This is a guest post from CatGirl. It’s a write up of her experience so far at the FCNL Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. I plan on writing up something later–maybe Monday. She’s much more on the ball than I am! You can follow my twitter feed, as I try to tweet the conference.

Without further ado, here’s CatGirl:

Okay, so we’re here in Washington DC!

DAY ONE:

The trip here was easy, but utterly exhausting. I got maybe 45 minutes of sleep, max. And, of course, as soon as we got to where we were staying, it was 8:00 and breakfast time. (Admittedly I took a two hour nap later in the day.) The weather? Wonderful. It’s been raining (or at least lightly drizzling) the entire time. It’s actually not too cold, and the weather forecasts all say its supposed to get relatively warm this weekend. I’m absolutely loving the humidity and the seasons. The leaves are actually red! I have a whole bunch stuffed into the pages of my wonderful red Moleskine notebook, so that I can bring a little bit of autumn back home.

So we reach our destination (stopping by the Firehook cafe on the way), take naps, get settled in, and then head out. Le Bon Cafe is our first stop, for lunch. (We felt guilty going in here after walking out of two other restaurants.) I ordered a mozzerella tomato basil sandwich and regretted not getting any tea, because the drinks were all served in bowls. It was delightfully charming.

Next we headed over to the Jefferson building–the main tourist part of the Library of Congress–to just sit and soak up inspiration.

The final stop? The location of the FCNL annual meeting. We arrived just in time to take off our coats, then put them back on again to head across the street to another building for what was basically a welcome session. We met all the other new people and some FCNL veterans, as well as learning what this was all really about.

Later that night we listened to Josh DuBois, head of the something-or-other cooperation committee (who works with Obama in one way or another). I think I was falling asleep during this, becuase I didn’t write a single note on what he said.

DAY TWO:

We woke up way too early to function properly, but still packed up our stuff and headed out to the FCNL hotel, where we would be staying the rest of the time. We stopped by the Firehook (again) for breakfast, then took the Metro the rest of the way. We arrived at the tail end of the arranged breakfast, and then headed into Meeting for Business.

Meeting for Business at a monthly meeting is usually five or so people making suggestions, counter suggestions, and sitting in silence. Quaker process requires consensus, so everyone has to agree on your decisions. Quaker process is also infamous for taking a very long time.

This Meeting for Business consisted of two hundred nitpicky Quakers, all determined to share their opinions. On most of the issues, everybody agreed and had consensus almost immediately. But when we were supposed to nominate people for the Naming Committee (who would nominate people for the Nominating Commitee, who would nominate people for the General Commitee) there was some dispute over whether or not someone was qualified (although they were all very polite about their accusations). Someone would stand up, share their opinion, and someone else would stand and counter it. It was, needless to say, absolutely wonderful.

The FCNL attendees then split up. We went to a session explaining the Peaceful Prevention of Deadly/Violent Conflict. It was actually very enlightening. Apparently this is a big thing for FCNL: the prevention of genocide and that kind of thing, instead of resolution of major conflicts. Sure, they do some resolution, but prevention is easier for a fairly small organization like FCNL.

Next was a session explaining FCNL’s position on the new Health Care Bill. I’m not sure why, but I don’t have too many notes for this one either. I remember that FCNL has been lobbying for a Native American rights bill for so long that they’d given up getting any part of it passed, but apparently the entire thing is now in the health care bill, which is interesting.

We ate dinner with the other Young Friends (which is anybody who looks thirty-ish or younger) at a Thai place. That was very fun.

So, yeah. That’s it! I’ll try to have days three and four up tomorrow afternoon or Monday morning.