Jamie’s CITES Report Today Opening ceremony was led by a welcome speech by the president of South Africa (a last minute decision) so lots of security. Followed by speeches from the CITES Secretariat and others. At the end of the speeches was a wonderful musical play by locals with lion king styled props of animated birds, gazelle, and a rhino. They gave every attendee a bongo drum to play along. This is the biggest CITES in history with 3,000 attendees. We were about 10 rows from stage at a table with our own mic and name sign. Spent the rest of the day meeting people and manning the booth. The booth is labeled as Born Free so confusing to people that approach as we constantly have to explain that there are multiple organizations working out of the booth. The only mention of BCR at the booth is our logo on the flyer we are distributing. Not much organization amongst the group members. Everyone is always very distracted and it is hard to get straight answers out of people as to what meetings we should be at, what time, etc. Everyone is always late for everything. It was hard to man the booth as you get a wide range of questions. Some easy enough to answer and some that are completely out of our league and there is no training or info to read to get prepped. We answer the best we can and said, “I don't know,” a lot. We are going to run out of gifts for the attendees. With 3,000 guests and only about 700 brochures and lanyards and 500 or so tote bags they are going quickly. Judy has been good at introducing us to people. We have been introduced to a lot of people. However there are times I feel like we should have had more direction. For example there was a huge event tonight that no one told us about. We were done for the day and went to the mall to pick up a few things. From an upper level we saw some food trucks outside and decided to be brave in SA. We went down to where the food trucks were and it turned out to be a welcome party thrown by the government of SA for all CITES attendees. There were 35-40 food trucks, dancers, bars, and arts and crafts. All the food and drinks were free. It was a massive event and we accidentally found it. Shortly after arriving we saw x there who seemed to pretend she did not see us. We did not approach her, but rather mingled and talked to people we had met earlier in the day. Other things that happened; met the 1 person sent from USDA. He only deals with plants and didn't even know that the USDA governs collections of big cats in the US. Met Masha with IFAW who was in charge of the project of releasing the Tigers back into the wild. Someone who has had a huge involvement with the phasing out of bear farms. I was approached by a forestry minister from Cambodia that wanted to know about how to reintroduce wild tigers in his country. Most other NGOs who heard about this said it was a terrible idea as Cambodia has horrible poaching which has not been lessened in more than 5 years. I guess WWF has plans to reintroduce Tigers there but has little support from other organizations as it seems to be a ploy to raise interest in donating to the project but may not be sustainable unless major improvements are made legislatively as well as with on the ground enforcement. There are other countries that have much improved their infrastructure and more continuous land such as Malaysia but no one is interested in funding reintroduction there. We met the founder of Born Free and semi founder of SSN but he didn't seem very interested in us. Also met several other people that thought our knowledge base would be useful to Lao should they accept assistance with auditing their current tiger population and phasing out the farms. Justin and I have decided to basically take over our own schedules and double check the daily list of meetings to make sure we do not miss important meetings and gatherings. We have also started to just leave the rest of the group behind as it takes them forever to make a decisio