Amnesty International

Yesterday I did something kind of cool--I have a friend (she lives in the same residencial as KellyAnne) who's from France. Apparently in the program they have at her university, all of the students have to spend their 3rd year in externships, and she chose to come here and work for Amnesty International. Apparently Amnesty International has an worldwide campaign (get it...they're international) that's been going on for a while (I remember hearing about it at school last year) petitioning the UN to change arms trafficking laws. Apparently they'll be a UN meeting in a few weeks, and this is supposed to be one of the issues on the table.

Melanie (this friend) organized a demonstration to gather petition signatures, that will eventually be presented to the UN, in the incredibly busy centro yesterday. Apparently every minute worldwide someone dies from a firearm, and she had four people lying in bodybag type things with labels on them explaining this, and some giant posters, and then we handed out pamphlets and gathered signatures. I wasn't orginially supposed to be a part of the project, I just kind of showed up because I happened to be at her house when the other people (the ones who layed in the body bags) were heading out toward the centro, and they invited me to come along.

However, with all of her previously organized volunteers in bodybags and another Amnesty worker who failed to show up, Melanie needed help gathering signatures. I spent the afternoon explaining the cause to people, handing out informational flyers and asking them to sign our petition. It's a little bit silly, really, that with just a few seconds of prep by Melanie I commenced acting like I knew exactly what the whole issue was about when talking with people, but I guess that's what a bit of extemp/debate background does for a person. (Makes them a great bluffer? Is that a good thing?)

It was pretty fun, and it forced me to speak Spanish to strangers, which is good for me. I was surprised at how much attention our demonstration attracted; people are always doing demonstrations of some sort in that general area of town. As a matter of fact, exactly opposite us on the other side of the street was a group trying to get people to adopt homeless pets, and they even had puppies to play with and everything, but we still had a much huger crowd. It kind of surprises me that anyone still stops and pays attention! I guess the "corpses" in body bags were a pretty important touch; people thought they were really dead!

Anyway, it was pretty fun, and then they invited us to go do some more Amnesty stuff today, which we did...however, it's 2 in the morning and I'm tired from everything I did today so you'll have to just wait until I write about it tomorrow or something. Tough luck for you.