In Cancun - COY6 over, UN conference just beginning

Hello eveyone around the world,

I've been in Cancun for just over a week and I've been slacking on the blogging. In fact, yesterday was the first chance I had to stop and sit and think for more than 5 minutes and it just so happened that I've gotten really sick. Yuck!

But, the good news is that it's giving me the opportunity to finally write down some of what's been happening here. 

First, our Conference of Youth (COY6).

For those of you who helped me with donations, thank you sooooo much! 

It was for COY6 that I came here, and it was a smashing success. 

When I arrived last Monday I hit the ground running, meeting with our contacts from the University of the Caribbean get things ready for the roughly 500 youth we were expecting. There was loads to be done between setting up rooms for workshops, assigning A/V equipment, getting lunches organized, writing information packages for the delegates and buying the materials we'd need to make the conference a success. 

On the first day (Friday), we were ready, though not too ready. We got off to a late and rushed start, but it could've been a lot worse. The one big bump during the conference came around 11am when we found out that lunch would be an hour late. The delegates took it in stride and the day ended successfully.

The second day (Saturday), went significantly better. We had the auditorium available to us, which made moving people in and out a lot easier. Plus, we had learned from the day before to assign volunteers and translators (COY6 was bilingual Spanish and English) the day before so we spent significantly less time running around trying to find people to help. I spent most of my day troubleshooting, moving people to their next events and generally just making sure the conference went smoothly. I was also one of two MCs for the conference, so I was super busy and didn't have any time to sit and listen to any of the speakers or workshops. Kind of sucked, but it was well worth it to see the conference a success.

The final day (Sunday) was fantastic! Particularly for me because I had more time to sit down and chat with people. We didn't have the auditorium, so we had to move very quickly to keep people from baking on the terrace where we were having most of our large gatherings. The end of the day came too quickly and we had to wait just over an hour for the sun to go down a bit before beginning our fantastic keynote speaker: Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org

Again though, I was busy making the conference ending slideshow, so I only heard about how great he was. Hopefully, someone filmed it so I can see for myself. The slideshow was well received, so it felt worth it. I think we got to nearly every query we'd had during the conference so most people walked away feeling satisfied. 

For me, looking at the difference between COY5 in Copenhagen and COY6 in Mexico was like night and day. Perhaps it was the sheer amount of volunteers we had this year, in particular the Mexican ones, who were awesome. Perhaps it was that people were more relaxed this year because there wasn't the expectation that this year would be "IT" for the climate movement. Perhaps (and my ego would lean toward this one) it was that this year we had people who were only dedicated to organizing COY instead of having to balance their UN ambitions with the COY ambitions. Whatever it was, this year was magical!

Now, on the second day of the UN negotiations, I'm sick and in bed.
I visited the UN building only briefly, and I'll create a second blog for that. 

For now, COY was fantastic and I feel like a success!

--Tim