Dear Our Media colleagues

We promiss the next message will have Spanish translation.

... Les prometemos que la proxima nota sera tambien traducida al Espanol...

This is just a brief note to let you know we have started a new chapter of OM today by inaugurating the 5th conference, here in Bangalore, India.

From the moment it was decided to host the conference in India we knew it was going to be extremely challenging... As many of you know, it has been quite a difficult task to put together the conference with minimum funding and important structural issues -which as was poited out in Porto Alegre last year, will need to be urgently addressed when discussing the future of the network-.

The local Indian committee - Rev. Joshva Raja, Ashish Sen and a whole team of collaborators- have been absolutely wonderful in trying to make sure things run as smooth as possible; I'd like to thank them on behalf of everyone else (internationally) that has worked towards making this conference possible.

With people arriving from many different parts of the world to the United Theological College, a beautiful green enclave in busy Bangalore, the conference started today with a few glitches and many late changes to the program...  We are currently around 45 people here, mostly people who are coming to OM for the first time. There are participants from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Botswana, Malaysia, U.S., Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Australia, Canada, Holland, Turkey, and the U.K

We started this morning with an informal welcoming session  where we acknowledged the unfortunate issue of the Colombian colleagues who couldn't be here, as well as other participants from Uganda and Papua New Guinea who were also forced to cancel their trip at last minute for reasons beyond their control. The session also showed the immense potential for future collaboration among this year's participants...

Alfonso Gumucio and I will try to keep you updated in the next 3 days of conference and we will probably circulate a more comprehensive report at the end. Just as some of you have expressed well deserved feelings of solidarity towards those who couldn't be here, we also urge you to keep supporting those of us who are here -doing our best to keep the network alive-...

Until tomorrow,


Juan  Salazar