Let us not rest on our laurels

I’m on my way back from four days in Barbados, for the ninth and final workshop of the initial series of what is now Regions Refocus 2015. This Caribbean meeting was one of the best in a process bookended by small island states (with the Pacific meeting first, in June) with each meeting full of incredible people, good food, interesting side trips (Machu Picchu, for one), and truly interesting and productive meetings.

Let us not rest on our laurels, intoned the Barbadian representative of the Ministry of Finance during the opening of the regional workshop, upstairs in the cricket hall at University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. (The walls were decorated with the cream of the crop of Barbados’s cricket stars, black and white photographs of “the quintessentially elegant” King so-and-so, descriptors of the players’ prowess at batting and consistently sharp style. The IGDS professors wore ankara dresses and summarily dispatched the crispest moderation I have yet to witness -- informing us that no, the internet does not work, end of discussion.) And following that instruction, the workshop got right to the point. It tackling difficult issues (the narcotics industry, divisions between the women’s rights movement and that for LGBT rights) and innovative ones (a somewhat un-PC descriptor of the Caribbean’s comparative advantage in tourism, the business potential for regional expertise should the US completely legalize marijuana). Scholars and activists from a lot of sectors, ages, and countries came up with concrete proposals and energized plans for the way forward.

At lunch the first day, I had an interesting (and somewhat concerning) conversation with the head of the co-sponsoring institute at the university. I was telling her about our project, about some of the workshops we’ve co-organized and places we’ve gotten to go (nine regional meetings, eight sub-regions, nine months). Rather than asking about the project, she turned to me and said how incredible this must have been for me, and asked how it feels to travel the world learning about the negative effects of American policies on other places. I told her I feel very grateful (for the first part) and consistently disturbed (re: the second), and said I don’t know for sure, but I think I’ll probably end up working on American policy eventually. As an American, you’re only allowed to learn for so long before you have to go do try to something about it, I said. She agreed, with a slight nod of her intricately dreded head.

So, I’m incredibly proud of our project and of having helped to start it, thrilled about where it’s going and where it might take me, and gearing up for a whole lot of work to launch the first phase and continue with the second. But as Chris, our bespectacled taxi driver, responded while being grilled by one of the most impressive and intimidating participants, ideas are the number one thing that’s missing in the leadership of Barbados and the region. Our project is contributing to amending that deficit, at the global level. I’m contributing some of it, especially in the report and in the planning of phase II. But let me not rest on my laurels either, in terms of my own responsibilities and in outlining my career. We may have lay on the beach this trip, but our laptops sat squarely in our laps.

a little colder

Happy Sunday night, the first beautiful fall Sunday of the year. I spent it huddled in the garage, typing with fingerless gloves and (eventually) drinking one of my brother's Coronas (after I turned the heat on). Still working on my SDGs paper, which is alternately depressing and fascinating and boring and hard. It really needs to be done soon though, both because of the deadline and because, drumroll please,

Full-time work on the DHF project starts tomorrow! We're planing five regional meetings between now and the end of the year, the first in Lima, Peru on financial transparency. (After which I am going to Cuzco and Machu Picchu, yay.) More updates coming soon after we implement our very exciting solid comms plan and website.

I've been thinking a lot about The Future, especially since apparently all long-term planning sends me into spirals of anxiety. (Last night I dreamed I had to move my entire apartment out to the street without assistance, piece by piece, and last week I dreamed my friend C* and I were randomly in charge of two tiny babies at an orphanage. Gasp, adulthood awaits!) Spending a week in Mexico working as rapporteur for the RESURJ retreat was an incredible experience in lots of ways (made friends, drank tequila, spent lunchtimes lying in a beach chair, sent baby turtles on their way into the sea, etc) but mainly admiring this incredible group of women and their shared activist path. I was jealous, I wanted to be one of them, I wanted to have a thing that I care about more than all other work things and to be working towards one singular goal. But I don't see myself as an activist, exactly, just a facilitator with an activist bent. And I'll have to figure out what to do with that in life... I'm sure I'll think of something.

