End of Course, Part Three

And finally, Graduation Day arrived. As is fitting of DSSC, we were first required to go through three full rehearsals to prepare ourselves for marching on-stage and receiving our parchments. The College would pass up no chance to make our lives just a little more miserable. Anyway, although we were all thrilled to be finally done with the College and on our way back to our homes, it was bittersweet to be leaving so many new-found close friends. I look forward to visiting them all in the near future.

Some assorted pictures with friends, post-graduation:

With Vikas, Indian Army

Me and Phady, Indian Air Force

With Jose, Chilean Navy

With Job, Indian Navy

Me and Jerome, Lesotho Army

Group Photo: Tim (UK), Chris (Singapore), Jeff, Alex (UK), Ki-Nam (Korea), Ruwan (Sri Lanka), me, Zul (Malaysia), Dave (Australia), Riva (Indonesia), Shamim (Bangladesh), Ranjith (Sri Lanka), Ashish (Nepal) and Lanka (Sri Lanka)

With Roj, Nepal Army; Alim, Bangladesh Army; Ashish Nepal, Army; and Siddique, Bangladesh Navy

Me and Anurag, Indian Navy, and his wife Sonia

With Manpreet, Indian Army, and his wife Neelu

With Manish and Sudeep, Indian Air Force, Anu, and Bhushan, Indian Navy

Posing with our flags...Chris, Singapore Air Force and Alex, Royal Air Force

Me and Bhushan, Indian Navy

With Amin and Naeem, Afghanistan Army

With graduation behind us, it was time to say our final good-byes to Wellington. Before heading back to the US though, I had one last trip to make to Delhi and northern India...

End of Course, Part Two

And more parties...

With Rana and my sponsor student, Gangs

At Jeff's house: Me, Prashant, Jazna, Alex, Jeff, the Wahis and Jose

At Dave and Vanessa's ANZAC Day party...

Me and Ruslan

With my Sri Lankan buds, Ranjith and Lanka.

Group photo: Tim, Ruslan, me, Dave, Shamim, Alex, Jeff, Siti, Ranjith and Michael

Group photo #2: Alex, Dave, Ranjith, me, Jeff, Lanka and Jose

And some other last moments in and around Wellington:

Our last official social function...cocktails with the Commandant: Roj, Ruslan, Alim, me, Ashish, Lanka and Siti

Foreign officers gather for a group photo at the final Foreign Student Presentation for Zambia.

Every week the foreign officers got together to play soccer. This turned into the one thing that we always looked forward to and kept us going. We called our team the Firangi Devils (firangi sort of means foreign in Hindi) and I will miss playing with these guys every weekend.

Firangi Devil team photo

Scrimmage with the Indian officers.

Battle scars; I'm still rehabilitating my elbow and wrist.

And lastly, I'd like to express my thanks to my faithful staff, Mary and Pinto. They constantly made my life in India easier and I will miss their hard work and attentiveness. I hope they continue to work for the Air Force/Navy house long into the future.

Next stop, Graduation...