World Social Forum, part 3

After the first few days, we learned to adapt to the chaos of the WSF, and we ended up seeing lots of interesting events. Some of the better ones included:

1) A meeting for Canadians to strategize in the wake of the disappointing federal election we just had (though the outcome was not as bad as it could have been!). Not too much practical planning came out of this meeting, but it did give people a chance to vent about the poor campaign that was run by the NDP, and also to air theories for how the Conservatives will conduct their time as minority leaders. One theory was that they will do nothing to rock the boat for the next little while, until they can call another election and gain a majority as a result of having failed to offend anybody with outrageous legislation...but maybe this theory should go out the window, as Bryan just read recently that they went ahead and cancelled the promised daycare funding...surely a good way to offend and alientate anyone who believes that a woman`s place is not solely in the home. Maybe the Conservatives will sabotage themselves sooner than we think.

2) An "International Court of Women" which allowed speakers to tell their stories without interruption, and without the removal of emotion and context which is common in most courts worldwide. I really loved this event. Though it was very heart-breaking, it was also refreshing to see peoples stories being told in their own words, in the way they experienced the events.

3) And of course, the speech given by Hugo Chavez - he`s like a rock star! He spoke for a couple of hours, and though it was mostly rhetoric, it was quite inspiring. I have yet to see a Canadian politician get as excited about ANY topic, or be as straight-forward about their beliefs, as Chavez is about socialism. And he always refers to George Bush as "Mr. Danger", which is hilarious. Admittedly, I was tired of his rock-star status by the end of the forum (what will the movement do when he is gone?), but during that speech, he was fun to watch.


By end of the forum, we had seen many good events, and as a result I`m anxious to get home and resume my work, both paid and volunteer, in Toronto. But knowing that a long trip still lay ahead of us, we spent the day after the forum looking for a hotel in which to relax and plan our next move. Unfortunately, it must have been that everyone in the Youth Camp was doing the same thing, because all the budget hotels we contacted were completely full. We ended up staying at the Hilton, of all places! Of course it was way beyond our price range, but we figured that`s what credit cards are for, and besides, we didn`t have anywhere else to stay. So we reluctantly checked in, and then took advantage of their cable TV and nice warm pool as much as possible before check-out the next morning.

World Social Forum Part II

We finally got our hands on a schedule of events the next morning, but we soon found out that the real schedule was always changing and the printed one was only a rough guide. When we finally arrived at the venue for the first event we wanted to see, we were suprised to find not, as we expected, an in-depth discussion of the effects of NAFTA, but a live hip-hop performance and breakdancing demonstration. We later discovered that in the 8 hours since our program had been printed, someone had decided that the building would host the childrens WSF, and all the events scheduled in it for the week had been moved -- but no one knew where to.

We spent the rest of that day looking for event after event, all of which turned out to be cancelled or to lack translation. One of the great things about he WSF is that it promotes a diversity of ideas and perspectives by allowing any participating organization to register as many events as they would like. This prevents any one sect or group from controlling the agenda. The downside of this open door policy is that anyone and everyone can and do register events, and no one checks up to see how serious these organizations are, or whether they have even shown up at the forum.

As a consequence there are about a hundred different events scheduled for each sessions (4 sessions per day), of which I would estimate about 60 events actually take place, of which about 10 are translated into english. The trouble is, how to figure out which 10?


I found the lack of translation very alienating. Its hard to participate in any kind of discussion unless you speak the language fluently; my basic spanish did nothing for me in trying to understand an analysis of participatory economics, for example.

I appreciated the efforts of the translators we did meet, but found their system very haphazard. As luck would have it, 2/3 of the volunteer translators had not made it to the conference, never having received their plane tickets.

So, we couldn`t trust the program`s listing of what would be translated, especially since the attending translators had adapted their approach to include "guerilla translating", as one volunteer put it -- basically showing up at events they were interested in and translating those on the fly. I didn`t really grasp how this system was good for anyone, because the participants didn`t know where the translators would be, and the translators didn`t know if there would be equipment for them at the events they chose.

In the end, we resolved ourselves to attending only those events in the larger venues (more likely to occur, and to be translated), and also those events put on by english speakers (we figured those would be in English but translated into Spanish). This is what I found particularly alienating; that we were limited to participating in events primarily concerning / put on by english North Americans. It forced us to put language over interest; to place importance on a linguistic link with the presentors, rather than on an ideological link. All in all, I believe the problems with translation contributed to a divide between North & South, which was contrary to the point of the forum.

And I can only imagine how much this problem would have been magnified if I spoke something less common than English.

Our second day at the conference ended with the following outcomes: the NAFTA/ hip-hóp mix-up that Bryan mentioned; an event about the new Canadian/Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that was partially translated; an event about independent/alternative media at which the speaker (Gore Vidal) failed to show up; and two more headaches.

