It was the scary excitement I only remember experiencing when I was a little girl. Like when we would play hide and seek in the middle of the night during primary school camp. But actually, a bit more of an excitement of something you knew were not supposed to be doing as a child. Like looking in all the closets of other peoples bedrooms (would there be something sex related??) Or like copying someones answers in a test while the teacher was walking behind you.
But this time the children were 30 and 34 and sneaking around inside the UN building in the evening. There was nobody there, except one poor man hoovering every single chair of the room of the United Nations General Assembly. But he had left the door open. So when he turned his back we sneaked in and looked around in the massive room with the hundreds of chairs. We whispered and shivered. We were standing in the room on top of the Security Council, where hundreds of resolutions have passed or where rejected. Where life changing decisions on the future of people and countries were made.

We pretended to be the Netherlands’ and Ghanaian delegation (or was it the Russians, for the historians amongst us?).

















Then we hesitantly walked up to the speaker’s desk on the stage. The place where Kofi Annan used to stand. Where he stood when he called for action on how by 2015 we should reach the Millennium Development Goals and have made the world a better place to live for all of us.
It felt weird standing there, knowing that Kennedy once stood on those same cm2 too. And Gorbatsjov and more recently Obama. People who changed history. I gently touched the wood they must have touched as well while they were speeching and tried to imagine what they might have thought and how they felt. I imagined they were nervous, knowing that the whole world was watching them. I already felt tremendously intimidated and fairly awkward. And the cleaning man hoovering the chairs wasn’t even watching me.