20th August 2011 was the date and KICC was the venue. Virtually all countries that AIESEC is present had sent at least one representative to this congress. The International Congress(IC) is the biggest it can go as AIESEC. This is one event where all MCPs, LCPs and PAI not to mention AI is well represented. If one wants to see the full picture of AIESEC physically, the IC is the picture that one needs to have a glimpse at.
Looking to the left, to the right, to the top and to the bottom of KICC, one could see young people from 100 countries located in all continents of the world, all excited to be members of AIESEC. I must admit, I have always told people that AIESEC is big but experiencing the bigness of AIESEC was something else altogether. Unfortunately very few guys out of the 60 members of AIESEC Egerton were present.
Opening Ceremony
In the opening ceremony that was between 09:00-12:00, we listened to speeches from the Vice President of the Kenyan Government, the MCP AIESEC Kenya and the PAI….yeah you heard it right, the current PAI was in the house. It was nice to see her physically. I mean, as part of the EB, you see a lot of publications in myaiesec.net for AI but you can't really picture the real persons behind the publications. And the more interesting part was when the guy chairing the session said that the PAI has a security team deployed around him/her in such occasions. It might be a useless fact but it's good to know for the hell of it.
Youth Forums
The session that was just before the lunch break was known as 'Youth Forums'. This is where all the delegates engage in a forum about leadership, who inspires us as citizens of the world and we were joined by four invited guests from DHL and the Corporate world to give us their perspectives into the topics in discussion. My defining moment was when the chair shot a random question that anyone in the conference centre could answer….I shot up my hand from the second floor to answer. I gave my answer and the 'whole world' applauded my response. Take note of the fact that I used the words 'the whole world'. This is because anyone who made a contribution in that session had the attention of representatives from all over the world. You can imagine how Obama felt when he was addressing American citizens in his inauguration speech knowing that virtually the whole world was paying attention. But it was until I was in the bus on my way back to Nakuru from Nairobi that it occurred to me that I had addressed the whole world during my one day experience at the IC. Funny huh?
Global Village
In the afternoon session, it was time for the Global Village. The Global Village involves setting up stands to showcase the culture of the country you come from. For example, in the Kenyan stand we showcased Irio, Maasai artifacts and those in the desk had dressed the African way.
Next to the Kenyan stand was the AIESEC in UK stand while on our left was AIESEC in Turkey.(Hope that gives you an impression of the arrangement). I tasted chocolate all the way from you tell me….can't even remember whether it was from Ukraine or Portugal….I shook hands with AIESECers all the way from Greece and you could realize that you had a lot of things in common. The session made the world to feel truly like a global village.
Then we went back into the conference centre which is more than an auditorium…..this time to watch the Global Village presentations. We listened and watched rollcalls made by all the countries present. This involved countries like Russia singing their national anthem to us and you name it. You can watch videos in you tube by the way if you realy want to see part of what I'm talking about. That marked the end of the opening ceremony and the attention shifted to Multi Media University(MMU) where the plenary sessions were kicking off the following day.
FYI
Tonnes of photos are in FaceBook and YouTube and you should browse and have a look incase you joined AIESEC after the IC…
And by the way, we now have a new myaiesec.net which can be accessed using this link (http://www.test.myaiesec.net) I' ve logged in once and I think its super awesome. The new @.net will mean that we shall be able to access our @aiiesec.net email accounts directly just like you access your other @gmail.com email account.
We'll keep you posted as soon as we get a briefing from our LCP who as you very well know was in the IC from the beginning to the end(10 days)….we shall keep you posted…as for now keep the 'blue bloods' spirit high. We are the true blue blood aka real AIESECers …..
Comm & IM Crew,
11/12.
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