Yanomami

We had our side event! It was a chance for our organization to present insider information about topics discussed at the Human Rights Council. As I said before, six participants came to our office to learn about Human Rights. Now it was their opportunity to share their experience and hopefully influence some big whig decision makers. The Ambassadors from Costa Rica and Venezuela were there and also some people with lots of responsiblity within the UN. It was great to get to see the sisters and the one Vides volunteer get to tell about their many years of experience working with Indigenous People in just 5 minutes. I was proud to get to see them all make their presentations and hopefully get to change the lives of some indigenous children. In Venezuela the Indigenous group is called the Yanomami. They have some very strange traditions, and we enjoyed many laughs over the stories from those sisters. It was a joke the whole two weeks about the "Yanomami".

The unfortunate part of the event was that we were unable to get a translator from Spanish to English so everything was in Spanish. And one of the sisters asked me, "So you understood about 80 %?" I said, "Uh...Maybe 20%." So I took lots and lots of pictures that we will use for our newsletter because I couldn't understand anything....oh I guess 20% of it.

After the event the sisters and I went to take some pictures around the UN, this one is us with the Budda statue. I had a great time with all the nuns, even though I couldn't talk with them very much, they were so sweet and caring.

Here is a picture of Ornella, Lory, and me after the side event. We had to make the long walk to buy some drinks for our event. By long walk, I mean around the building, down the hall, and outside, then back up the stairs and across to the opposite side of the Human Rights section. It was quite a trip and we had to hurry to make it in time for our event. So we all dressed up a little, as you can see in our picture. But Ornella is sitting down because she wore her high high heels...unfortunately. By the end of the day she was in a lot of pain. She was limping across the UN building and we all had a good laugh.