Personally, as always, I’ve had a hard time adapting to being back home. As I mentioned before, every time I travel, be it 100 miles or 1,000 or more, my wanderlust grows. My inability to adapt this time, however, has yielded an unexpected side effect - I haven’t been able to stop writing since I got home. Much of it is GV-related, some of it freelance, some of it so personal I have yet to figure out who to send it to via e-mail.

To me, the most amazing thing to come from the GV Summit is new ideas. During small group sessions, many of us discussed new ideas for GV: a new style guide, author recruitment, and coverage of as-yet-uncovered countries and territories. This last idea proved to be quite important amongst my colleagues, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting down with (or, rather, excitedly jumping around the room with) Yazan Badran and Renata Avila to plan coverage of the Western Sahara.

Now, this idea didn’t come about overnight - for months, perhaps even a year, I’ve received comments from Moroccans, Sahrawis and friends of the region asking why GV ignores the Western Sahara. Now, ignores is perhaps the wrong word…Global Voices does its best to cover every country around the world (note: except the US/Western Europe, which are only covered occasionally) on a regular basis and all authors are volunteers, so when a country is left out, it’s for lack of time, resources, and manpower. That said, I’d always wanted to cover this region, but was never sure how to go about it.

And that’s where the Summit comes in…an incredibly, impressively global exchange of ideas has just occurred. GV’s first Western Sahara post (thanks to Yazan) is live on the site, and I woke up to over 100 e-mails, sending the idea vibes back and forth across the Atlantic and Pacific.

I am truly amazed with what we can accomplish when we put our heads and hearts together. Sounds trite, perhaps, but never before have I felt so full of this particular brand of energy (certainly not the brand that gets me outside, but the weather’s crappy, so forgive me) and never before have I realized that now, it is impossible to look away. Whereas before I could go about my insulated life, working my previous (I reiterate: lovely but unrelated) job, drinking my $3 Starbucks and talking the talk, I can do so no longer.

Pull me up.

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Many other GVers have blogged on this topic. A sampling:
Rebecca MacKinnon
Ljubisa Bojic
Cristina Quisbert
Ethan Zuckerman

Dear friends, as much as I loved Budapest, I admit - I didn’t love the food. Sure, it was nice to be able to eat fresh tomatoes with abandon, and you know my love for European cheeses (and then there was Soproni, though that hardly counts as a foodstuff), but being faced with the selection day in and day out of salad with duck, smoked fish, and cucumber salad (and let’s not forget fruit soup - which was surprisingly not that bad) can make a girl drop a few pounds! (5 in my case)

So you see, for my first meal back in Boston, I present you with…Sabatino’s tortellini chicken with pesto, a weekly favorite:

Getting off the plane at JFK, back in my country, easing into the crowds (something I don’t do willingly or easily) of, mostly, Americans screaming and shouting and feeling, as I do every time I return to the States, that I don’t belong. Surrounded by beachgoers and tourists, first-time travelers and Long Islanders, I feel more the outcast in my own country than nearly anywhere else I’ve been.

And then through customs and into New York, where suddenly things feel different. I order my coffee with cinnamon and brown sugar, and the woman behind the counter calls me “mama” in the way only a New York Latina can and for a second everything feels okay.

This crisis of identity that belongs to the uprooted, the transplanted, the culturally confused now belongs to me as well. I used to feel happy to be home; now, with each exit and entry I feel I belong less and less.

But how do you explain this feeling of needing to run? Wanting to be alone? Wanting to grab just one pack, fill it with only the most important items (iPod, journal, laptop perhaps, clean underwear) and take off around the world, surfing couches and visiting long-lost friends (but never for too long). The feeling comes and goes; sometimes I think I’m content but I know I’m just lazy. The rest of the time I long for freedom.

My passport expires in 2012 and has 25 stamps and 27 free spaces. Will you help me fill them?

And now, as I sit here with Daniel Duende in the California Coffee Company in Pest, responding to GV e-mails, writing GV posts, and reading blogs of GVers, I realize that I am with you all, and you with me, even if we are halfway around the world from one another. From friends farthest away…

…to those I could reach in four to six hours by car…

…to those with whom I share a city…

…to the dancers…

…the drinkers….

…to each and every one of you…

…I raise an invisible plate in the spirit of love, harmony, humanity, and GV!

The concept being addressed was the fact that blogging and participatory media are great tools for communication between such different populations. More importantly, it was said that lesser-known opinions, countries, blogospheres, blogs and what have you (in other words, alternative ideas), will not feel heard unless those of us in a position to do so link and promote them. During the session, Rebecca MacKinnon said:

Attention equals support in many cases; for people who are saying something that’s not quite mainstream, just getting a link from other people and having the awareness that other people are paying attention and that your opinion counts really encourages you to get talking

I truly believe this, and Rebecca has inspired me to put into practice, more than I have been doing. When I started with Global Voices in April of 2006, I began reading more of the “othersphere” - in other words, blogs from countries of which I didn’t have much knowledge. At the time, I’d lived in Morocco for a little under a year and had begun reading Moroccan blogs in French and Arabic; it was true then and still is that much of my knowledge of Moroccan current events and pop culture comes from the blogoma (Moroccan blogosphere). I therefore figured that, to learn about the rest of the world, why not start with blogs? I suppose that’s what Global Voices is really all about.

And so, although I read as much of the international blogosphere as I can find time to do, I would now like to take it one step further - and encourage you to do so as well - and make the extra effort to link to those blogs, to promote those blogs, and to tweet those blogs.

To start this effort, I am proud to share with you the blog of Cristina Quisbert, a member of Rising Voices and Voces Bolivianas and now, I’m glad to say, a friend as well. Cristina is from Bolivia and part of the Aymara, an indigenous group. I met her at WeMedia Miami 2008 in February, and was pleased to discover how fluent her English was (that’s of note because apparently even the people who’d known her for a year had no idea that she spoke it!) She said today, during session 1, that her experiences at WeMedia inspired her to blog in English, as well as Spanish and Aymara. Her English blog shares a title with her other one: Indigenous Bolivia. Check it out - Cristina blogs about everything from music to local artisans to her life in Bolivia and paints an incredible picture with each post.

I liveblogged several sessions, wore out my wrists and brain, listened to my lovely colleagues share their stories (I have a soft spot for Session 2: Citizen Media and Online Free Speech; Ory Okollah’s story was incredibly moving, and hearing about issues in Morocco from Amine was great - Morocco is definitely representin’), and then promptly tied one on. Early this morning, walking back to the hotel, I remarked that it was light out. True story.

Also, I’m pretty sure Luis Carlos Diaz, currently speaking, just referred to blogging as a sport. Awesome.

I also took lots of photos yesterday; so did many people - check out the Flickr tag gvsummit08. Here are a few of my own, from yesterday and the evening before:

My dear friend Renata Avila and me

The new GV t-shirts!

That’s me with Nasser Wedaddy of HAMSA. He also randomly happens to live two blocks from me! Unfortunately, two other photos of me are also on there, with me making my usual ridiculous photo face (just check out my facebook page if you don’t know what I’m talking about)