Report 2
A warm Saturday evening and thousands of people are crowding into the atrium of the Melbourne Convention Centre. We are waiting to get into the auditorium for the second plenary of the Parliament about the international context of the interfaith movement.
As the audience pours in, Sean, Jem and I are eyeing the stage with anticipation. We were given a privileged platform as one of four keynote presentations.
As our names are called out, we collectively go up the steps towards the lectern. Three young people from different faith traditions standing together in front of several thousand people. We’re pretty scared if truth be told: adrenalin running. But the symbolism spoke volumes even before we opened our mouths.
The main theme of the Parliament this year is ‘making a world of difference.’ So we urged people to do this by joining the Faiths Act movement which we lead.
Advertisement
Our campaign encourages people of faith, from all over the world, to work together in their local communities, towards the Millennium Development Goals. Our particular aim is to help eradicate deaths from malaria.
In the ‘coffee shop’ set up by the Parliament as a networking space after the plenary, I meet a Christian Religious Education teacher from Singapore. She said that she was inspired to teach the children in her classes about the devastation caused by malaria around the world. She wanted to help her students understand what they, as young people from a variety of faith and non-faith communities, could do in a practical way to challenge the disease.
I also meet a Jewish father from Sydney, Australia, who said his daughter now wanted to organise a fundraiser with her friends to buy bed-nets to protect people in malarial areas. A bed net costs around £5 and will protect a family from malaria for five years.
It means a lot to know we are making an impact. The world needs to know that, at the very least, it is possible to halt and reverse the spread of malaria by 2015, and it seemed the world had crowded into that Convention Centre tonight. The Melbourne evening was turning into a cooler night, but the excitement, the debate and hope, meant we hardly noticed.