Day two

Today, I got to go to the actual negotiations! To many MUN-people the formalities might be familiar, but it was all new to me. An Australian was chairing the first meeting of the SBI (Subsidiary Body on Implementation), which took place between 10am and 1pm. As we decided, we (UNfairplay) should try to cover all the main streams at all times to keep our delegations posted, and so I tried to take notes from what the delegates were saying. My favorite delegates were African delegates, not necessarily for the content, but because they tend to speak much slower and more considerate than their counterparts, which often rattled at a speed that made it impossible to type! If I imagine someone from a small delegation with even less English skills than mine, I would not know how they cope.

Did I tell you about ECO yet? It’s a daily news bulletin here written by a network of NGOs. Its quite funny and witty, almost everybody reads it here. Every day it announces the “fossil of the day”, the country that was the least productive. Yesterday it was Canada on all 3 places! I’ll see wether I can find a copy to post it up on the blog. ECO is also good to have a view behind what actually is being said by delegations as “diplo-speak” can be quite confusing.

Oh, a girl sat behind the US delegate who had their main strategy up on his screen while busily chatting on his telephone, and I heard she’ll blog about it! Not sure she’s allowed to, but I’ll send the link to you anyway should she put it up ;)

We’ve got good news from Kiribati, too! We finally managed to meet up. Kiribati has 8 delegates in Cancun at the moment, but they haven’t managed to meet each other yet (!). They could not afford to stay in the same hotel and are all only communicating via email. At the moment, they are preparing the arrival of their president (his speech) and their interventions at the main negotiations (I heard them intervening twice :)). Today, we covered the side events (events that are organized by NGOs or other organizations besides the main negotiations) for them and we’ll send them an email tonight with a summary of things that are crucial for them.

They also agreed to give us delegation status! This means that as official delegates of Kiribati, we can access many of the events which are closed to NGOs and the press. Exciting! :D