The last time I had been to the United Nations in New York was seven years ago as a high school freshman delegate to a Model UN Conference.  As I walked into the UN on Friday before the 53rd CSW, temporary credentials around my neck, I had to remind myself I was there for real.  I didn’t have to remind myself for long.  The conference was, in a word, overwhelming, and soon had so thoroughly convinced me of my presence and participation in it that I had trouble remembering, three or four days in, that another world existed.  I felt like I had always been, and always would be, walking briskly through the corridors of the UN, CCUN, and 815 from one eye-opening event to another, encountering everywhere engaged, intelligent female activists and diplomats from literally all around the world.

 The transition into that world, however, was far from seamless.  For the first few days, I was simply overwhelmed by the conference’s schedule.  I was running in the mornings before orientation and worship services in order to keep up with my track team’s workout schedule, and at night after scheduled events were over I was accessing wireless from corners of the hotel lobby to download reading assignments and send in homework for my classes.  With CSW events solid from 8:00-7:30 or later every day, and also trying to hang out and get to know the other delegates, especially from our young women’s delegation, I was only sleeping about 4-6 hours a night.

 This, however, is the superficial overload.  During the CSW itself, I was on overload for entirely different reasons.  Each day we were presented with an unfathomable array of events to attend.  We had access to high-level roundtable discussions and plenary sessions in the UN, interactive interest-group and regional caucuses, and hundreds of workshops and presentations put on by the thousands of NGO representatives and activists who came to network, advocate, and experience the CSW.  Each day provided myriad opportunities.  We worked out our schedules on index cards in morning NGO briefings, sometimes noting three or four potential options for a given time slot, and still met each other in the hallways in between events undecided about which intriguingly-titled event to attend next.  We all chose based on different criteria; personal interests, program requirements from personal sponsors or schools, networking possibilities.  I was just trying to take in everything. 

I chose events that put me among policy and legal experts and Government members from Southern Africa and the familiar accents of West African French, the events that found me in rooms full of African print dresses and women who laughed approvingly when I greeted them in French and English and told them Botswana is my second home.  I chose events on policy issues of particular interest to me, issues I have worked on or been effected by; caregiving for patients with HIV/AIDS, gender roles, LGBTQ discrimination, gender roles as mediated by race.  I chose events for career reasons; plenary events that demonstrated diplomatic relations in ways I had never seen firsthand, workshops on community organizing and how to push for legislation, and events where I could speak to influential members of the development and activist organizations like Oxfam, UNIFEM, and the World Food Program with whom I have been pursuing summer internships so I could get contact information and ask questions about the character of their employees’ work.  Finally, I chose events where I believed I had a particular voice to lend to recommendations; the Youth Caucus meetings and meetings with the US mission to the UN.  I was surprised by and felt conflicted throughout the conference about how authority developed at the CSW; the decision (or lack thereof) of who has the right to speak for and advocate for whom and who presumes to have that authority proved difficult to understand.  But in those forums created for youth delegations and American citizens, I spoke for no groups other than those of which I am a member and then was able to participate in the suggestion, revision, and presentation of recommendations to the US mission and to the CSW.

This combination of experiences is beyond compare in my life until this point.  Over the course of ten days I was exposed to enormous volumes of information, phenomenal reserves of knowledge and skill, lessons on how to pursue the development and service career I have been working towards for so many years, and firsthand experience of what many of those jobs would be like on a day-to-day basis (as well as on extraordinary days, such as the CSW Conference).  And this does not begin to do credence to the people, nor to the blessing of experiencing all of this through the framework of the Episcopal Church and the young women’s delegation. 

One of my Lenten disciplines this year was to attempt a conversation every day with someone I had never really spoken to before – not necessarily a stranger, but someone I’ve never reached out to, a familiar face from class or a stranger on the bus.  It is an exercise in extroversion (never one of my natural talents) but also in sharing, appreciating the variety and wonder of life with others, and being open always to the potential angels all around us.  Little did I know how the CSW (with orientation beginning this year on the Friday after Ash Wednesday), would enable and reward this discipline a hundred times beyond what I could ever have imagined.  Every single day I met activists seriously engaged in addressing the problems women face in this world.  From diplomats and advocates dealing at the highest levels of international legislation to grassroots activists organizing to meet needs in their local communities, everyone was willing and eager to share their stories.  In one workshop I attended, a women in hijab delivered an eloquent soliloquy on the importance of free speech and rights for women.  I only learned two days later in another forum that she had been imprisoned in Iraq for eleven years for her feminist activism.  Everywhere were intentional, motivated people, arguing their causes from the basis of personal stories, their own or the stories of others.  In many ways the entire Conference was about sharing of ourselves and our stories, reaffirming shared experience, shared struggle, shared conviction, perseverance, and success.

Many of the emergent group leaders were familiar faces from among the Ecumenical Women’s congregation, and these women affirmed each morning in worship their motivations; violence, disparity, and discrimination grieve the heart of God.  For them, these infinitely complicated problems in a complicated, convoluted, and often disillusioning system of inefficient bureaucracy and compromising diplomacy, came down to a singular, clarion conviction; they are working to end practices that go against the ultimate tenants of the love of God and fellow human being. These convictions are at my core as well, but to reaffirm them in community in shared worship every morning before Conference events began was what ultimately made the Conference more than an overwhelming, inspiring, and useful slate of individual events.  It was what made the Conference about people and my own commitment to serving human rights and equality, what made the grinding schedule and the missed workload when I returned unquestionably worthwhile.  The shared conviction was what made UNCSW real.