On my way to the canteen I met Margaret Owen who is the director of Widows for Peace through Democracy, she told me that she every year she swears to herself that she's never coming back. But this is her eleventh time - so I asked her why she's here again.
"Every year I think oh my god what are we all doing, hundreds and hundreds of women from all over the world coming here to talk mainly to each other, because the whole thing about the CSW is there's very little contact between the NGO's and their governments. But I've been coming because I've got one particular issue concerning the status of women that has been continually under wraps and yet it is one of the most important and urgent of all the human rights issues there could be. So each year I decide not to come, and then as the CSW gets nearer I think "Oh God, who is going to speak about this"? It's about widowhood. I've been coming now for eleven years because widows are the very poorest of the poorest women in the world and their voices are barely heard, because they are so isolated in so many developing countries and face appalling discrimination and abuse and nobody talks about them.
In the last decade we've had so many armed conflicts and ethnic cleansing it's resulted in an explosion in the numbers of widows and wives of the missing, and in some countries the poverty and marginalisation they face is so extreme that they are killing themselves. In Afghanistan some widows wrote to us saying "we are headless, homeless and helpless and we have no hole to hide in" (headless meaning households without the male head...) and they are landless in the aftermath of conflicts and so vulnerable to kidnappings.
So I come here to the CSW because it's the only international organisation in the world that represents these women and lobbies for them and knows from our networks what's happening to them on the ground. We come here because it's the only way we may get governments to listen - that is, if we can get something into the text of the Agreed Conclusions. I'm aiming really high this time. I am determined to do all I can to get the UN Secretary General to commission a special report on the situation of widows in post conflict scenarios. Widows are not a women's issue, they are for the whole society because widowhood increases poverty and deprives million of children from going to school. This time I'm getting somewhere because I have the support of Rachel Mayanja, special adviser on gender issues to the Secretary General and yesterday we were asked to send our recommendations. So here I am with a team of speakers from Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, DCR Congo, Nepal, India and Iraq, but it's all terribly terribly difficult - in order to have someone speak on your behalf at the CSW you have to apply in writing to be considered to speak for three minutes , you have to have ECOSOC status, you have to submit eleven copies of your application several days in advance - and it's only three minutes and each person spends ages saying who they are and anyway you might not be chosen.
When I went with my addition to the Draft Agreed Conclusions on widowhood I was told to go to go to the Coordinating Committee for NGO's who told me to take it to the Coordinating Caucuses Committee, I walked in and said "oh I don't belong to any of your caucuses" so I gave it to the chair. It remains to be seen what will happen to it - it may actually go nowhere and I can't afford to stay two weeks to find out, besides probably all the decisions have already been made before we got here, they don't like changes to the Agreed Conclusions, even inserting commas are a problem.
So what's the point? I've spoken three times in the past on widowhood. It's an opportunity to make an intervention, but of course it isn't an intervention because there's no debate and you can't respond to what is being said. It has never helped so far, it's such along slow process and I think it's a huge waste of money to come to New York to meet NGO's from all over the world yet, each year people say "oh I didn't know anyone was doing anything about widows", so slowly slowly you are bringing up the issue.
I can't stand the phrase "raised awareness", even if I can get widows on the bottom rung of the agenda, the phrases mean absolutely nothing, it's just about talk. I want governments to take real action, to listen to widow's voices, not just as victims but carrying crucial roles in society.
So now you see why I go on saying I'll never come here again."
Margaret will blog on openDemocracy next week about what happened next.