From the NGO Forum in Huariou

by Lynn Fogwill

This part of the UN 4th World Conference on Women is a place of amazement, a kaleidoscope of sounds, sights, smells and feelings. Here in the Media Centre there are close to a hundred computers available for use at no charge to participants. There are women all around me working, as I am: sending messages to loved ones back home, sending news and asking for support work from organizations on the other side of the planet. The atmosphere is one of shared vision and sheer pleasure. We are involved in something historic and we know it.

This is a place of numbers. There are 28,500 women (no one seems really sure) at the NGO Forum, women of all ages, races, languages and national costume. Every day there are more than 400 workshops, plus planarias and cultural events to choose from. Trying to plan which to attend and a strategic route from one to the other across the 40 or 50 hectares of the site is exhausting in itself. But the workshops often have an atmosphere of kitchen table discussion, hunched over with friends and neighbuors, engaged in an intense dialogue that matters deeply to us all.

This is a place of rumours. The Chinese police have stocked up on blankets to cover our naked bodies when we go dancing in Tiananmen Square. Women have had their rooms, belongings and papers searched by security police. Australian women, meeting in caucus, were raided and had their meeting shut down because it was in a hotel and not at the "designated" place. The Tibetan exiles are being harassed. There will be a demonstration. ... There was a demonstration. We can rarely assess if these rumours are true.

This is a place of uncomfortable undercurrents and confrontations. Korean women confront Japanese women, telling them to go home. During the Canadian daily caucus : meeting someone yells, "Take that kid out of the tent!" Patiently waiting in line is apparently not a universal nicety. Does sisterhood end here, when yet again a woman elbows her way past me to the front of the queue? I feel ashamed of us all. What happened to our respectfulness for each other? To our support? What happened to "If women were in charge the world would be different"?

Yet this is a place of a global women's movement. The networking begun here will carry on, particularly through this very medium, and it is what will go forward from here that will matter. Beijing will change everything. Women from "North" and "South" have had the opportunity to share their stories and discover their common issues and concerns. The unbelievably negative impacts upon women of structural adjustment policies, no matter what the structure of the national economy, and the feminization of poverty as a global phenomenon are now understood. The horrific extent and kinds of violence against women have been named. The marginalization of women and girls in education is still very real despite some gains since the first Nairobi conference in 1975.

With the capacity of electronic communications, we can continue to support each other and make common cause. But we must ensure that power relationships are not simply perpetuated through this technology. Unless all women-in countries of the South as well as the North and particularly women in small NGOs-have access to the technology, we will have betrayed the hope and promise of Beijing.

For CCLOW, there is a new possibility for international links. I have had the privilege to connect with women from Australia and Sweden, with whom I discussed on very practical terms our commitment to continue networking post- Beijing. We also spoke hesitantly but hopefully of organizing an international conference of feminist adult educators.

As the theme song of the NGO Forum cried out, "Keep on moving forward, never turning back," so shall we at CCLOW.

Lynn Fogwill resides in the Northwest Territories and is a founding mother of CCLOW. She is currently CCLOW's president. A fuller article detailing the importance of Beijing, specifically to women's education, will appear in an upcoming issue of WEdf co-authored by Lynn Fogwill and Susan Lafleur.