It's a beautiful life!

I titled the post as "It's a beautiful life" because we heard that song 4 times today-but I will talk about that later. The plenary sessions today were just as moving as yesterday. Michael Kelly from Zambia spoke on Children, Aids and our Priorities. Again I found the statistics and facts associated with these countries to be mind blowing! He told us that their are three diseases that people are fighting-HIV, Aids and Stigma. Two of them they can treat well with drugs, the third you can not." "Early Childhood Education is a medicine for stigma.

Amara Amarasinge from Sri Lanka also addressed the delegates of the world forum. She spoke at length of the struggles in Sri Lanka and how they are dealing with the traumas of the tsunami of 2004, landslides, flooding and a 30 year civil war. 300,000 people are displaced from homes, with 60,000 of those being children. 10,000 between the ages of 0-3 years old and 15,000 between 3-5 years old. Amara talked about the need for working with these parents as they are in extreme stress which results in abuse of children.

Ellen Hall presented each of us with her new book called Seen and Heard, a book about children's rights in early childhood education.

Over the past few days I have been to trainings on outdoor classrooms....it is brought to a whole new level in Scotland. Their children nap outside in geodomes even in the winter. They dress them up warmly even in cold temps. Children is some areas sleep in hammocks for naptime. It was inspiring and thought provoking. I have many ideas-how many I can implement will be the question as there is still the ongoing struggle to remind myself that this is my backyard shared with my family! The other workshop I attended today was on leadership styles and using those styles to recruit the talents you need. It reminded me that it is important to seek out talents different than your own in order to get a job done....big picture thinkers are needed as are the detail oriented list-makers.

Last night Sara and I attended the International dance. We had a good chuckle as we walked in. We were greeted at the door with some Black Eyed Peas blaring and they gave us beads and put glow bracelets on us. By the sounds of the music, it was going to be a good dance. We walked in and quickly saw that no one was dancing, there were chairs lining the walls. Balloons decorated the dance floor...people stood around talking for quite some time. We decided that a drink was in order first off. Well.....we repeatedly kept saying this feels like a middle school dance. I knew I came to represent....I danced like a fool for the 2 hours. A woman from Australia who had sat with us the night before at dinner said to Sara: "she's a real circus, isn't she?" "Is she a circus with children too?" Sara started laughing and could not even respond. I am going to go ahead and take that as a compliment! We perfected some dance moves-the sprinkler, shopping cart, some disco moves...it was very fun! The song It's a beautiful life seems to be the theme song of this conference. The Nature group did a beautiful video to it-some of the pics from that slideshow are in my pictures. But needless to say, they played the song 3 times during the dance. They also played some waltzes, arabian music and some other stuff that I have never heard...no worries-I danced anyway!

Tonight we met as global leaders one last time for this trip. Sara and I learned that we will need to meet with our North America group again in 1 year and at the next world forum will present our completed project. We heard what other global leaders will be tackling for issues-all sound truly wonderful and inspirational! I am looking forward to starting to gather our research and get started! Tomorrow is our last day of meetings and we have a closing reception/luncheon....it has been a fabulous week but am ready to get back to some normalcy.