Conference

After an exhausted one long day, I took a rest on Thursday, and Friday we had meet with Dr. Laksmi with whom I will run an experiment on Tilapia fish. We had talked all the details. She introduced me her students who will help us during the experiment.

It is interesting, there are more than 15000 island in Indonesia, they even gave away 2 of them to Malaysia. There are more than 4000 universities in Indonesia. In Airlangga University Faculty of Fisheries and Marine, there are 1000 students. That is huge. The faculty was found on 2008 and it has been significantly contributing to university, I believe.

They organized “First International Conference of Fisheries and Marine Science” this Saturday and there was nearly 100 oral presentation and 60-70 poster presentation. The conference was run in 6 parallel sessions and they have kindly asked me to moderate aquaculture session together with prof.  Since it was a one day conference and lot of participant, they gave only 10 minutes for each talk (Q&A included). That made things difficult but finally we managed with the help of volunteer students. They have done very good job.

The conference was started with National Anthem and then the Chair of the Conference, Dean and Vice Rector gave a speeches. After an interesting traditional dance show the plenary speakers gave talks. One Professor from Hiroshima University explained us how coral reef death is going bad. The other professor from Korean University explained how e-DNA and barcoding are important in recent studies.

After the plenary session we had lunch in the garden. They have built a huge tent and there we have nice foods. I have seen some boot for helping earthquake people. This was so sad to hear people suffering from earthquake. That reminds me always the big earthquake happened in my hometown in 1999. I was already thinking of to help these people but didn’t know how so, this was a good chance for me to donate some money and support them.

My session was started a bit late and the first presentation was given by me about aquaponics. After me, 15 presentations were given by researchers from different cities of Indonesia and other countries.

Of course the day before the conference, the Dean invited me and other invited speakers for Dinner. We went a nice fish restaurant in city center. Had a nice chats all together and of course after the conference finished we were invited again to dinner and invited speakers received some presents from the committee of conference as their appreciations.

Such a kind and respectful people… I really love them…

Next day is Sunday, so I have to visit city center and do some sightseeing? No, I have to finish the presentation which will be given next day in Marine Biotechnology Workshop by me as an invited speaker. Huh! Getting tuff Yaaaa :-( Well, at least I have a title “Blue Growth for Community Development: Aquaculture & Biotechnology”