Sunday, November 16, 2008

Estamos aqui!


After three airports, two continents, and 15 hours of travel time, we arrived in Lima, Peru at 5 AM this morning. We were greeted by the always wonderful Cindy Youssef, a Furman graduate who is working diligently with the Voices program. Today was just the preliminary settling-in period, but I can already tell that this is going to be an APEC very different from one s in the past.

Most of the day was spent getting acquainted with the other student delegations. Furman is joined by students from North Carolina, Texas, and California to make up one of the larger student delegations. The Mexican delegation from Monterrey is also large, along with the Chinese delegation, pooled from a selective national competition. Overall, there are over one hundered students participating in Voices. We are each being given the opportunity to interact with the students from other member economies, being split into diverse teams as we conduct our interviews later in the week.

Our first APEC experience was a tour of the Media Center we will be calling home for the next week. There, it became apparent to us that access to political leaders and businesspeople would be much greater than in the past. We were each issued a press pass giving us access to press conferences, reporters, and ultimately speeches at the keynote CEO summit later this week.

Tomorrow is looking to be a full day. Most students will tour Lima in the morning. I personally had the luck of being selected to attend a CEO summit dealing with issues in small businesses of the member economies.

We have truly been blessed to be given this experience. Lima is an exciting, yet starkly different place from the U.S. We each have been given the opportunity to make the most out of this unprecidented access. My first act in pursuing this opportunity is to go get some well deserved sleep!

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