#35WoCo Helen's reflections

What just happened?

Last night, I was dancing around an airport hotel - a different airport hotel, I hasten to add - with friends old and new; people who had arrived in a new country as  strangers, danced together as friends.

Yesterday, I lunched with my Austrian friends in the Ballroom, where we had spent most of the week.  I watched with a strange mixture of bewilderment and sadness, as the hotel staff severed the WAGGGS backdrop, which had been in tens of thousands of photographs across the week, and tweeted out to millions, with a craft knife, ready for the next event.

Having thought about this, I've decided that it's a metaphor.  The conference experience is - for want of a better word - awesome.  It's a dynamic, vibrant, intruiging blend of tradition and modernity, goodness and ambition, linguistic joy, a common understanding and so much more.  It's a safe, friendly place of similarities and differences.  But now, conference has come to an end; and that craft knife epitomises the fact that this indescribable feeling at being part of this international spectacular, has now ended.  The banners have gone, we are back in mufti, the #35WoCo wifi has been switched off; the journey back to reality kicks in.  Don't mishear me - this is a good thing.  We have lived in an airport-hotel shaped conference bubble for a week, experienced situations we will never experience again.  Now it's time to take back the learning, the contacts, the joy, the experience, the sharing, the ideas, the alternative ways of thinking, and consider how this impacts our Member Organisation and how to take everything forward.  

I feel strange.  I've been with 100 friends for the last week.  Now, I'm at the airport, with just a plate of dough balls and a Coca Cola for company (I had to get a Coke lid, as anyone who knows me will understand).

I walked through immigration and a man armed with an iPad stopped me and asked if he could ask me some questions.  Thankfully, he was from the Hong Kong Tourist Board.  I couldn't tick any of his boxes as to why I had been in Hong Kong, so was trying to describe Hong Kong Girl Guides, to which the reply came - 'I have never heard of this'.  There is work to be done, here and in every one of the 145 MOs of WAGGGS. 

The delegation has now dissipated - some have been joined by their partners for a holiday, others have shifted to another hotel for some downtime.  Me? I'm off to Vietnam for a few days, then to Cambodia.  I'm going to be blogging from my personal blog here, if you can bear to keep reading over the next week or so.

I'm going to sign out there.  This has been the most intense week of my life, but in the best way possible.  It has been a privilege to have been involved and I have gained so much from it, which I will happily share with you when next we meet.

Read back over the blog, tell your friends about WAGGGS aand how it all works.  Encourage all girls and young women to join Girlguiding.  Start volunteering yourself, if  you don't already.  And if you do already, consider what more you could do to advance this great movement.  Go - help Girlguiding to Be The Change.

Au revoir.