girltheology

There are going to be daily postings of the webcasts of the thematic plenary meetings at the WCC.

In addition, if you want to know what's just going on in general, you can check out the website for the WCC 9th General Assembly by clicking here.


For the webscast for Wed. February 15, if you watch the session on the General Secretary's report, about an hour and five minutes into it, I am the third person to respond to the General Secretary. I questioned what he didn't say about Indigenous issues, and asked how they could take Indigenous concerns for prommatic planning seriously when they had moved the desk of the Indigenous program to Bolivia in 2003. Decentralization is fine in theory - Bolivia can communicate with Geneva - but how can they have input into the WCC's work in a holistic way and make sure the Indigenous voice is heard. "Indigenous concerns" are not an objective thing. We need to make sure that other WCC works aren't ignorant of or detrimental to the lives of the world's indigenous peoples.

Finally - on Feb. 21, I will be speaking on the theme of the Assembly - "God in your Grace, Transform the World." It will be a very different speech than what I proposed here. The entire session will be the last webcast of the thematic plenaries - so watch for it on the website.

OK - off to work!

No real words today, as I'm off to the campus for the first full day of the WCC, but here is a picture of me from the pre-assembly gathering for Indigenous Peoples.

This photo is property of Richard C. Choe and may not be used without permission.

Today the Pre-Events for the 9th General Assembly of the World Council of Churches finished.

I mostly attended the Youth Pre-Event as I noted in a previous post, but this morning I went to an excellent session in the pre-assembly event for Indigenous People. I expected there to be many Indigenous People from all over the world, and was shocked that there were less than 40 people in the room, with only a handful of us sent as delegates. We did some great work that I will post on here as soon as it's been approved by the WCC. In the meantime, and as a result of both pre-events, here are the prayer concerns I have to pass on to all of you:

-The Aboriginees in Australia who are suffering persecution under the Australian Government. Specifically around aboriginal rights, history and infrastructure. The government is engaged in a systematic endeavour to erase the history of genocide and oppression of Indigenous Peoples in Australia.

-All of the gay and lesbian leaders of the church and government in Cameroon who had their names published in the national newspaper so they could be shunned by society as abominations. Some have been forced to emigrate from the country.

-The people of Kiribati who are losing their islands due to the rising sea levels (a result of globalization and the melting of the polar ice caps). The highest point on any island in Kiribati is 3m. The sea has already risen 1m, and some of their grave are now under water.

-AIDS among young people in the Carribean.

-The journalists in the Phillipines who are being assassinated because they are considered "enemies of the state."


On that happy note, I'm off to explore the city on my only afternoon off out of the two weeks I'm here.

Blessings.

Today we spent the day getting to know each other as youth stewards and youth delegates (those elected by their churches as voting delegates). It was a full day, with breakfast at 6:30am, bus to the University Campus at 7:40am, and meetings started at 8:30 am and ran through to 7:30pm. The highlights of the day were getting to know other youth from all over the world, as well as an address and question period with the Rev. Dr. Samuel Kobia, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.

One of the things that has happened to put my world into perspective is sitting among the African delegates. Whereas my North American colleagues and I talk about plans for doctoral studies and church politics, my African sisters and brother in Christ meet each other with questions like "Are your people surviving?" "You have no jobs, just like us, eh?" "Has the famine reached you yet?"

It sort of puts my privilege into new light for me.

Anyways - off to bed. Breakfast is in 6 1/2 hours.

Peace to all.

Heh.

When I bought my new laptop (which I love) S. suggested that I check out OpenOffice as a software suite rather than MS Office.

"OpenOffice.org the product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office."

What is that in plain old english? Open Office is free, and it is compatible with the other software suites your friends are using. Since it was going to save me like $300, I opted for the Open Office, and for the most part I've been pretty happy with it.

This afternoon, since I'm pretty much ready for Brazil I was busy surfing blogs. A cousin hooked me up to the blog of a friend of his, and now she's got links to all kinds of blogs. I was pleased (no - flattered) to see mine under the link "Academics Unleashed". I was curious to see who these other academics were, and so I started surfing blogs. I'm am terribly impressed with some of the other blog sites out there - even if most of us are using Blogspot or Wordpress or whatever.

That led me to look at my own. Heck - I'm happy that I figured out how to change my template, but some of the formatting for these sites is phenomenal - especially for people who actually have non-computer programming jobs. Blows my mind. I wish I could figure it out - but when it comes down to it, my site may just remain "as ugly as the internet in 1995."

Heck - I'd be happy if I remembered to spell check. It's not that my spelling skills are lacking, but rather that my brain moves faster than my fingers sometimes. So I should spell check, which I rarely do.

*sigh* Which brings me back to my point. If any of you are considering OpenOffice - know this: how I got out of the habit of spell check, is that the spell check on OpenOffice leaves a LOT to be desired. The fact that it doesn't pick up "adn" and "teh" (my most common typos - intended as "and" and "the") disappoints.

Now - the thing about OpenOffice being open platform is that I could actually contribute to the correction of this heinous oversight. But - I don't know how. Even more - I don't particularly care to know how. So I guess I'll just have to live with proof-reading documents when it's really important (like scholarship and grant applications, or anything job-application-related), and people will have to suffer my mistakes in the meantime.