doing these things under extraordinarily difficult situations, but we don't hear about them in the West. We hear about the terrible problems, and we don't hear enough -- even as a feminist, even as someone involved in international women's rights, we don't hear enough about the agency. So I think whether you're talking about the women in Zimbabwe, or the women in Sudan, or the women in Congo, or the women in Columbia, or the women in Guatemala, or the women in Mexico, there is in this gathering a tremendous energy that understands the obstacles and is persistently committed to overcome them. And so I have to say on a very personal level that I go away with a sense that more is possible than one sometimes thinks sitting in the belly of the beast. JG: The networking and conversations between sessions are such that at times, it's difficult to persuade participants to go back into the main conference hall. One moderator, Kavita Ramdas, tried singing to get them back in... Every session at the conference is framed by the question of how democracy should be re-defined. RC: The question of democracy I think is a really important and challenging question. And for me, I think the question here has deepened my sense of the complexity of doing it and also the level. For example, I worked for many years with the Algerian women who were fighting the Islamic - the armed Islamic groups - and we brought a legal