As was expected, my blog posts have dwindled towards the middle and end of the program. There have been complains, and I have heard them. Now that I am in Barcelona with free wireless internet waiting for my friend Candace to arrive, there is really no excuse for me to not update.
The SIT Switzerland program went off really well. I enjoyed being in Geneva and being able to have access to all of the resources that the UN and other organizations provided. The city allowed me to rest in some comfortable place between optimism and cynicism. The work that many organizations do is slow, but they are all persistent. Sometimes it seemed to me that everyone was running around in Geneva trying to get things done while the situation out in the field in Malaysia, US, or Colombia was remaining the same; at other times, the right combination of leadership and expertise lead to some real changes in development or post-conflict reconstruction.
What is certain is that I had some really cool conversations. I talked to a Cuban-American lawyer, a representative from the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, lawyers at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the chairperson of the UN Working Group on Mercenaries, and the head of the International Relations department at Webster University. These meetings weren't anything special. They were meetings set up by simply calling the individuals and asking if they had any time to talk to me about Private Military Firms, the eventual topic of my final paper. By far the best part of researching this topic was the one-on-one interviews I did with these folks. They were all extremely knowledgeable and approached the topic from different angles. People were willing to talk and discuss and share ideas. It was a pretty sweet intellectual atmosphere and I learned a lot just by listening. My topic was far too large for one paper, but the research process took me to loads of different places.
At one point, some of my colleague's meetings with various officials at the UN were canceled due to the indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Oh, I see, you have to cancel our little interview because you have to go deal with issues at the International Criminal Court? Oh ok, cool. No problem. I'll just wait...here...
You really do feel like you are in the thick of things.
Its funny because really, there are people all over the world screaming out various messages. I mean people who are really just screaming truth to power. Sometimes these messages get heard. Sometimes they are heard and ignored.
At one point on the plane from Geneva to Barcelona today this baby started wailing and suddenly all of the other babies on the plane chimed in and it was just this chorus of yells and screams. Ironically, it was just at that moment that the flight attendant was trying to give her little speech of all the safety rules. It made me laugh because it reminded me of all the people who are screaming truths while the people at the top, our world leaders, may not necessarily hear the messages and continue to give their speeches. This may be the slightly cynical side of me, but its hard to be in Geneva and work on issues that are going on around the world. I mean while you're surfing the web and looking out over Lac Leman (beautiful Lake Geneva) and the Mont Blanc (top of the Alps)...its a bit hard to think about the consequences of Private Military Firms.
Either way, Geneva is a beautiful place for world leaders to meet and I felt welcome (save for a few French language barrier issues) wherever I went. After the program I had the chance to travel with my family. They met up with me in Geneva and we went to Luzern, Interlaken, and Montreux. We took trips up mountains Pilatus, Titlis, and Jungfrau and then just enjoyed the lakeside in Montreux. There were tons of music festivals going on so there were always bands to listen to. We even went on a specific mission to find a few Sigg water bottles, the elite Nalgenes as I call them.
It was nice to see my family again and get a chance to travel outside of Geneva. The only other places I visited during the program were Lausanne and Lugano. Lugano was a good break from the French-speaking part in Geneva down to the Italian speaking part. The lake in Lugano was extremely beautiful and we had a couple of nice swims. The jazz festival gave us something to do at night. Several of the shop owners spoke Spanish, so I could communicate quite easily. It was probably the one and only time I ever translated for the other students on the program (almost everyone had a bit of French background except for me and my friend Rubyn). I savored it because we were only there for five days. Lugano, you restored some of my dignity and for that I thank you.
We had gone down to Lugano to learn about Swiss Italian NGOs but had the weekend free to travel as we wished. Three other students and I ventured down to Venice for the weekend which was an adventure itself. The last night we were there we just stored our bags at the train station and stayed out until our train left the next morning. Not only was this a mini-adventure in exploring every crevice of the city, but heck, it saved us a whole night's worth of hotel reservation money. Not sure if I would recommend this experience to anyone. If you go for it, then rest up the day before...that's all I'm saying.
So what now? This is the end of my Swiss traveling, though stories may crop up in blog posts to follow. As I mentioned before, I am now in Barcelona and will be traveling to Berlin, The Hague, Amsterdam, and Brussels before I head back to the US. The pictures in this post are of Lac Leman and Geneva. The soccer ball you see near the fountain is a result of the Euro Cup. The pictures were taken from Le Saleve, which is a mountaintop that can be reached by cable car. We also did a bit of hiking on the trails around the top and watched the paragliders take off.
Here is to one more week of adventures around Europe before I return to North Carolina.
-Rosh