Secret Friend Week and Farewell to Cesar, March 2018

In preparation for Cesar’s farewell party at INESAD this week, we decided to organize a Secret Friend Week, and it was so successful, and revealed so many hidden talents at INESAD, that we decided that a new INESAD tradition had been born.

At the beginning of the week, everybody drew a secret friend in a lottery, and their job was to secretly post memes about their secret friend on the walls of INESAD during the week. It started a bit timidly, with just two memes the first two days, but by Friday we had a collection of 45 very creative submissions.

Fernanda was put in charge of the difficult process of selecting the winners in the following three categories:

1. Most memes posted
2. Most creative meme posted
3. Couple who most enjoyed Secret Friend Week

She gathered all the posted memes on one wall and let participants study them before voting.

It was easy to find the winner of the first category, as there were no less than 9 memes about Lykke, including the following:

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With so many impressive submissions, it was a lot harder to chose the most creative meme. The following won by a very a small margin:

For the last category, people had to nominate their secret friend if they had really enjoyed the memes posted about them during the week. That category was included to make sure that the memes posted were funny and non-offensive.

Below are the two winners in the three categories. José Luis won by quantity, Lykke won by quality, and the two of them together were the ones who most enjoyed Secret Friend Week.

A few honorable mentions should be pointed out as well. Particularly sweet were the six submissions from former junior researchers Alejandro, José and Gabriela, who are now in Spain, Chile and UDAPE, but found out about the competition and wanted to participate from a distance.

Two people had to be punished for making no submissions at all. One of them was Cesar, the object of the celebrations. He got a job in  Cochabamba as Commercial Manager for Bata with very short notice, so he had a lot of things to do, and accepted the singing penalty imposed by Beatriz.  Fortunately, Vero produced a guitar in no time, and Cesar really likes singing and playing guitar.

So the whole event turned into a “Guitareado.” We are going to miss Cesar profoundly, and wish him all the best in Cochabamba!

Since there is never enough beer at INESAD, the other penalty for not complying with the memes was for Miguel to go buy more beer.