Building a team to help build a nation

I have to admit, after waiting several months for my turn to go out on deployment, I still wasn't 100% sure that the department was going to be sending me to Timor Leste as they had promised. 

Firstly, the end of November saw me falling into a hole as I leapt after an errant girl of 12 years.  The result?  I broke my ankle (I still got the naughty girl though), and my April deployment date looked further off to me than ever.
  Secondly, as I completed all the pre-deployment tasks required, I went in for the two dozen odd blood tests and inoculations and was informed that I had returned a positive result for Dengue Fever. 
  "That's just great!"
The Travel Doctor questioned me about where I had been in the past few years and since Bali was the only tropical country I'd visited she decided to treat the result as a false positive and suck more blood from me for a second test.

By this stage Christmas had come and gone.  My lack of mobility meant the time I had off work was very unproductive, except that my ankle must be repairing.
  Finally, I had been cut from my cast, the blood had been taken, and I was to head down to Porirua to begin the intensive 17 day training course designed to prepare 25 of us for our deployment.

On the 2nd of February I made my way from Te Puke to Rotoura where I boarded a plane to Wellington Airport. 
  From there a shuttle took me out of the city to the Royal New Zealand Police College (RNZPC) at Porirua.
 
It has been almost 21 years since I first came to this college as a fresh-faced young Police recruit. 
  I've been back here many times, for senior courses or as an instructor, but this course is the one that has me feeling closest to how I felt back in 1988.   This was a course to prepare me for the unknown.  After this I would be expected to manage situations very alien to me, policing a people I couldn't understand, in a land I had not yet visited.
  Yes, I was a little apprehensive, but more impatient to get this part over and get into the job that it was to prepare me for!


The RNZPC can house 720 residents, this makes it bulge at the seams and the lines for the dining room long and slow.  Fortunately for us there were just two recruit wings and a couple of senior courses in attendance. 
  I found my room up in the barracks and found one of the guys I was to share the floor with for the next couple of weeks as we learned all about what we had signed up for.  We were the only two that had arrived on the Sunday night.   The rest would be arriving in the morning and would meet us at the Defence Force base where we would be issued with 6 months worth of uniform and kit.

So it was that, Monday morning, after breakfast, we made our way to Trentham.  There we were met by two lovely ladies, bearing large black bags filled with clothing.  We were required to try on then confirm it fitted and I have to admit it felt a little like Christmas as I dug down in to the bag, pulling out the various goodies.
  Everything fitted well and when we’d got the job done we headed back to the college and had lunch prior to climbing onto a bus and heading off to Apiti, where we would stay for 3 days to complete our 4 wheel driving training.