Today I have decided to settle my personal stuffs and rest to recover from my sickness. Let’s just provide a personal space for myself to reflect. Good news, I have purchased a new phone …it was like FINALLY, after all sorts of up and down.

Great to be back in the MYD team whatsapp group again and able to communicate properly with Malaysian Negotiator, Dr Gary. Honestly, I feels good to return in the virtual chats. Even though it was only two days without a phone, I felt like a bit behind. Guess everyone was just too caught up and did not managed to notice my struggle without a phone. At the end of the day, I decided to solve it by myself and make a great return!

I talked to myself (sounds weird but that’s how I reflect). I have been blindly following an unfamiliar negotiations for two days and learnt very little. Firstly, I am not familiar with the text. Secondly, I am totally new to this negotiation process. Thirdly, every spin-offs or closed meetings seems very exclusive but I was unable to keep track. I was literally just the note-taker and would not want to miss out important points from speaker. At the same time, owning a privilege to pink badge, which has access to close door meeting gave me a pressure to fulfil my task. The badge should be in good use and not wasted. These reasons have caused me unable to interpret well the meaning of the text within time limit. Besides, our team do not expect to receive a pink badge within short period of time and the initial plan was to attend parallel summits/events. This gave me insufficient time to think and make full use of the badges.

I am thinking about another approach for the coming 10 days in COP21. Daily tck and CAN meetings sound like a good platform to get daily updates and highlights. It would be very suitable for newbie like me.

Conversation with some other Asian youths during Asian Youth meet up dinner and Melissa from Singapore yesterday made me realised that following negotiations process is an uneasy task and it takes years to understand. Furthermore, Jolene mentioned visiting other NGO and countries pavilion opened up my mind. Thomas also shared his experience on attending side events such as forums sounds more informative than tracking negotiations. There are many things worthwhile to explore in COP21. Therefore, I decided not to stay in the meeting rooms anymore.

Great day spent! Hope it is not too late to restart my journey in COP21 🙂

Written by : Emily

Edited by : Ginger