My Lunch With Eleni

When I first arrived in Ioannina, Dr. Eleni Morfidi, took me for lunch at a former monastery that was high on a hill overlooking the campus.  It offered a great view of the campus as well as of Ioannina and the mountains in the distance.  We started off with, of course, a Greek salad accompanied by feta cheese (every meal includes feta cheese).  The main entree was a rice, meatball, and tomato sauce combination that was quite tasty especially when followed by a glass of Greek white wine.  Who needed three martinis when you could have such a delectable glass of wine?  We dined at a table underneath the portico pictured above.

During lunch, I had the opportunity to explain to Dr. Morfidi about the research project I wanted to initiate during my semester at the University of Ioannina.  Specifically, I told her about my plan to interview special education teachers in Ioannina about their experiences with the inclusion of students with disabilities, especially teachers of the deaf and hard-of-hearing and speech-language pathologists.  As we talked, she said that she was more familiar with quantitative research designs whereas this project was more qualitative in nature.  In other words, this project focused on interviewing and observing of teachers rather than developing a research design to test a hypothesis.  She seemed to enjoy the challenge of implementing a project with a qualitative focus.  She informed me of a colleague in the College of Education, Spiros, who was in the Ioannina schools often and could act as a liaison between the teachers and us.  That was reassuring to me because nothing helps more to gain entree into a school than to have someone who has a good relationship with the teachers and the principal of a school.  We then discussed the type of questions to ask.  Dr. Morfidi offered to translate the questions into Greek and to act as the interpreter when it cane time to interview teachers.  Although most of the people I have encountered speak English, Dr. Morfidi said that the teachers would probably be most comfortable answering these types of questions in Greek.  While someone else may have found it awkward or odd to go from one language to another while interviewing subjects, I was perfectly comfortable with the concept because of my work over the years with sign language interpreters. 

After lunch, we lingered for a bit looking at the rest of the monastery.  I learned that it was not only a restaurant, but that the university allowed guests to stay there.  We accomplished a lot over lunch, which whetted my appetite to return again soon.