Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Yesterday while coming out of a meeting, I stopped into the Hotel Armenia to use their restroom and noticed a table in the lobby that had a bunch of name-badges. I noticed among them a name I had not read since I was last in the states.

After the restroom, I returned to the table and asked if I could leave a note with the badge and noticed that the badges was for a conference tied into the events here in Armenian for the 90th year or remembering the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

I asked how I can get invited and after being given the okay, I canceled my plans to return to Martuni that was suppose to happen today.

This morning I packed up my bag with our books on trafficking and headed to hotel Armenia and joined the conference after the opening was over (for security reasons, I could not attend, and fully understand).

As I was going in I did see Serg Sarkissian coming out with Oleg Yesayan, the president of the NKR parliament, who were later joined by the NKR president.

After Serg left, I walked up to Oleg to give him a copy of our book on trafficking and told him that they should think about what NKR is going to do, since there are girls from NKR there. Oleg told he would, as the president shook his head as if he too agreed (though I'm not sure if he really knew what Oleg and I were talking about).

The conference went quite well and it was well attened and very well organized.

I passed out quite a few of our books to people who didn't know, but do have to know about the "white genocide" that is going on today.

At the end of all the sessions, they had a questions and answers to which I asked the question of what is genocide, since everything that was talked about was genocide that spills blood and you can see the killing, pointing out that there is genocide going on all over the world that does not directly involve blood, a genocide that is even going on in Armenia.

When all was said and done and after talking to a couple of natives about my question a comment, one who didn't think what I said about Armenia today was accurate, but after a few questions to him and he answering and understanding what genocide includes, I headed home, skipping the concert at the opera for the attendees.

Tomorrow is the second and last day of the conference. Let's see what they will cover on the last day.

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