Youth Delegate Breakfast Series at the UN-DPI Advance Global Health conference in Melbourne, Australia.
Day One
Walking to the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Center at 6:45 a.m. I felt nervous and excited of how this day was going to turn out. Upon arriving, a group of other youth delegates were also waiting for the security check to open. Initially I stood their by myself, feeling a bit awkward as most of the people were already in groups and chatting away. I took a deep breath, kicked myself, and walked over to two other delegates talking to each other and introduced myself to them. The hardest part of the day was finally over.
Being able take the initiative to approach someone at conferences is an intimidating experience. But once you are able to put aside that fear and understand that by talking to people that you gain a wealth of knowledge and information, networking and meeting strangers becomes essential in making a conference worthwhile.
Each morning youth delegates (ages 18-24) are invited to attend a breakfast to network, motivate, and empower each other by sharing ideas and communicating to each other about their experiences. Today Alfonze from the Oaktree Foundation in Australia welcomed and reiterated the purpose of the conference. The most important message that resonated with me was his emphasis that, while we have made numerous advances towards achieving the Millenium Development Goals (MDG's) there is still much more work that needs to be accomplished if we want to achieve the goals by 2015. It is pertinent that in this during this conference we don't focus on ourselves but what we could do for others.
With approximately 50-60 youth delegates, we went table to table and introduced ourselves and the work our respective organizations do. Many of the delegates were unfamiliar with SimplyHelp but were certainly interested and asked many questions about our projects. Hopefully we will see some of them at our workshop on Wednesday. The breakfast series was a great opportunity to produce more consistent networking opportunities during the conference.
Upon listening to evryone's ideas and experiences, it was empowering to see people my age advocating for their local and global communities to be a better place!
Sending my regards from Down Under,
Theresa Tsao
P.S. While introducing ourselves to each other someone mentioned to answer the question, "What is your favorite condiment?" Somone mentioned cumin, and I followed it with basil. However they were completely confused and did not understand my pronunciation of it. In America we prounounce it "baze-le" while here they prounounce it "bazz-al." Remember that if you ever intend on going to Australia!
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