The planning and preparations of the 2006 Congress in Malaysia
Dr. Valarie Guinto (Philippines) with Dr. Abdul Aziz Yahya (Malaysia)
Dr. Valarie Guinto: Good afternoon, I am Dr. Valarie Guinto from the Philippines. I am representing China OBGYN.net. We are going to conduct an interview. We are very fortunate today to have with us the man credited for the success of the 18th FIGO 2006 World Congress. He is a very prominent obstetrician and gynecologist from the Gleneagles Intan Medical Center. He is the Chair of the Obstetrical and Gynecological Society of Malaysia, and the local organizing committee of the 18th FIGO 2006 World Congress. We have here Dr Abdul Aziz Yahya.
Dr. Yahya, I know you are very prominent and very recognized in your field, particularly in gynecological oncology, but the topic of this interview will focus more on how this Congress was organized. Everybody is talking about how well this Congress is organized. Maybe you can describe to us the pains and tribulations, from conception to birth, of this very successful Congress.
Dr Abdul Aziz Yahya: Well, that is going to be a long story, because I have to tell you that it has not been that easy. But the advantage I had was that I had very good supporting colleagues and family that understood this adventure that we started many, many years ago. I call it an adventure because when you start an adventure you do not really know what the outcome will be. We started in 1998 when we decided to bid for the Congress. When I mooted the idea, there were people in my own society, in their decision, who thought it was not such a good idea, especially when we were competing against renowned cities. I am not going to summarize and say what happened, but we worked very hard to win that bid. The support from the Malaysian government has been excellent and I was able to convince key ministries in Malaysia to support us in our bid. When we eventually we put our bid in Washington, DC there was a lot of background work that we did. We had been lobbying in the background. We sent our senior members all over the globe to speak to voters who would be attending the assembly to work for us. This was our modus operandi.
I even wrote letters. I do not speak French or Spanish but I had some of my patients who are French and Spanish to translated letters for me. I faxed these over to the president of some of the Spanish speaking societies and some of the French speaking societies. So in that sense we did a lot of work. But the importance of planning is also indicated. What you see today, a very successful meeting, is that planning has been rather refined, we planned ahead. We tried to anticipate what sort of problems we would encounter, but despite all that, it cannot be perfect. Hosting a Congress of this size we cannot expect perfection but what we can expect is somewhere near that, with as few hiccups as possible. So far we have not done too badly. But the key point here is you need to have supporting members, friends and also family.
I made a personal sacrifice, and this has taken a toll. When I embarked on this adventure in the year 2000, and I am sure you have heard this story I am not going to repeat it, but there was a day my firstborn, a daughter, was born. She was delivered by c-section at 9:00 in the morning and I had to kiss my wife goodbye, who was still in pain, at 3:00 pm, to be on the airplane. That was not a good thing a husband should do but we were committed. I was committed as a bidding chairman to actually win the bid for Malaysia, so a bit of personal sacrifice there. But we did it.