World Social Forum, part 1

The World Social Forum is an annual event, organized around the theme "A Better World is Possible". It began as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, an annual event held in Davos, Switzerland at which presidents and prime ministers from the wealthiest countries meet with a few thousand of the richest investors and industrialists on the planet to discuss the future of the world. The World Social Forum is intended to be the opposite type of event, attended by NGO`s, grassroots community organizations, members of social movements, and individuals from around the world - all discussing alternatives to the current neo-liberal form of globalization, which many would argue is eroding public services, destroying the global environment, and confining democracy in the name of corporate interests and private capital accumulation. The first World Social Forum was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil and attracted about 10 000 participants from around the world. This year, the sixth WSF was held on three continents - Africa (Kenya), Asia (Pakistan) and South America (Venezuela) - and 100 000 participants were expected in Caracas, Venezuela alone. Luckily the event coincided more or less with our itinerary, and we were able to attend.

We flew into Caracas on January 23rd, excited, but not knowing what to expect. A few weeks earlier, the main highway connecting the airport to the city had been shut down for repairs, so we weren`t even sure how to get to the city - or where to go once we got there. Thankfully, there were tables with volunteers to greet arriving participants, and they directed us to a special free bus heading downtown...little did we know this would be the easiest part of the conference to navigate. Traffic on the winding secondary road connecting the airport to the city was so bad that it took nearly four hours to get there. And then once we arrived, the bus drove away without a word of advice from the driver on where to go, how to register for the conference, or what to do next.

This problem was compounded by the fact that all the hotels in the city had been booked solid for weeks. Nearly a hundred thousand participants were expected, and all of them had to stay somewhere. We were planning to stay in the Youth Camp, a city park hastily converted into a camping zone for thousands of people from around the world. But how to find it?

We hunted around for volunteers, easily identifiable by red WSF shirts and hats, but none of them seemed to have a clue as to where the camp was (foreshadowing). After an hour and a half of searching, we were nearly at our collective wits end before we found the camp, right around the corner from where the bus dropped us off!

By the time we had set up our tent, it was past 9 pm, and we were starving. Unfortunately, almost all the restaurants were closed. We finally found one that was open, and ordered the only "vegetarian" item on the menu...which turned out to be pasta with clams, calamari, shrimp, scallops and tomato sauce - I don`t know when seafood became a part of the vegetables food group! We staggered back to our tent feeling thoroughly confused and defeated.

The next morning we set out to register for the conference. After asking around for a while, we found a registration site. We waited in a line which never moved for an hour, before finding out from a volunteer that we had to pay the registration fee at the national bank before going through the line. Eventually we found the bank, easily identifiable by the huge line-up of confused, disgruntled people outside it. We waited in that line for another hour before finding out from another volunteer ( I came to hate those volunteers - never the information you need, only a different story you don`t want to hear) that those staying in the Youth Camp had to register at a different site halfway across the city. We were exasperated, but happy to learn that there was a free bus waiting just across the street to take us there. Though I only got that information from a third volunteer after being roped into making an English version of the sign he was posting about the situation. After a half-hour ride we arrived at a giant stadium, only to find out that we still had to pay the fee at a special bank located about a ten-minute walk across the stadium parking lot. I don`t know why the bus couldn`t have dropped us off at the end of the lot that was beside the bank. After we paid, we had to walk back again and show them our stamped receipt in order to get our name tags for the Forum. The most confounding part about all the trouble over fees was that the grand total, for a week full of events, staying in the Youth Camp the whole time, and a week`s worth of shampoo and toothpaste that came with our registration, worked out to about $8 CDN! We would have happily paid 3-times that to avoid four hours of line-ups and confusion. And for such a small amount of money, why couldn`t we just have paid in cash at the registration site, instead of making special deposits at specific bank locations?

All in all, registration took us over four hours, and gave us a bad headache - two bad headaches, actually; one each. Still, one couldn`t complain about the value. For 8 dollars apiece, we had access to thousands of events, lodging for a week, a toiletry kit, and a pass for free public transportation anywhere in the city. Luckily we didn`t miss anything while registering, as the only event scheduled for the first day was a massive anti-war demonstration in the late afternoon. The rally was huge, and there were contingents from dozens of countries and thousands of organizations. Despite the chaos, we managed to run into a few people from Toronto that we knew, and joined up with them.

I`ve been to dozens of protests/marches and this one was largely the same - if bigger than most - with one major difference. At every protest I`ve been to in Canada or the US, there has been a massive police presence (sometimes almost as many police as protestors), characterized by varying degrees of hostility, and on occasion, the use of pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets against peaceful protestors (don`t forget menacing horses). On this occasion, there was virtually no police presence, and the few officers I did see were casually waving and smiling to the crowd as it passed by. In short, I`d never felt safer and less threatened at a protest before.

The event ended at a large rally with musicians and speakers from around the world. Unfortunately, the speakers weren`t translated (more foreshadowing), so we could only understand the few English-speaking participants, but the event was inspiring nonetheless. It is, to me, always inspiring to see tens of thousands of people mobilized, not for personal gain or advancement, but because they believe in a common cause - in this case, peace - but more inspiring still when the crowd is made up of people from virtually every ethnicity and nationality on the planet.

After the rally, we found another free bus ride back to the Youth Camp and stumbled back to our tent, exhausted, still a little exasperated from registration, but inspired nonetheless.

To be continued...