The conference formally ends this afternoon. Today is mostly oral summary reports of all the "tracks" (e.g. prevention, treatment, youth, etc.) and a short closing session. Tariq (my husband) and I left crazy-beautiful Mexico City this morning to spend a few days in a little village on the Pacific coast before heading back to the U.S.

PHOTO (above): Mexico City Z*colo (Playa de la Constitución), second largest public plaza in the world behind Red Square in Moscow; Catedral Metropolitana in background

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I've been to plenty of meetings for which the routine is this: get on a plane, arrive in place X, get in a waiting car that arrives at hotel Y, go to the meeting, get back in the car when the meeting is done, get back on the plane, arrive home.

Usually there's at least one sleepless night in the hotel in there somewhere.

The way this conference is set up, people are in hotels all over the city and there is no way to come and go from the sessions without seeing bits and pieces of the place, even if it's through the window of a taxi in standstill traffic.

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So, I'm starting to get the conference fatigue that happens at these kinds of intense, overwhelming meetings. I'm a little surprised I can still see straight, as it feels like my eyes have rolled back into my head. I've been asking veterans for strategies to sustain me through the week, but everyone just shrugs.

My session -- Making HIV Trials Work for Women and Adolescent Girls -- was tonight. I'm going to just include my remarks with this post (see below), with a disclaimer that I went back after the talk and filled in narrative around the bulleted list I had, trying to remember what I said.

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The other day I wrote about my struggle with what it means to "represent" my "community." There's at least 33 million people (more than 16 million women) living with HIV/AIDS in the world, there's well more than a million in the U.S. -- if I, as an American woman living with HIV, stand up to give "the community perspective," what does that mean?

It turns out that Frika Chia from Indonesia, a member of the Asia and Pacific Islands Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS, has the same concerns. I attended a session today by positive (as in HIV-positive) leaders from around the world and Frika -- wife, mother, activist and 24-year-old woman living with HIV - was among them, speaking to the very challenge of representation.

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Mexico City is a place of complicated and myriad modes of transportation. The way taxis work here is that they are stationed in various places around the city. This means that the same five guys are waiting outside our hotel every morning.

We've been getting a lovely gentleman named Ernesto who, it turns out, has English skills about on par with my Spanish skills. We've joked, in our broken sentences and wrong verb tense and wildly limited vocabularies, that we are having our own little language lessons every morning. We gently correct each other and generously make valiant guesses about what each other is trying to say.

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So, here's the thing -- just because the UN is internationally recognized and respected doesn't mean it's going to have a perfect system for, let's say, conference badge pick-up. I spent the better part of the morning trying to get into the conference, with my badge at a hotel across town -- a little town called Mexico City with 20 million people and traffic jams that are legendary. I guess one could say I got an up-close and personal look at how a conference like this runs.

After conversations with upwards of a dozen people who spoke varying amounts of English and stops at various offices, they ended up issuing me a new badge. It was actually a very good, early lesson in letting go, as I had wanted to go to a couple sessions in the morning but had to forgo them. I remembered someone's advice about these kinds of conferences, where lots of important information is being conveyed all the time -- it's not a question of whether you miss something, it's a question of which parts you miss.

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Greetings from Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico. Mexico City is the site of AIDS 2008, the 17th international AIDS conference ever held and the first one to take place in Latin America. It is also my first one, so I am very excited, a little anxious and altogether delighted to be here.

It's worth noting that there has never been an international AIDS conference in the United States because the U.S. has prohibited entry of people living with HIV/AIDS into the country since 1987. Included in the new AIDS funding legislation that was passed by Congress in recent weeks, the legislative part of the HIV travel ban is repealed but the ban remains because the government still has HIV on a list of communicable diseases that bar entry into the country. It's a relic from the days of ignorance about how HIV is transmitted, but a shameful relic, for sure.

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