Weeks one and two at the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy

So I was a little bit later in starting my internship than the rest of the CLP, but as soon as I arrived in Berlin I was right in the thick of things. The icd office has a staff of around 80, with people working on projects relating to German-Canadian relations, European-American relations, European-South American Relations, Intra-European Relations as well as several other areas. When I arrived I was added to the News Team here, which writes research articles, interviews high profile visitors and more importantly attends all icd functions to cover interesting and important events.

Luckily for me, the icd was hosting the Berlin International Economic Congress the first weekend of my arrival. The BEIC is a new event created by the icd that invites speakers from several nations to come speak about the potential for cooperation and reform in the areas of economics, international organizations and the environment. Some of the bigger names slated to come were Renate Kuenast, the leader of the German Green Party, Guido de Marco, former president of the United Nations General Assembly, Heiner Flassbeck, director of the Globalization and Development Division of UNCTAD and Soloman Isaac Passy, the former Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE. There were also several former prime ministers from around Europe, ambassadors, MEPS and former ministers of defense, trade etc. So it was definitely exciting to be getting a chance to meet these people and hear them speak.
On my first day of work people were already busy preparing for the conference, and I spent the majority of the day researching the congresses speakers and writing short introductions for them, which were to be read at the congress. This was a good way for me to get acquainted with the speakers before they came, and also gave a lot of insight into the magnitude of who would be at the weekend’s events.

As the week progressed the stress level increased exponentially. On the second day in the office we needed to format and edit the interview questions for the 30+ speakers that would be at the conference. This wasn’t quite as interesting as some of the other work, as the team had already written the questions before my arrival, and we were only checking grammar, spelling etc. I found out that being a native English speaker in an international NGO means that you need to be proofreading constantly.
Wednesday was our last day before the start of the congress and it was very busy. One of our main tasks for the day was writing (and re-writing) the questions for the panel discussions that would be taking place the following days. I never realized how every small detail of something like this could make such a difference. Our director would send us back questions just to make the smallest of changes regarding word choice, or just send back an entire list of questions and tell us to start over. It was very frustrating. However, when the panel discussions took place, it was quite satisfying to hear important political figures having debates based on the questions we had written.

This was also the first day that I had a little disappointment at work. I had previously been scheduled to conduct interviews with some of the speakers, including the Ambassador of Lesotho to Germany, who serves as coordinator and chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and who represented these nations at the Copenhagen Climate Council, with one of my bosses, in order to help me through my first round of interviews. But, as all interviews are done in teams of two, and my boss decided that she didn’t have time to conduct any interviews and would instead be needed elsewhere, I had to give my interviews away to the other teams. This left me to work on the testimonial team, which involved interviewing the congresses participants instead of speakers, and also required me to be at the entire Congress in order to take notes. And, since the congress runs from 8 am to 8pm from Thursday to Sunday, that meant I had a very long weekend ahead of me.

For the most part, everyday on the congress was the same. I would arrive at 8 in the morning, listen to speakers and take notes all day, and then get a chance to talk to the speakers at various social functions following the congress. One of the most interesting people I had a chance to speak with was an MEP from Denmark named Dan Jorgensen, who was the youngest MEP ever elected to office. He had some very interesting and insightful views on climate change, and, being so young, was really progressive in his ideas to involve the youth in climate protection.
I decided to include the first and second week of work together here as, since I didn’t get a weekend off my first week, we were given Monday and Tuesday off. So my second week wasn’t much of a week at all. During the time back we spent most of the day transcribing interviews from our Dictaphones to word documents and typing up our notes from the speakers and combining them in google documents. We will later post the interviews to the website and use the notes to write articles on the speakers or speeches later.

I also turned in my first research proposal this week on the use of cultural diplomacy to further the campaign to create a parliamentary assembly in the United Nations, so we will see how that goes.

That’s about all from Berlin for the moment, sorry for the length, but there was a lot going on. Until next week.