No Foolin’

The other day there was a lovely story on NPR about a wild coffee plant on Rodrigues that everyone thought was extinct. In 1979 someone found the lone survivor. Botanists tried for more than twenty years, but failed to get it to produce seeds. In 2003, cuttings were sent to plant researchers at Kew Gardens, who grew them into full size plants and when those didn’t seed either, they gave them, in essence, fertility drugs. The treatment worked: they produced viable seeds which have grown into about 20 new plants. The crazy thing is, after all these years, the original plant back in Rodrigues has also started producing seeds.

I was listening to the story on my way to my Thursday Tuakana workshop. Their first exam, worth 30% of their grade, was this Friday. Joshua, a nice, bright kid was feeling nervous because he’d missed some lectures; his father just had a liver transplant. He’d been waiting for 9 months when they got the call. But someone in the clinic must have tipped off another family about the liver, because Joshua's father was met at the hospital by a man who asked if he could have the liver for his son - 10 years old, very sick, and likely to die before his turn came.

Josh said his mother was furious when she found out his father gave up his chance. As it turns out, there were concerns the liver was too small for Joshua’s father, a large Pacific Islander. But it was plenty big for the doctors to split and give half to another child. So his sacrifice actually saved two kids’ lives. And Joshua’s father? He’s doing ok. They got another call the next day: there’d been an accident in Christchurch. The donor was another Tongan, about the same age and size as Joshua’s father. A perfect match.

Instead of the workshop I’d prepared, everyone agreed we should go over the material from the lectures Joshua missed. I stayed an extra half hour past my scheduled quitting time, and Joshua skipped an Accounting class, so we could get through the whole thing. We won’t know until the grade comes out, but I have a feeling he did all right.

A couple weeks ago I applied to a conference for post-graduate students at University of British Columbia. When I first heard about it, I didn’t think I had a chance. Then I realized if I tweaked my “globalization” paper a bit, maybe spliced in some additional material from the other paper I wrote last term, it might actually be a good match for the conference theme, Whose Law? Why Law?

Friday morning I got an email inviting me to be a presenter. In just over a month I’m heading to Vancouver to attend my first academic conference. No fooling.

Cheers,
Sandie