OXNARD : Participant Hails Women’s Conference

Days have passed since Elizabeth Gibson returned to Oxnard from the Non-Governmental Organizations Forum on Women in Huairou, China, but the experience still has her talking in superlatives.

“It was one of the greatest experiences I have had,” said Gibson, a member of the Bahai faith who spent more than 20 years working to improve socioeconomic conditions in Asia and Africa. “The prevailing feeling of the conference was a wonderful serenity.”

More than 20,000 participants from throughout the world attended the grass-roots forum, which opened before the official U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and closed last Friday.

Gibson, who returned to Oxnard on Monday, said she was wonder-struck by the hundreds of workshops and lectures by international experts on everything from women’s political activism to violence against women.

One of the workshops, on global peace, was headed by Cal Lutheran professor Hoda Mahmoudi and Betty Reardon of Columbia University.

Gibson said she spent a lot of time traveling through China, visiting factories and villages with other women to see how Chinese women lived. And while the U.N. conference received a lot of negative publicity after First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton made a controversial speech and Winnie Mandela was denied entrance, Gibson said the grass-roots forum was an enjoyable affair.

“I talked to women from Albania, Macedonia, Turkey, Korea,” Gibson said. “There isn’t a corner of the globe that wasn’t represented. And there was no one you could go up to, whether you knew their language or not, that you would not feel like they were your sister.”