STRP7 met on 29-30 April 1998 and generated another awful mess of ideas, suggestions, proposals, wishes and dreams, summaries, declarations, decisions, indecisions, and of course Minutes, as well as Summaries of the Minutes -- all of which create burdens for everybody for the next year or more -- draft decisions, agenda papers, guidelines and methodologies, yadda, yadda -- but in any case the meeting was certainly fun whilst it lasted.
Due to a couple of ill-timed fits of photographer shyness, we do not have pix of absolutely all the participants, but we got enough to convey a sense of the uncertain psychological climate prevailing at the meeting and, hopefully, to induce all of our readers to wish to become members (or alternates) of the STRP for the 1999-2002 triennium.
 | At the head table, Bill Phillips, Deputy Secretary General of the Convention, and Yaa Ntiamoa-Baidu of Ghana, Chairperson of the STRP, plot the meeting's strategy whilst the other members of the Panel play solitaire, write brief letters home to their families, pore over train and airplane schedules, arm-wrestle with one another, or unashamedly snooze. |
| François Letourneux of France has no problem with occasional delays in the proceedings, since he's had the foresight to bring his newspaper and simply pretends to himself that he's in a café, on the sunny sidewalk. |  |
 | Chaman Lal Trisal, Alternate from India, passes the long idle moments conversing with Rebecca D'Cruz, the Bureau's Regional Coordinator for Asia, mainly about wetland conservation. |
| Reluctant to let good meeting time go to waste whilst the Chair continues to ponder the agenda, Max Finlayson, Alternate from Australia, convenes a meeting of his own on the sidelines. Raquel Sigüenza of the Bureau is on the right. |  |
 | Keith Thompson of New Zealand occupies the temporal interstices by picking winners in the equestrian form sheets and contemplating riches. |
| Rick van Dam, invited expert from Australia, has a photocopy of the first edition of Cyril Tourneur's The Revengers Tragaedie (1607) and is determined to memorize the part of Vindice. "Why does not heaven turn black, or with a frown / Undo the world? Why does not earth start up / And strike the sins that tread upon't?" |  |
 | Mihály Végh of Hungary looks forwards to breaks in the agenda because he has two big bottles of mineral water and a comic book. |
| Roberto Schlatter and Makoto Komoda, from Chile and Japan respectively, co-conspirators on the Management Planning Guidelines studies, are caught contemplating further mayhem. |  |
 | Peter Bacon, Trinidad and Tobago, was one of those for whom sleep was the only remedy. |
| The lads from BirdLife International, Dave Pritchard and John O'Sullivan, both of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, await with 1) concern and 2) amusement, respectively, whatever sophomoric trick Tim Jones (Bureau) is about to perpetrate upon them. Elizabeth Salter (WWF), in the background, heads for the exit. |  |
| Mauricio Cervantes Abrego of Mexico emits an enormous grin upon being told that, at the conclusion of the ponderous deliberations, there is to be a party on the IUCN headquarters' terrace. So we're not finished yet -- with Dr Cervantes, we are going to the STRP reception on the terrace! |
All photos by Valerie Higgins, Ramsar Bureau.
