Day seven

I cannot believe that I have been here 7 days. The time goes by so quickly. We are so busy that you do not realize the time.

Today was blessed. Started with Chapel as usual. Then I went up to the briefing. The tone continues to be very positive and open which is wonderful, and the room was full. Next week there will be less people as many cannot stay for the 2 weeks.

This morning I returned to the Episcopal centre to hear Latchmi Puri speak. She is part of UN Women and spoke for nearly an hour. She talked about the Millenium Development Goals and the future beyond 2015 when new goals possibly called Sustainable Development Goals will come into being.

Back to my roon to put the finishing touches on our visit to the Canadian Mission this afternoon. I arranged this visit and all of the Canadian Anglicans got a private audience with the Ambassador for 1 hour. He spent some time explaining how things work at the Mission and who works there. We had a prepared statement which he had read before we arrived. I had asked the youth to prepare a 4 or 5 minute presentation as part of our time and they did and awesome job. They talked about access to post secondary education,missing Indigenous women, difficulties for the LGBT community and the problems of stress and other mental health issues in young people.

Our paper talked about poverty and hunger, access to resources and services, access to education, employment and decision making positions and the need to look at violence in a non-gender way ie: violence against a person instead of violence toward women and the need to involve men and boys as well as women and girls in the solution. We had examples from our own experiences to illustrate our points.

We left the Mission quickly because Ecumenical Women were scheduled to have a private audience with the American Mission at 4:30 and we barely had time to get there. This was an excellent meeting and I thanked the mission personnel for their openness and willingness to come to us for this meeting.The meeting lasted nearly 1 1/2 hours.

Immediately after the briefing we held the Ecumenical women debrief which I also chaired. This one was a bit faster because there have been no new drafts of the concluding document and everyone seemed very tired. Alice and I got a take out from the Olympia and came back to our room and had a leisurely dinner in our pyjamas and just chatted. most enjoyable. (I had a craving for meat loaf).

It was cold in New York today and windy, I had to dig out my toque. It will be sunny and warmer tomorrow.

Some of our group left yesterday - I hear they had to stay in Toronto before returning to Muskoka today. More will leave tomorrow. We will miss you all. Caitlin, who has been bunking with her mother til now, will move into our room tomorrow for the next week. Two old fogies and 1 young one.

More tomorrow, Stay warm and safe

Blessings Judy