image 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 GoldsmithThe Ecologist
Lord MelchettThe Soil Association
Tom BurkeRio Tinto Zinc
Sir Christopher MeyerFormer Ambassador to the US
Charlotte M. (Charlie) PonticelliDeputy Under Secretary, for International Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor
Mary Blewitt (pic) – SURF (Rwanda Survivor’s Fund)
Zainab SalbiWomen 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.