Our flight was to leave around 10:15 this morning, but we didn’t even board until 15 minutes after that. Then we sat on the tarmac for a bit as captain announced that they had to clear the flight through Khartoum and it would take about 10 minutes. About 25 minutes later I was beginning to wonder if they were going to be ordered to pull me and Mia off the flight in order for it to take off. But, right after that we took off.

Everything was green as we approached Juba; far different from the border area I saw of Chad and Darfur, where everything is brown and dry. Juba – the capital of South Sudan. I’d been told it was part “boom town” and part IDP camp and part military base. Others called it the “wild, wild West.” I can’t make that determination yet, but I’ll certainly share my impressions after we’ve had some time here.

When we got off the plane at Juba’s airport, no one directed us where to go. We simply walked around the plane in the rain and past a few others as we made our way to the VIP lounge in the airport. It was a bit startling to see a big red farm tractor with luggage carts hooked to it carrying luggage out to put on another plane soon to leave. I really regretted not having

Mia Farrow’s comment that ‘working for peace is not a passive process’ rang true today during our Addis press conference. Seated in Committee Room 1 of the African Union’s modern Addis headquarters building, Prof Maathai, Mia Farrow and Prof Jody Williams made brief remarks about the delegation’s issues and goals and then opened the floor to questions.

Not surprisingly, many journalists were concerned with the ICC’s recent decision (and Nobel Women's Initiative’s response) to indict Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes. The global debate about whether the ICC’s actions could do more harm than good for peace in Sudan has been fast and furious.

“What do you think the people in the camps think about the ICC’s decision—why don’t you ask THEM,” was Mia’s unexpected response to a journalist sitting pen in hand in a bright blue chair.

Many Africans take issue with indicting a sitting African president. Some stress that national solutions be found for national problems.
Nobel Women's Initiative Delegates were pleased to have a chance to respond to these and other questions and to footnote fact vs. fiction.
The Delegation is travelling precisely to listen to the voices of the women we meet, and Mia aptly reminded us that in this ‘vacuum of justice’ that is

Monday, 28 July 2008

The sky is full of clouds and it is raining this morning in Addis – not a surprise as this is the rainy season here and no one should complain given the famine gripping parts of Ethiopia because of the drought that has hit the eastern and southeastern parts of the country bordering Kenya and Somalia.

The combination of lack of rain devastating food production in the region and skyrocketing global food prices which affect relief operations makes for a very dismal situation. Some reports indicate that over ten million people are in varying degrees affected by the drought. Ethiopia’s population is 80 million. I don’t know if the rain is finally reaching the drought-affected areas, but hope that it is the case.

As I sat down to start writing, I could hear the sound of the morning call to prayer wafting through the air from a distant mosque somewhere in the city. To me it sounded a bit mournful, but it was also beautiful.

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Good morning again. Obviously I didn’t get very far yesterday. Just those few paragraphs into writing, I had to stop and get myself ready to start the day.

It was excellent to see Professor Wangari and her daughter Wanjira for our breakfast meeting.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Yesterday in Bankok was a rare day of mostly down time – except for an unexpected trek to the Press Club for a live TV interview with Al-Jazeera. I can’t say I didn’t feel a bit of irritation to have to think about work and be “on” again when I’d so been luxuriating in a free day. Once Rachel and I headed out, however, I managed to get my message together and ended up glad for having made the effort.

Back at the hotel, near the end of the day, we all got together with our Burmese friends and colleagues to strategize a bit for post-delegation followup as a result of our various meetings while in Thailand. It was a a good and productive brainstorming session.

We then had the opportunity to hear from Dr. Sima Samar about her most recent trip to Sudan in her capacity as UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Sudan. The situation is bleak and desperation among those displaced on both sides of the Darfur-Chad border by the war grows. Splintered rebel factions splinter even more, resulting in spiraling criminality, as bands of heavily armed men with allegiance to no one rampage through the countryside. Attacks by government and militia forces continue often supported by arial bombardment before and during the attacks.

