Chelsea
and I left NYC much later than we intended to (actually 6 hours later). The amount of stuff we had to get for the photo exhibition, the We will not be Silent t-shirts in Farsi and Arabic, the Left Turn magazines to sell etc. took a long time to pick up.
It was midnight by the time we arrived in Burlington at Serena’s house the Director of the Peace and Justice Center and a friend of mine who just moved from NYC to VT. It was great to see her and Jason and their young rambunctious dog Tuck. After a good night sleep we were off to get the last bit of things and printing materials for our press kits before picking up Antonia 
and Rostam
from their hotels and Raed
from the airport who was coming from DC.
We worked out of the Peace and Justice Center all day on the Church street mall. We met Wendy a long time Center activist who set up the speakers homestay’s and visited their amazing store that has so many products from around the world.
The event was at 7pm at UVM and Raed was delayed because Delta airlines first delayed his flight from Dc then from NY and then canceled it. Luckily Raed was able to convince them to let him get on another flight and he just made it. But without his luggage.
Burlington VT Day 1
We set up the exhibit out side the room for all the students and professors in the building to see. The exhibit looked great ! Everyone was stopping to look.
Once the speakers had 5 min to chat, we started the event with Chelsea moderating. There were about 80 ppl in the audience from the school and Burlington community. Raed spoke first then Rostam and then Antonia. The audience heard lots of information about the economic colonization of Iraq by Antonia who focused on the US corporate take over of Iraq explaining how Bechtel, Halliburton and others had won huge contracts to reconstruct Iraq after the invasion and had squandered all of our billions of dollars. She explained how we can put pressure on the companies directly and through congress about canceling the current contracts and especially on contracts that have not received payment yet. What we should be doing is asking for this money to be transferred to Iraqi’s to re-build themselves.
There of course was much more that was talked about, but as I am in the car now I will tell you later.
Jessica
