While walking home from work last Friday evening, I was feeling particularly thankful.  It had been a very busy week and I was really looking forward to switching off for a few hours.  I reflected to myself: Each week, we all learn something.  It might be from a casual conversation, a book, a news report or even online on social media. So here’s a few things that I picked up last week.

• I spoke to a medical missionary nurse on the way home from Dublin on Wednesday.  She started travelling around the world offering help in 1982. Since then she has helped in Nigeria, Kenya, Gana and brazil. When not working as a nurse and a midwife, she was also helping young nuns to as she put it, “make sure this life suited them”.  I found the conversation with this woman fascinating.  She explained that many of the areas she worked in transitioned from providing hospital care / primary care facilities to providing community support and preemtive care. The lady didn’t agree with this entirely but she saw the motivation behind it.  The young nurses she had once helped to train are hoping that reducing the need for hospitals will reduce the burden on the emerging health care system.  She was also telling me that NGO’s such as the red cross took over from medical missionary nurses from the mid to late nineties.  At their peak, there were 250 medical missionary nurses in her organization. Now in recent times there are about 150 MMN’s at any one time.
• I took three short courses this week on Linked in learning. The first was on Azure architecture fundamentals, the second was on Windows 2019 differences compared to 2016 and the third was specifically related to Active directory on 2019. Each course was about two and a half hours long.  I can’t say I learned anything groundbreaking.  Especially relating to azure, I had done all of this before but it’s good to go back over the basics in case there’s something that’s been forgotten over time. But still, it was reasonably useful.