"If you can meet triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same"

Okay.
What happened since I last posted?
On Wednesday we got interest from the Guardian in our report, and got accredited by Kiribati (meaning we can attend meetings closed to the public).
Crazy excitment all round, so we rush to finish the report and on Thursday morning send it round a lot of journalists.

Thursday evening we find out the stats we used came from the wrong document.
So end up staying at conference centre till 1am counting the number of delegates from each country and emailing every jounalist asking them not to publish.
I can tell you conclusively that Brazil has WAY TO MANY delegates at this conference, somewhere around the 600 mark...
Then some of us wake up at 6am again the next morning (bear in mind the travel from the conference centre to where I'm staying takes about an hour)
And then spend all of yesterday taking minutes for the Kiribati delegation, something I do enjoy doing but which gets hard when your too tired to concentrate.

Regardless of all this our report has still got good media coverage:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/03/cancun-climate-change-summit-unfairplay
as well as being reblogged all over the place.
And Kirbati seem happy for the work we're doing for them. So it ain't all bad.

I've spent a lot of time sitting in on negogiations and it has made me see how important what we're trying to do here is. In a meeting I sat in on a latin American country attempted to propose something quite controversial but lost merely because there english wasn't up to the arguing standard of the USA.
How can we live in a world where merely by having english as your first language you are advantaged in international negogiations?

It has also reminded me of the craziness of what they argue about; I witnessed a 30 minutes discussion on the use of "some" vs. "many" with people trying to compromise around "a number of" or no numerical reference.

Inside negogiations these people have a good sense of humour though and often the tedium of negogiations are interuppted by a quick witted comments from the chair.

I feel like I am a little bit closer to understanding what is going on, but the number of acroynms still amazes me. And I swear if I have to hear one more talk on NAMAs, MRV or NCs I will go crazy.

The real politicians are starting to arrive and security has been stepped up big time, with military vans all of the shop.

That's all for now, I need to go to our morning meeting with Kiribati. And then hopefully tonight; NGO PARTY! =]

Blue skies.

Lindsay