But in the meantime, I am so grateful that this project has become a full-time gig and I can't wait to see what comes of it. And in other exciting news, my sister Becky is getting married! So this large blonde muzungu will have to get myself in a gomesi for her introduction ceremony in Uganda in December. Yay.

Some parting thoughts:

ixtapa sunset (mexico)

and the album/song I can't stop listening to:

Living the dream (?)

I'm currently working on my first commissioned article - as in, the first article I will get paid to write, as a product in itself rather than just part of my job or an item on an invoice. It's pretty exciting, in theory... the subject of the article (an overview of the SDGs) less so.
I am so sick of hearing about the SDGs, which is problematic given that the real negotiation process for post-2015 hasn't even started (and won't for months) and I seem to be locked into this scene given that it's where I've spent the most significant part of my career. Not that I'm not grateful - I am, extremely, especially when I think about the people I've met and the things I've learned and the concepts I now understand. I'm grateful for having gotten to go to Rio+20 and then cover the SDGs process, grateful that I'll still be around, probably, to see what happens next and keep doing work with some amazing organizations around this process. This "package" of the UN's work encompasses an incredible amount of interesting issues, and will potentially affect a lot of people's lives.
And hey, I get to write! I've always said all I wanted is to write... so I need to go write the article, dammit, and then draft the interview for the one after that, and pull together some pieces for the paper after that. It's an August full of writing, which is exactly what I want. And of traveling, my other favorite activity. First Uganda, then London (on miles, yay) - to squeeze my godson, see friends, eat Nile perch and posho, buy things I don't need at Banana Boat, spend quality time with my host fam, and sit outside in a plastic chair drinking a Tusker and listening to reggae. Yes please.

squeezing my godson, Aug 2012

squeezing my godson, May 2013

Update

squeezing my godson, August 2014

Recap of Pacific Partnerships to Strengthen Gender, Climate Change Response and Sustainable Development

In early June, I got to go to Fiji for a meeting on Pacific Partnerships to Strengthen Gender, Climate Change Response, and Sustainable Development (as I mentioned earlier). The meeting brought together a total of 60 participants - most of them women, most of them from the Pacific, and pretty much all of them amazing - for five days of strategizing, capacity-building, and collective planning towards the SIDS, post-2015, UNFCCC, and relevant regional processes.

here we are

The set-up of the meeting - two days CSOs, then two days CSOs with national women's machineries, followed by a high-level dinner and final day - was the best-designed of any I've been to. All of us staying in the same hotel the whole week, sharing meals, drinks, swims (not to mention the unexpected presence of the entirety of the Fijian national rugby team) built an incredible atmosphere of camaraderie and collectivity. 

me with the amazing rapporteur team - representing GIZ/SPC, Pacific Youth Council, DIVA for Equality, & SPC

The participants worked hard on two outcome documents: a civil society/social movements/Major Groups statement, and a joint outcome agreed by both the civil society and the government representatives present - the first of its kind, with strong language on climate finance, structural issues of trade and the international financial system, and gender equality as a cross-cutting regional priority. 

The statements were presented by participants at the high-level dinner and have already served as advocacy tools in the second SIDS prepcom, held the week before last in New York. 

For more on the meeting, see its Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube page (don't miss my fairly awkward recap of my presentation) and stay tuned - this important intersectional analysis, led by the Pacific itself, will continue to be taken forward in key regional and global fora. 

Thoughts on Iraq, from Beirut

Sitting in Doha airport last Saturday, waiting for my third flight of a 30-hour journey, I read this article, and immediately burst into tears. At first I chalked it up to exhaustion, to the peculiar effects of an airplane journey, to the strange coincidence of landing in my first trip to the Middle East just as my country steps back into a never-ending mess of a military situation. All true, but it's more than that.

