The Guide Dog "Mini Symposium" (long post)

Monday March 13th - An extremely long day was ahead. We began with a breakfast meeting at the world famous "Raffels" hotel with Mr. Rob Patterson, a businessman, who is a consultant to the board of The Seeing Eye, in New Jersey. Some months ago Rob was visiting GDB in CA. He met with some of our staff and happened to mention his personal interest in Asia in general and the potential for guide dogs there. Ironically we had recently served Cheng Hock and Rob asked for an introduction to him. In the next months Rob and Cheng corresponded via email. Rob happened to be in Singapore on business at the same time as Susan & I and requested a meeting. We enjoyed the beauty of the hotel and courteous service of the staff. The staff had been notified of Kendra's presence and had prepared a dog bowl of water and a rawhide bone on a special tray (which Cheng politely declined). They were very excited to see her and very welcoming.

After Breakfast we had another interview, then it was back to the hotel to prepare for the "Symposium". I was able to modify an existing power point presentation in the GDB database (thank you Ben and Darren!) which had great photos and information about the program and etiquette when interacting with a guide dog team.

The Symposium took place at Alexandra Hospital and was sponsored by the ophthalmology department. They had a large lecture theater and a staff who were very helpful in setting up all our audio visual equipment. Rob did a short introduction on the history of dogs as guides in the US. He made the analogy between Morris Frank, the first dog user in the US (1929), and Cheng Hock the first dog user in Singapore today. Susan introduced GDB and explained what we were doing as well as our organizations mission statement. We then showed the Soul Mates video which looked wonderful up on the huge screen. I delivered the power point presentation and we closed with our video "considering a guide".

We had been told by several people that in this culture people usually do not ask questions during a Q&A session and to not feel offended if there were no questions. So we were delighted to discover that the audience was so interested that there were so many questions we finally had to stop taking them and end the program. Much to our surprise the program ended with the hospital presenting us each with a HUGE plaque thanking us for speaking at the symposium!

Following the dinner we headed to a private country club with the founding members of the new society tentatively named, Guide Dogs for the Blind, Singapore. Some of the hospital staff joined us as well. We had a private room and as this was the first time the board members had met we spent some time with introductions. We all chatted over a traditional Chinese dinner then Susan & I held another Q&A session. The forming society is made up of influential business people from a variety of professions. They all seemed very enthusiastic about the guide dog movement and had a lot of thoughtful questions about how to support the movement in Singapore.

At the end of the dinner they presented us again with thank you gifts, lovely Rosewood jewelry boxes with a historic photos of Alexandra Hospital on the lid! They were all so kind and generous and we had a wonderful time. It is so rewarding to see people becoming passionate about such an important cause.