My work.

Today was a wonderful day. It started out a pretty mediocre - I've been very tired recently, feeling lonely despite constant socialising, and I've been finding my work depressing. It's a project that I think is supremely important and no one but my boss seemed to be very interested in it. I spent the day reading the Convention on Children's Rights, wishing that people would help a little more and wondering why no one seemed too willing to provide much information. Yesterday I finally understood why - apparently the information that was sent out to the various teams of NGOs was rather incomplete and made the project sound like Save the Children was basically asking other people to do our work for us. No wonder everyone has been polite but otherwise too busy to really contribute. Let me tell you what I'm doing (even though I wrote it in another post, but nobody else seems to have read it. Besides, it will help me organise my project.) In point-form so that it's not too boring for you to read:

- SL signed the UNCRC in 1990. Article 44 of this Convention says that each signatory State has to provide a report on how they are protecting children's rights every two-to-ten years.

- SL was supposed to submit a report in 1996. They finally finished writing it in 2005. It was published in December 2006. Ten years late, they finally told the UN in a 93-page report how wonderful they are at protecting children.

- The report is misleading and often makes it sound like the government has completely revolutionised children's rights in SL. They have not. The report is not entirely faulty and the country admits to having many problems, but also implies that children's rights are being adequately protected. They are not.

-Article 45 of the UNCRC says that it is up to NGOs to monitor the implementation of this convention. It says that NGOs may coordinate a coalition to write a counter-report to that of the Government.

- I am fully aware that absolutely nobody is reading this.

- After the Government submitted its report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF asked Save the Children to organise the writing of a complementary report to what the government wrote so that the Committee can hear about both sides of the issues: What the Government says is happening vs. what the relief workers are actually seeing on the ground.

- This report will be submitted to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in April after which it will be presented orally in Geneva in June. It is this report that will be used by the Committee when the UN is making decisions on children's rights policies in the future. The next report will not be created for another ten years or so. This is the ultimate opportunity for each NGO to say: The Convention says X, the Government says Y, and our reality is Z. We want changes.

-Now, when presented this way and the NGOs suddenly realise that their comments and contributions are going in a report straight to the UN, that their words, their experiences, and their statistics will be directly compared to what the Government is saying, suddenly I see results.

- Today I had a meeting with the director of World Vision who started slapping his desk saying "It's going to the UN? Oh, that changes everything! We'll help!" The International Rescue Committee is on board with us. We now have submissions from Mercy Ships, the Forum for African Women Educationalists, Caritas Makeni, and the Red Cross. Tomorrow I have a meeting with the director of Catholic Relief Services, the Justice Sector Development Program, and am going to go see Medicos del Mundo. We finally have a team.

- And I am still writing despite the fact that there is nobody reading this. You are brats for not caring about my work. :P

- Once I have submissions and comments from all the NGOs, I have to take their comments on child abuses, compare them to what the Government says in the report, do a comparative analysis with the UNCRC, the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, and the Optional Protocol on Children in Armed Conflict and the Child Rights Act, and then write it all into the report.

- I have a month. The project is due April 13th or we won't be able to have it ready for the oral submissions in Geneva. Wish me luck.