Before we finally broke to go to dinner to bid farewell to our Thai and Burmese colleagues as well as to Dr. Sima and Lydia Cladek, Sima also shared with us her insights into the increasingly unstable situation inside her own country of Afghanistan. Violence increases, warlordism continues it retrenchment in the provinces and Sima paints a bleak picture for Afghanistan’s future as well.

Yet tenaciously and with incredible courage, Sima leaves us to return to Kabul and her position as head of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Council. She continues to fight for the rights of women and children – indeed for all the people of Afghanistan – even as she cannot move an inch without heavily armed bodyguards who are with her 24 hours a day. Her fourteen-year-old daughter also must live with such “security” – if that is what we can call it. It is impossible to not worry for Sima and her family every time she goes home.

Ok. So, having left you days ago upon leaving Chiang Mai, here we are back in Bangkok, where we arrived Thursday night. Every day I kept on hoping to find time to continue writing about our ongoing journey. Yet every day was so full of exchanges with the people from Burma who we had come all this way meet and listen to that carving out extra time to write about it proved to be logistically and perhaps more honestly at least for me -- emotionally impossible. 

I actually did try a couple of times, only to find myself staring mindlessly as my blank computer screen. I felt anxious that I was falling down on the job by not committing the experiences to writing until I surrendered to the realities of the trip and let it go until finally now I have a bit of time to write.

What I write now, unfortunately, will not be as complete an accounting as it would have been had I been able to write after each meeting, each encounter, each experience or even at the end of each day. I'm going to only be able to summarize some of our encounters and obviously, those will be the things that continue to run through my mind, like an endless loop video, or something like that. But such is life.

The Seminar at Chiang Mai University

I'd like to take a couple of minutes to take us back to the seminar at Chiang Mai University. No way I can now share the words of the ethnic women of Thailand or all that our Burmese women colleagues said in their presentation, but I can make a few observations.

Day Two Blog, Monday 21 July 2008
Chiang Mai, Thailand


Our day started a bit early with a briefing at 7:30 am. The inevitable question of the morning when we first meet is “So, how did you sleep last night?” Sometimes jet lag seems to hit as soon as you step foot off the plane. Other times you start out by sleeping well and then a few days into a trip you go to bed to find you seem to be awake more than asleep during the night. The next day it can be a serious challenge to not drag yourself through the day.

Generally members of a group seem to “take turns” with troubled sleep, which means that at least some are alert and energetic on any given day. The big challenge comes when the entire group has a night or two of bad sleep! It seems inevitable. It is too early in our journey for that to happen, but given that many of us have flown about 24 hours to get here the jet lag menace always seems to be lurking.

After two nights of incredible sleep (including the eleven plus hours on the plane to Bangkok), last night was not enough hours of sleep and waking up too often when I was in bed. It wasn’t a really bad jet

After arriving from various parts of the globe in Bangkok, the delegation members met and set out for Chiang Mai – a short one-hour flight to this city north of Bangkok. Everyone’s energy and excitement for our trip is high and for me in particular it’s been great to meet up again with Mia Farrow, well-known actress-activist on peace for Darfur, as well as Dr. Sima Samar, head of the Independent Human Rights Council of Afghanistan as well as the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in Sudan.

I met both Mia and Sima a little over a year ago in Abeche, Chad. Sima was a member of a UN High Level Mission on Darfur that I was leading, and totally coincidentally Mia, who I’d been talking with on the phone about the delegation, arrived in Abeche, Chad, at the same time our Mission was there – all of us were on our way to visit various Darfuri refugee camps from there.

So, here we are, together again, this time in Thailand, along with the other women who make up this delegation. But almost until the last minute, we were not sure that Sima would be able to join us. Because she had to face so many difficulties in getting a visa to enter Thailand,