The war on Iraq made me a political person. I was fifteen when it started, studying abroad in Rome. We went to protest marches in every Italian city, hung PACE flags in our dorm rooms, lied and said we were Canadian to anyone who asked. We cut class and went to a rally at the Coliseum, chanted with Italians holding makeshift torches that blew ashes into our faces as the sun set, aghast with them at Berlusconi's agreement to send troops when 80% of his country was against it. I watched CNN International in the school cafe, shocked at what they showed on television outside the US. I came home and wrote scathing essays in my American History class, mocking the "PROUD TO BE AMERICAN" bumper stickers that popped up on every SUV. Proud to be American - as opposed to what?, I wrote. Iraqi?

My first year in college I worked at an indie coffeeshop, wearing a t-shirt with a red line through the president's face, making friends with the Eritrean ladies who worked 12-hour shifts there, chatting with the customers about "anyone but Bush." I was seventeen and a half during Bush's reelection, livid at being six months away from eligibility to vote, staging heated arguments with my father, accusing him and all other Republican voters of standing against everything I stood for. We sat on couches in the Barnard student lounge in stunned silence, crying at Kerry's concession speech, ashamed and embarrassed of our leadership. Not My President, we said.

And then 2008 came and Obama was elected. I stayed up all night in another student lounge, in London, watching the results come in. I cried myself to sleep at 6am in utter gratitude and disbelief. We'd come so far. We had a black president! A true liberal, a community organizer, who'd been against the war in Iraq from the beginning, who promised to close Guantanamo and ensure real social services and stand up for all those the Republicans kicked to the curb in their preference for corporate profit, oil money, global policing. My friends who were in New York for election night told stories of taking city buses in which all the riders spontaneously burst into our national anthem. I bought every newspaper with Obama's picture on it, put them all up on my wall, told anyone who asked that I'd voted for him in both the primary and the presidential election, that this was the first time I was old enough to vote, that I was proud of him and no longer ashamed to say I was American, abroad.

It was bound to be disappointing. He would never have been able to live up to the hype of how we felt reading his books, watching him speak during his campaign at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Private insurance companies and the American right were never going to let him create a true public option for healthcare; Obamacare has been frustrating at best. He hasn't closed Guantanamo. He's only recently started talking about climate change. And we're no longer eighteen, stunned into believing that anything was possible.

Even so, how can we be right back where we started? How can Obama be sending "advisers," planning airstrikes, eleven years later, in Iraq? Because we dismantled a state and now have to prop it up forever, to justify the sacrifices and the money spent and the efforts and injuries and deaths of all those Iraqi civilians and American soldiers and everybody who loved them and worried about them? Because the War on Terror is real, and we're losing? Because Obama is just another politician, because Bush and Cheney didn't account for the consequences of their choices, because in the end the US cares more about being a military powerhouse than anything else? Because now we have drones, and drones "don't count," new war isn't the same as old war, we can just press a button and destroy whole villages, wedding parties, and maybe some terrorists while we're at it? Because it was all for nothing: all that political awakening and shouting in the streets, the mobilization of young voters, the reuniting of a disgruntled left with the concerns of the people, the forming of new identities of what we thought was good about being American? 

Pacific Partnerships on Gender, Climate Change, and Sustainable Development (why I am in Fiji)

Tomorrow we start getting ready for Pacific Partnerships on Gender, Climate Change and Sustainable Development, a five-day regional meeting bringing together civil society, women's machineries, and heads of state. Dag Hammarskjold Foundation is funding it and A and I are supporting it, but she's had to go home on a family thing so it looks like I'm about to learn a whole lot real fast.

I spent the past couple of weeks putting together background documents for the meeting:

- an overview of government positions based on the OWG and the Asia Pacific HLPF regional meeting http://bit.ly/1q4RIm5
- an in-depth document looking at the OWG Zero Draft and Member State positions, as they pertain to our meeting http://bit.ly/1pltggK 
- an in-depth document that provides an overview of the Asia Pacific HLPF regional meeting as it pertains to our meeting http://bit.ly/RUv3gm 

Sharing here in case they're useful! Follow updates from the meeting via its Facebook page, here: https://www.facebook.com/PPGCCSD 

And now off to put aloe on my sun rash and hop into bed! The 16 hour time difference is no joke. 

