We were very tired by the end of the training on Tuesday, let alone the poor students - we almost expected them not to turn up on Wednesday morning…but they did, bright eyed and bushy tailed!
 
On Wednesday (23rd) we went over some more concepts and exercises in the first session of the morning then left them to their own devices for a desk exercise that we had set along the lines of one we give to our own new recruits.  We had five teams and they all did fantastically well - one even made pie charts of the information given - quite impressive really.  At lunchtime we rearranged the room, networked the PC's printers etc and in the afternoon we had the first session of a disaster simulation exercise run along the lines of a MapAction deployment. It was great fun with us role playing the parts within MapAction and the many agencies involved.  We gave one team a task to get a taxi and go around Dushanbe taking GPS points of the agencies (they were so excited about that) another GPS team collected details of food, hospitals, petrol stations etc on foot and 3 GIS teams spent their time doing WWW, Overview, Elevation and Admin Boundary maps.  

Evgeniya from the British Embassy who had given us lots of support for our work in Tajikistan came to visit.  She was here for about an hour looking at photographs of the previous courses, training material and some of the maps that were produced and she seemed very happy with what we have provided.
 
We met with Mirzo Saidov again on Wednesday evening for dinner with some staff from the UN to discuss the GIS Strategy for Tajikistan.  It's something Andy Murdock from the Geodata Institute is heading up.  Andy was instrumental in making the arrangements and introductions for our first visit last year and has helped us with the Russian translation of the materials for the National Mapping Agency course.   
 
Thursday (24th) was a continuation of the disaster exercise, we recapped the information from yesterday and more information came in for the students to produce maps of blocked roads, affected population, tent distribution and helicopter landing sites.  Zainab from Save the Children acted as the MapAction Field Director and Eraj from Acted, who was the best GIS person, as Ops Officer in a logging role and helping others out with GIS.  It was good to see the students eager to finish the maps for the final 12.00 UN coordination meeting (exercise end).

The maps produced have actually been really good - some issues with symbology - but with 2.5 days of training and only a little bit of help we have got the main concepts of GIS / GPS in Disaster Mapping across and are extremely pleased with the results.  We asked the students to complete feedback forms on the training and they have been very positive.   So all in all a fantastic experience for the pair of us - it's been harder work preparing and delivering the course than either of us imagined, but the thanks and keenness of the participants have made it all worth while.  Here they are with their certificates.

We are heading out for celebratory baltika with the UN later on tonight then up at 3 for our 5am flight to Istanbul tomorrow and onward flights back to Edinburgh.