half a blog from half way around the world

The last 10 days has been frenetic – in between Senegal and Nepal where I am now. Not much time for reflection.  It has been a case of getting as prepared as I can for the next thing. And many of the ‘things’ have been opportunities...I will compare and contrast two of them.  The first was a meeting with the Royal Commonwealth Society – serendipity caused our paths to cross and I found myself with an opportunity to convince the RCS to take up child domestic work as their campaign issue and push for the 54 commonwealth governments to ratify the ILO’s new convention on domestic work. I enjoyed developing my argument for this but as I only know one person in the RCS and none of the other stakeholders who would actually make the decision about their campaign issue – I have no idea if they’ll like it.  The other opportunity was with Comic Relief (a UK funding agency) who organised a stakeholder meeting on child domestic work.  As Children Unite is the only international organisation working exclusively on child domestic work (our ‘Unique Selling Point’) it was exciting for Jonathan and I to finally be in an environment where the issue was at the centre of the discussion rather than on the periphery. The aim of the meeting was to consult with 30 or so organisations working on connected issues (child labour, girls, etc) to help Comic Relief develop a strategy on promoting child domestic work to potential applicant organisations.

One opportunity was quite exciting (well for me anyway) - to think that, in one relatively short move, I could scale-up our campaign on the ILO convention on domestic work to 54 countries.  The other opportunity was more of a slow burn excitement – it was very encouraging that Comic Relief want to work on this issue and that the team put a lot of energy into organising the stakeholder meeting on child domestic work.  It was also quite pleasant (if slightly distracting) to have an enormous picture of Brad Pitt staring at us throughout the workshop!

Well my compare and contrast didn’t last long! I’m afraid I’m in Nepal now and can only think about all the opportunities here (and how it is much colder than I had packed for so I  might need to run out and buy some pashmina jumpers, shawls and possibly even socks and pants...brrrrr).  I’m 5 days late with my blog and now feel uninspired about last week – so can’t write about it, the opportunities feel distant now – but I know that last week I was very inspired, positively jumpin’ around with excitement!

So, as this feels like half a blog with very little ‘learning’ in it – I promise to write a couple of posts this week on everything I’m seeing and hearing here - half way around the world.  It’s cold, but very interesting.