Celebrate girls

Ginger ale and ginger cookies for breakfast, any one?

You're sure to find such bold choices at places where the hardcore of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women convene. Where women dealing with life threatening issues come to let their hair down and speak their soul. Women who have taken ownership of their own lives, their families, their community, their country, their world.

You will find such a place on the 2nd floor of the Church Center, opposite UN Headquarters at the IWTC (International Women's Tribune Center).

Women like Vicky, who runs the center with the utmost respect for every woman that walks through her door. A place where the norm is going out of your way to create space for all. It's crowded in the small center. It smells of dark-roast Columbian coffeebeans or the pungent ginger of the Jamaicas. It's full of color, vibrance, beauty, and women, many of whom the lectures from the panels don't make sense to.

These are the statistics in real form. Women who come from conflict, violence, obstructed care, social isolation and the inequities that are still pervasive for many of us, 15 years post Beijing. I ate apples with these women, laughed and cried with them and simply listened.

Women are strongest in our most vulnerable moment and our tears are a manifestation of the internal power that allows us to connect. So let's cry all we want, and laugh all we want... Who the hell cares because I am one of the 536,000 women who died in pregnancy or childbirth, one every minute. I am from Uganda, Ethiopia and Samoa because I am a woman who lives because of the breath of life that I've received today from my sisters. We all come from Mother earth, dont we?

We must take care of ourselves and each other and if the CSW is the key to the change that we seek, then let's just keep partying here, at someone else's party, for another 54 years.

But if you're like me, uniterested in matters of state, oblivious to officials and their cronies, then let's just crack open this nut, figure out what's good for us now, what we can preserve for later and share this as wide and as fast as we possibly can with other women who need us just as much as we need them.