Migrant and Ethnic Minority Health Conference & Around the Town

I spent much of Thursday, Friday and Saturday attending a Migrant and Ethnic Minority Health Conference. This is the third conference held on these topics in Europe and was held in Pecs this here due to the fact that Pecs is a Capital of Culture. I am very lucky that this conference was here and all I had to do was hop the bus to the Faculty of Medicine. Well, I did pay a hefty fee to attend too.

I learned a lot. The conference was a combination of presentation of research papers, poster presentations and lectures. I also attended a roundtable about human trafficking. Sitting on the border with Eastern Europe brings this topic high on the priority list. We frankly give little public and political attention to this topic; it most often appears as a plot line in something like Law and Order. At this roundtable I learned many European countries have shelters primarily for women who have escaped forced labor or prostitution.

Other learning: I spoke with Swedish participants about their Somalian population. (I was surprised to hear so many countries discussing Somlian populations for I thought with the number we had in Minnesota, there could not be many more to be anywhere else.) The Swedish participants immediately recognized Minnesota as a location of Somalians and immediately told me that we [Minnesotans] are providing a much better environment for this group -- that they are successful in Minnesota for they can obtain jobs.

I saw another poster presentation that said North Americans did much better with cultural competence -- that we are far ahead of Europe on this issue.

I'm very grateful I could attend this conference. And it is amazing how much the same it is as conferences in the United States. One difference though -- we never get glass goblets for drinks at coffee breaks, let alone have people making expresso for us.

After the conference I did a bit of walking about Pecs. It was sunny when I left my flat, but five minutes later a big gray cloud dumped rain on the center of the city. I took shelter in the courtyard of the Nagy Lajos school. I found some interesting posters there that had pictures of Szechenyi Ter over time.

Here is a picture of area from 1907.

And here is a picture I took last evening from about the same spot. The school is there and the statutes are there. And in pictures taken later in the 20th century there are cars along the sides of the Ter. Now there are no vehicles as this has been turned into a totally pedestrian area.