une autre partie de 25 août 2009

I can’t do this day justice unless I write about the most interesting conversation I had on the train. On the 3 hour train ride from Nice to Marseille, Leah and I couldn’t find seats next to each other, so we ended up sitting on different rows. The man diagonal from me had on a Florida State shirt, so I attempted to ask him if he was from Florida or had visited there. Turns out he spoke no English and it was a gift from his daughter that he was on his way to visit. The man next to me translated. Supposedly, the man in the Florida State shirt talked about how much he actually disliked the shirt but was wearing it because it was a gift. The translator (man sitting next to me) and I talked the entire next 3 hours to Marseille. He is half Italian/ half French – Italian father and French mother. He calls Bologna, Italy home, but his mother sent him away to boarding school in Paris because “she has little to no faith in the Italian education system.” He ended up going to l’université and l’école de droit (law school) in Paris. After practicing law in Paris for a few years, he applied for an internship with the UN. He said he was craving some type of international experience and knew he wouldn’t stop until he did it. His first internship with the UN was a 3 month stay in Lebanon, where they began teaching him Arabic. After the unpaid internship in Lebanon, he began working for the UN as a full-time employee and was stationed in Palestine as a UN representative for reconciliation on the Gaza Strip. He told me all about this experience – the times he felt they made a difference, the times he thought it was hopeless, the times his life was put into danger, the food, the UN compound he lived in, Israeli sonic bombs – anything and everything I could think to ask about. After 4 or 5 years with the UN, he wanted to settle down and so moved back to Paris, where he is an attorney working on his own, but also with the ICC. The International Criminal Court prosecutes individuals for genocide and other war crimes – the human rights and international part of law I find so interesting. He told me all about the Rome Treaty, the ICC’s founding treaty, and how/ why the US is not a member of the court. Right now, he is one lawyer on a team of 6 representing a bishop charged for ordering the murder of thousands of people in Darfur. The trial is taking place in Tanzania right now – he and the other 5 lawyers fly to Tanzania for a month on September 10. I could go on and on about the things I learned in this conversation. One of the coolest things is that even though I know all these things about this man’s life – from his excitement and anxiousness for the trial in Tanzania to his siblings, nieces, and nephews – he is still a perfect stranger. I don’t even know his name and he had that profound of an effect on me. These types of conversations don’t come around everyday, at least not for me – I know I’ll remember it.