Another cracking annual conference has been planned by the Conservative Women’s Association for today, which is where I am heading for now.
Entitled, “Creating a Better World for Future Generations”, speakers include some of our leading Tory politicians, as well as:
Zac Goldsmith - The Ecologist
Lord Melchett - The Soil Association
Tom Burke - Rio Tinto Zinc
Sir Christopher Meyer - Former Ambassador to the US
Charlotte M. (Charlie) Ponticelli - Deputy Under Secretary, for International Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor
Mary Blewitt (pic) - SURF (Rwanda Survivor’s Fund)
Zainab Salbi - Women for Women International
Peter Constable Maxwell - UN Representative in South Sudan
I shall particularly enjoy listening and learning from the African speakers. I have written before about Conservative women and Africa and only wish I could have joined our delegation to Rwanda earlier this year.
Mary Blewitt is an inspirational figure who survived the genocide in her country when up to 1 million people were massacred in 100 days and now feels duty bound to help her people:
Among those slaughtered were almost all my relatives: fifty members of my family. As I was out of the country when the genocide started, I escaped the massacre. Had I been in Rwanda I would certainly be a widow, or dead, by now. The only reason I can think I was spared, is so that I could live on to help others like me who survived. So when I returned to the UK after eight months working as a volunteer for the Ministry of Rehabilitation in Rwanda, working to reunite families and search for the dead, I set up the SURF. I felt a duty to help my people, a duty all the more urgent for the hundreds of survivors in the UK who had no support whatsoever.