Ohje...

I've had, at the maximum, about an hour a day this week to sit, drink my coffee, answer emails, etc. Otherwise, I've been on the go; I leave my house at 9 AM and come back at 1 AM the next morning. And I love it. Except I've got no food and don't know when I'm going to be able to go shopping.

I started my internship on Monday. The organisation is an NGO working on climate protection and sustainable development. They work on various projects supporting green procurement and the implementation of the Local Agenda 21 and Aalborg commitments. They also have a department which plans conferences, including one in Spain in March, www.sevilla2007.org . This is my new department. I am the new go-to person for anything involving English, the working language, and will probably receive other tasks as time goes on.

Of course, right off the bat I was introduced to the thirty-odd people who work there, and I am trying my hardest to remember who each of them is and what he or she does. It's not easy. As a whole, the group may be summarized and generalized by saying that they are exceedingly international and on average quite young. I would judge most of them to be around 30, with the few slightly elder balanced out by the multple mid-20s-employees and interns. My new office is shared with two italians, a german, a german/spainiard, and me. There are canadians, mexicans, dutch, belgians, people from all over Europe, one british guy, and me. Everyone seems to speak four or five languaes. I wish I could.

I've been sitting in on meetings, trying to follow what is going on and how it all works. It's quite a dynamic group, and my impression is that they help one another out. Communication is clear and frequent; goup tasks and projects are openly discussed and shared. I proofread the website and learned how to work their web editor, so I can apply my changes.

Mainly I am fascinated by what it takes to put such a conference together. It's the same sort of thing we did back at CU for our Darfur events, except on a much larger scale. 1,000 expected attendees, 40 panels, roundtables, four plenaries, four days, six or eight partner organisations and the whole thing takes place in Spain. I can learn a lot.

And after 'work' each day I go to class, which is the same as it has always been, except my evening class has finished. We ended with a four hour session followed by a small party. I'll be sad to see it go. I hope we can keep some portion of the group together, but you never know.

In the meantime I will be eating canned peas and dumplings until I can go shopping again, and save my sleeping for the weekend... :)