Fiji is better than Bali; or, I feel really good about my recent life choices

Ni sa bula from Nadi, Fiji, where I have returned after three days in the Yasawa and Mamanuca islands, having pretty much the best possible solo holiday. Snorkeling, beach-lying, beer-drinking, friend-making, sun-sitting, and no wifi - AT ALL - until yesterday evening. I read (and left behind in the Fiji traveler universe, passed along to whoever may appreciate them) both of Teju Cole's books. In my humble opinion, Open City is more profound but Every Day is for the Thief might be a little better.

My backpack died a slow and painful death in LAX. It accompanied me through hell and high water, Ethiopia to Bali to Vermont, and served me well in the 10+ years since I stole it from Manda. Rest well, old friend.

Last night I stayed on the Mamanucas' "party island," Beachcomber, which my guidebook promised me was the "Club Med for the under 35 set on a budget." Not so! It was nearly empty, but blasting great music (including this Nigerian gem, the world is a funny place), and had a pretty awesome (and pretty airless) phone booth where I took a two hour conference call with New York. I was half asleep and sitting barefoot on the floor, watching a cockroach walk by:

Soundtrack to a rainy work day

It's crunch time! This week, next week, and the following are all I have left before my trip to Fiji and Beirut, which is now confirmed. A + I will be supporting two civil society meetings, on gender and climate change (Pacific) and social protection and tax policy (Arab States). I'll also be doing some traveling (pointers welcome!) - my guidebooks came yesterday and I'm already making lists.

My main task this week, which I've been plugging away at at Regus business lounges (shared workspace = genius idea, with added perk of eligible bachelors, apparently), is to compile background documents for the two meetings based on ongoing sustainable development processes at the UN. It's involved a lot of shuffling documents and copy and paste, so I've been listening to music while I work. My iTunes hasn't been updated in a while, so this has involved lots of flashbacks: Elgar Cello Concerto in E Minor (high school), and the Kronos Quartet cover of this one (early college):

Solo Hiking in Flip Flops

Today I went vortex-visiting, to two of Sedona’s famous vortexes (note: not vortices, as my Lonely Planet helpfully informed me. Just in case I might accidentally be grammatically correct.) I figured I wouldn’t end up hiking far, and those who know me will know I hate socks and the shoes that require them… so I just stayed in the flip flops I was wearing for my after-breakfast nap in the sun. I went to Boynton Canyon and to Airport “Table Mesa” (uh hello, redundant). I didn’t feel much in the way of electromagnetic energy – and none of the pull-over-on-the-side-of-the-road awe I’d felt yesterday on Upper Red Rock Loop Road, where I took pictures of the cloud-covered rocks and texted J + E, “God exists.” But I did feel peace, and sunshined serenity, and that’s maybe better than inspiration or magnetic jolts or whatever it is you’re supposed to feel.

The flip flops though were a little treacherous. “Nice shoes,” said one of twenty-five middle-aged ladies in Lululemon and hiking sneakers I passed along the trail. I laughed, embarrassed, said something about not going far, thought haughtily to myself, “I hiked a mountain in Ethiopia in flip flops”… and then nearly stepped on a snake, which hissed snakelily as it slithered under a dry bush. Lesson learned, I thought.

vortex selfie

Sedona is a strange place, not my “scene,” really. But I’ve come across all kinds of people, including the taxi man who prepped me on the town’s history and told me his grandfather was a prominent movie-man, who’d come to Sedona when it was founded, less than half a century ago. He told me his grandfather’s name, helpfully, in case I want to look him up. Now I’m sitting by the fire pit across from a friendly lesbian couple in jeans, sharing a bag of chips and a mimosa in a water bottle. The chattier one complimented my suede purple oxfords. :) It smells good here, the air is cold and clean, the food is decent, and there’s plenty of booze.  

For more on Sedona's vortexes, see "John and Micki's Metaphysical Site." This is not a joke.