One of my colleagues sent out an email to the whole international team today, and it eloquently captures what I love about traveling, working, and living elsewhere. The writer is an RN by training based in the US and worked closely with this colleague before she joined the international team.
I think all of the travel options you are having will definitely change your life. My own visits to the UK, Schweiz, Germany, Austria and Italy living with locals and trying to blend in gave me a real appreciation of how we are all the same and yet all unique both personally and culturally. On my last trip to Zollikon, outside of Zurich, we went to the Alpenfest in the Romansch area of the mountains, and while experiencing a lovely thousand year old tradition of singing the Ave Maria to the cows before releasing them to summer pasture, an elderly man named Emil Buchli had a heart attack. His wife had just died and his health was poor but he was determined to climb to the fest one more time, and he died there. I gave him chest compressions for nearly 40 minutes waiting for the ambulance to get to the top, but at one point, he sat up and looked me right in the face, and then collapsed. I knew that that moment he was telling me he was going to leave. I can still hear the enormous cow bells, the men singing, see the wildflowers blooming in the fields, and taste the cheese from those huge wheels that were aging in a cool concrete and wood shed in the midst of a alpine high meadow. Things like that go with you always and connect you to people who you get to share a bit of life with - so keep remembering every possible experience you are having!!
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