Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Day Five: The Longest Day Ever

I kid you not. This was indeed the.longest.day.ever

Any day that starts off with a four am wake up call and then leads to several wrong turns, misplaced meetings, hikes in high heels and the delightful combination of planes, trains AND automobiles is long. However, when you factor in meetings with funders and the overall pulse of the Big Apple and you have a recipe for exhaustion.

And that was just the morning! That evening we had a speaking engagement at Fordham University's Chapter of the Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC). This was a new type of audience for us. This was a group of students who were already active, engaged and informed. I was curious to see how they would react to the story Monalisa told as compared to some of the other groups we had been before.

It was interesting, I watched people as they reacted. The looks on faces mirrored the looks we got in South Carolina. The nods in agreement happened in the same places. Really this just reinforced to me that no matter how well you know this problem, no matter how much of an expert you consider yourself to be -- in the end it doesn't matter. Monalisa's story taps into so many parts of human nature that it unlocks emotion. You don't need to be a doctor or an uber activist to have a voice here. You just need to have a heart.

No comments: