Day 0 of AIESEC International Congress 2009

I’m currently in my room chilling with the national staff of AIESEC Bahrain.  It’s also the first day of Ramadan, and I’m glad that I will sharing the room with someone who can teach me more about its significance.

My other roommate is the national president of AIESEC Chile, who I randomly met in March 2008 when I visited Santiago.  He was then ex-LCP and hanging around as an alumni, I had no idea he had gotten back into AIESEC as national VP in 2008-09.  Small world.

 
members of AIESEC Uganda + AIESEC Venezuela at Global Village

The previous three days were spent in IC Pre-Meeting at a different hotel located in a suburban part of Kuala Lumpur.  I frequented the market across the street for soymilk and pickled mango/papaya snacks.  While I had an immense feeling of “wow, I’m not in Africa anymore,” it was nice to find familiar Asian staples to enjoy.

The Pre-Meeting was a chance for each regional network to work together on planning, collaborate on regional issues, and set the tone of their involvement in IC itself.

As a delegate from the national staff of AIESEC Uganda, I was participating in the Africa Growth Network meeting, along with AIESEC national leaders from the rest of East Africa, West Africa, and South Africa.  I practiced my French with @Togo and Gabon, connected with the president of @Nigeria who also studies chemistry, was inspired by a Science & Technology project that @Tanzania is organizing, and learned some awesome roll calls in Swahili from @Kenya…

I’m really taking AIESEC Africa’s issues to heart, now that I feel like we are the underdog coming into this International Congress.  There’s a lot we go through to be present here.  Among the 10 delegates from Uganda, I was the only one to have stepped onto a plane before.  Ultimately, the attendance at @Africa Pre-Meeting was very low … which was underscored by the Asia-Pacific delegation meeting on the same floor of the hotel with close to 10 times as many delegates…

The tone of pre-meeting finally gelled after the regional director screened a video from TED Talks about leadership in Africa.  It’s true that you need a very special type of leader to succeed amidst such challenges.  It’s also true that exemplary leaders are most needed in Africa now to drive progress in the coming decades.  The group that’s here is a representation of the immense hard work that’s done throughout the network – and here I see African AIESECers more committed to the meetings, staying up later to do work, and increasingly passionate about getting members of other regions to enter and understand the “cultural space” in which Africa resides. 

 

This conference is also an opportunity to re-live the various parts of my AIESEC experience from the last four years.  People are here from my first AIESEC trip to Egypt as a new member in 2006, from the cultural exchange trip I led to Peru, from my traumatic CEED in India, from the jubilant Anatolia Congress 2007, from the empowering Iberoamerica XPROS conference 2009… not to mention the countless people whom I’ve emailed day and night regarding matching around the world.  And most of all, I’ve appreciated re-connecting with Anjali, whom I met at my first AIESEC US conference … we’ve shared much of our development, and fought hard alongside each other for important issues in @US.  Now she’s on AIESEC Oman’s national staff.  As much as I am passionate about my current African identity, the chance to re-connect with a past (and still-existing) identity has truly strengthened my internal reflections.