WEEK NINE: The Lunch Game

Did you ever play that game as a kid when you list the famous people with whom you’d most like to go to lunch? Although kids today would be answering Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, in my day it was more like Mariah Carrey and Arsenio Hall.

However, a more interesting collection of guests were at the table I found myself sitting at last week. On Wednesday, a group of twelve people went to lunch as a way to recognize the work of the Carter Center interns over the course of the summer.

Each of these individuals is fascinating:

1) The Arabic-speaking law student
2) The sophisticated Jamaican-born MBA businesswoman
3) A former leader of a youth project in Northern Ireland
4) The tennis-playing law student who has enough extra brain cells to educate another planet
5) President Carter’s son who is just about the best storyteller-ever
6) The PhD student whose heart is big enough to support her family – both in NY and in Lebanon
7) The former director for the office of the U.N. Secretary-General's High Representative for the Elections in Cote d'Ivoire
8) The English teacher who taught in Palestine and China before working in Afghanistan
9) A former Amnesty International UK student organizer who spent 18 months in Namibia after working in Central India
10) A Lebanese woman who seems competent to manage coordination of the entire world while working in multiple languages
11) The most energetic intern who happens to be a Paris graduate and knows more about “So You Think You Can Dance” than me

It’s pretty incredible to think that I have the opportunity to spend time with this dynamic group of individuals over lunch – mixing in Caesar salad with questions about the tri-presidency in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the status of the revoked residency permits of four Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

Everyone at the table is part of the Conflict Resolution Program at the Carter Center. The diversity of experience and areas of expertise is quite broad given the specific geographic focus and primary issues of the Center’s current work in conflict resolution.

In my opinion, that diversity of thought allows the Center to integrate existing best practices into innovative and pioneering programming approaches. In fact, this is reflected in one of the organization’s five guiding principles: the Center addresses difficult problems and accepts risk. In the limited time I have spent here, I’ve seen that principle embodied in so many different ways – from a re-doubling of efforts in Sudan to a persistent commitment to observe the elections in Guinea.

Sitting and looking around the table at these particular people deepens my belief that the “resolution” part of the conflict-resolution equation is possible. If 12 people can sit-down and brainstorm ideas that an organization is willing to institutionalize and implement, then there is some sort of pathway forward – even if it does involve a little trial and error.

As the group packed up and left the restaurant, I couldn’t help but think Lady Gaga missed out.