I am now back in London, after what can only be described as one of the best months of my life so far. Living in New York, working at the UN and meeting so many great people all combined to produce an experience I will never forget.

The last week was the least busiest, something I rather enjoyed. There were only five or six youth delegates left on Monday; that number had decreased to three on Friday, when I attended a roundtable discussion on youth and the MDGs at Columbia University. This involved giving a brief talk at the start, along with fellow youth reps from Georgia and Australia and a few other guests, before comments were invited from everyone else. The event was organised by the Earth Institute at Columbia and the UN Programme on Youth and I thought it went pretty well, with just about the right amount of people there. It was chaired by Gordon McCord, understudy to Dr. Jeffrey Sachs and a leading advisor at the UN.


Other events of the week included meeting team members of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Africa on a night out, a fascinating group of people from all over the world - including one from the area of London pretty much adjacent to where I live! - and going to a comedy show the next evening featuring five men improvising humorous sketches around random words suggested by the audience.

It was while having breakfast in the surreal surroundings of a New Jersey diner, during the small hours of Sunday morning with gospel music and a religious preacher ringing out in the background, that I realised just how fast time has flown by over the past few months. I can still remember all the summer days revising indoors, coping with boiling heat to try and learn historical happenings and political ideologies, like they were last week. And there I was, sitting on the other side of the world, none the wiser.

The time does seem to have gone incredibly quickly, but the good thing is I don't think it's been because I wasn't concentrating. Particularly during the UN main youth week, I was stressing to everyone not to lose focus: otherwise the days will be gone before you know it and you'll be going home without really having learnt anything or taken in the occasion. You can look back and think of many things you'd have done differently in retrospect. This can happen so easily when you get too caught up in something; thankfully I managed to avoid it.

I arrived back to the good news that I've been accepted to attend a youth conference in Lithuania at the end of the month. It looks like a fantastic event and I can't wait for the chance to discover another new country - I've been incredibly lucky recently with everywhere I've visited and will be sure to take a couple of days in Vilnius just to explore the town and learn about its culture.

After this will come the all-important youth delegates' evaluation meeting in Geneva. As I keep emphasising, the follow-up work we all do after leaving NYC is equally - if not more - important than everything we've done in the buildup to the UN and during it. The website idea needs to be developed and discussions are ongoing; hopefully something will be in place before the meeting. I also hope to have my documentary ready to show everyone in Switzerland; after the event at Columbia on Friday I paid a final visit to DCTV in Chinatown to pick up DVDs containing footage of the youth Roundtable and Plenary sessions from the WPAY review, which I'd had dubbed from VHS for easier editing. That was the last piece in the jigsaw as far as the documentary preparations are concerned: now I have to get down the the tricky business of writing, editing and producing the film itself.

Being back at home is anti-climactic after the hustle and bustle of living in Manhattan and everything I did there, but it had to happen eventually. Recently I was elected to the Board of the UK Youth Parliament to represent London and, no sooner had that happened, a bad financial situation came up in the region which we all have to work now to sort out. Also, I'm rather behind in hours with my job as Youth Participation Worker for Hounslow and this may take a few weeks to catch up. But I have the Lithuanian and Swiss events to look forward to and literally two minutes ago I had an email inviting me to another event in Italy happening the week after Geneva, which I will attend to represent the English Secondary Students' Association. What a day - and what a trip this will be!