Global Week of Action for Women's Rights

And here, because I am blogging for past events, I will use the past tense:

For the past five weeks, I have been focused on organizing events for the Global Week of Action for Women's Rights. The week, which arrives in March, Women's Herstory Month, is centered around International Women's Day, March 8, and the UN Beijing + 10 Review, an international conference by the Commision on the Status of Women (CSW) to review and re-ratify the Beijing Platform for Action. I spend the month working with my holy goddess soul sister Ariel and a woman named Emily who is a Yale graduate, a WILPF (Women's International League of Peace and Freedom) intern, and an eastcoaster by origin. The three of us also work with Nancy from Codepink NY. Our task is to integrate the international women's events inside the UN with the organizations and indivudals that compose the NYC community; in other words, we're to forge an inside-outside bridge linking women together the Codepink way: with creativity, originality, and lasting impact. Our planning team struggled with communication between the supervising staff and the NY crew, and the limited planning time made booking spaces for events challenging. In the end, we planned some all-star events, and we learned a lot about grassroots organizing. With the information I gathered from the planning, particularly from the pitfalls, I have constructed a CODEPINK event planning guide and form, which I hope will be useful in the future.

Over the month and a half that I am in NYC, I perfect the soon-to-be Olympic sport of couch surfing. I stay with old and new friends and cultivate some absolutely incredible bonds. In the post-college world, as with any massive life change, one can never be certain which friendships will last and which will fade and perhaps resurface again later. My month in NYC was a great blessing of friendship. In the darkest months of the year, the time when I have most feared being in the concrete complex of Manhattan, my friends opened their doors and invited me into their circles of light and warmth. I slept on the pink sectional couch from my old apartment at Hila's house. I shared a futon with Kyla at her parent's apartment and helped her move into her Brooklyn brownstone. I spent a shabbat and a weekend at Sarah Chandler's house with Ariel, eating bagel breakfasts and celebrating valentine's day with rose petals. I spent an evening with Sarah, the woman who is currently co-facilitating Students Against Silence, and we ate desserts at Lalo's and returned to her dorm where I slept on the futon. There are three most memorable experiences. First, I spent ten days housesitting for Karina while she was in Australia. She has an incredible studio apartment in Chelsea which is filled with light, Central American artwork, and good spirits. It was wonderful to live downtown, to have my own place, to savor the city in this way. Secondly, I spent a weekend and several more days at Malia's home in the west 70s. Malia has an apartment that is splendidly large, inviting, and feels very west-coasty to me. I slept on the most comfortable sofa couch I have ever slept on and awoke to streams of light filtering through stained glass windows and real wooden shutters. Malia and I stayed up late talking and watching parts of pirated movies and I discovered a life-long friend and goddess in Malia, whose radiant soul and firey presence illuminated my time in NYC. And lastly, I spent nearly two weeks at Molly's apartment in the west 100s. Molly gave me a spare key to her house and bade me go as I please, and she generously offered me Fresh Direct peanut butter, which I am now, thanks to her, addicted to. Molly is for sure one of the greatest people I have ever met, and I already knew that. But what I didn't know was the extent of the gift of her friendship. She made me laugh countless times, especially when she, her boyfriend Wylie, and I hung out. Imagine Dr. Drew and Adam, only Dr. Drew is a woman who is fiercly humorous and serious at the same time, and Adam is also an artist who paints large canvases with splashy colors and creates webpages. I really felt at home at Molly's house, and by the end of my stay, when I was boarding the Blue Van outside the Broadmoore and saying farewell "seeyoulaters" to Molly and Wylie, I felt like I was parting with family. Molly's apartment building is especially cool because there is a rooftop solarium with wireless internet access and a view of the entire city. I spent many a day e-mailing and working from the roof, and even brought up a sewing machine to sew the large pink satin banner for Codepink. Molly also has a film projector and a bed with a hotelesque mattress and friends who sometimes crash at her house in the middle of the night. So her house is obviously a great place to stay. But it is superb primarily because I got to spend so much time with Molly, hanging out, eating zen pizza with lots of garlic, planning the reform of the way we look at mental health in this country, celebrating Molly's summer plans for Florence, and even sharing my last night in the city with friends and Wylie's white russians. All this couch surfing taught me a thing or two about packing light and gave me an opportunity to really test drive my Ex-Officio "17 countries, 1 pair of underwear" quick-drying undergarments. I learned some crafty ways to find free food, internet, and land line access in the city in my post-college days. And I really felt grounded on the island, emerging from subways and knowing instantly where I was headed. And, I faced my anxieties about NY wintertime. You see, my friends make it hard for me to be down in NYC. If I was seasonally affective before, then I have finally found the cure: Friends who embody a springtime spirit and wrap me in a warm and nurturing environment.

The event highlights for the Global week of Action follow in the next blogs.