Toronto is amazing. The weather is perfect and the city (or what I have seen of it) is a blast. I flew in with Beth and Mimi, two other members of the Advocates for Youth and Toronto YouthForce team on Tuesday.
Driving through downtown, we were greeted by banners flying high along the main streets announcing the AIDS 2006 Conference. Our excitement could not be contained!
We arrived a full day before registration and got a chance to walk around the neighborhood. We shopped for last minute supplies, including notebooks, cell phones, and snacks to keep us going during the long days.
But that evening it all started … I had a meeting for all Pre-conference volunteers and we were given fabulous light blue with orange trim volunteer vests. Very fashionable! After the meeting we moved boxes of t-shirts to be passed out to participants in the morning. Then I had a planning meeting to finish a Youth-Adult Partnerships workshop, which I was presenting the first day of the conference.
Registration began early the next morning. I loved working the registration desk. I must admit that at heart, I am a nerd and love getting things organized. I love checking people off lists as they come in and creating a system for them to pick up their conference bags, name badges, and other information. But more importantly, I love getting to meet the participants as they arrived. Sure, some of them had trips that took 17 hours, but even the exhausted participants were so excited to finally be here and happy to meet everyone else!
Giving out name badges, I looked through them to find mine. I quickly found it, but soon found another, and another, and another. It turns out I had four names badges, one for participant, one for volunteer, one for presenter, and one for media! A badge for each role I was playing over the next couple of days during the Pre-conference. There was a little voice inside my head asking, did I sign up for too much? But it was quickly silenced by a more excited voice that wants to be a part of everything. We will see how I manage these next few days, but no matter my state of mind, at the end of it, this is sure to be an incredible experience.
