I received yet another frantic call from my mom yesterday afternoon. She watches the news far too often—“Kelsey, please don’t go to Thailand! They’ve got Avian bird flu over there!” I couldn’t refute her claim, since I try to avoid watching TV unless baseball is on (that controversial 9th inning strikeout last night worked in our favor, though—the White Sox downed the Angels 2-1).

Well, after a bit of research online on this topic (in which, incidentally, I also noticed that Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher got hitched—rock on, Demi), I actually discovered that today Romania detected bird flu in its poultry. Considering that I will spend most of my trip to Thailand in a hotel conference room, and I spent much of my trip to Romania this summer stumbling over chickens running loose in people’s yards, I think I’ve already encountered the greater risk.

Yes, my friends, I’m leaving for Bangkok in less than two weeks, on October 25. The AWID International Forum, which I’m attending with NNPCW alumna Ann Crews Melton and Women’s Advocacy Associate Molly Casteel, will bring together activists and scholars from around the world to talk about how to create institutional and social change through our work. AWID places special emphasis on women in developing countries, and many of the delegates will be from other parts of the world. I’m particularly interested in the mini women’s rights film festival they’ll be holding Thursday night… hopefully I won’t be in a comatose state by then due to the 12 hour time difference.

Besides my obvious excitement about my first trip to Asia, I’m very much looking forward to the chance to learn from women in other parts of the world about organizational strengthening strategies that have worked for them. It seems that in the United States, we’re often caught in our own little bubble. We see our way as the right way, the only way, for something to be done, and our problems as the defining problems of women around the world. When it comes to women’s rights in particular, I think many Western societies see themselves as enlightened paragons of virtue—“Women here got the right to vote in 1919,” and so on.

Yet I get more excited about women’s issues these days when I hear stories from abroad. These women take on non-trendy, grassroots justice issues. The stories I’ve read are of women who examine the problems in their particular social context, whether that’s genital mutilation or honor killings, and look to the women affected for solutions. That seems much more empowering to me than an agenda imposed from someone above or outside.

We ultimately strive for that autonomous model ourselves in NNPCW, with our decentralized, non-hierarchical network structure. At our best, the national NNPCW office provides you with opportunities for leadership development, improved methods of communication, and resources to aid you in your work. We don’t package your experience as a woman into a little box, and we don’t tell you what issues should be important to you. We give you tools that empower you to create change on your own college campuses. And really, isn’t that what the Body of Christ is all about?

Hopefully my trip to the International Forum will give me better strategies for how we can move even more toward this vision. And in the meantime, I’ve got some hot tips from the New York Times on places for great Thai food in Bangkok.

“If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members of the body, each one of them, as God chose.” --1 Corinthians 12:17-18

Kelsey