Monday was my quintessential intern experience. Advocates for Youth rounded up interns from organizations across the city and had us join forces to lobby for the Protection Against Transmission of HIV for Women and Youth Act of 2006, better known simply as PATHWAY.

I was excited as Monday approached. I was going to lobby. I was going to talk to the representatives. I would persuade them with jargon like PEPFAR, socially responsible spending, micro-lending, and female-initiated methods of prevention. I would reason with them on a personal level and try to show them what I considered to be the error of their ways. For a second, I think I probably convinced myself that my group would simply have to educate them on the scope of the epidemic in order to convince them to co-sponsor. It never occurred to me that lobbying would be hard and probably unsuccessful.

At the end of the day my group had visited the offices of two congressmen, both from New York, and had not gotten very interested responses. It seemed that despite our efforts and passion they did not really see any benefit that could come from investing their time and energy into co-sponsoring the bill.

As I rode the metro home I considered this to myself. How could you turn down the chance to help someone? Scratch that. How could you turn down the chance to save someone's life? How could you parade yourself around as an American, enjoying your freedoms, supporting the endeavors of this administration to make those freedoms available to others and yet deny someone the freedom to choose their own method of family planning, deny them the freedom to access information that affects the choices they make about their health?

I understand difference in opinion. I understand that I am still young and consequently overly ambitious and probably naïve. I do not, however, understand hypocrisy.

So why then would I consider Monday to be a quintessential intern experience? Because I learned a lot. I learned that, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, not everyone is concerned with human rights, at least not when it runs the risk of crossing party lines. And I learned that I have to work harder. I have to read more, I have to engage in more conversations that stretch my capacity for understanding issues and I have to voice my opinion and make sure I have the facts to back it up intelligently. If that was all I took away this summer as an intern, I would consider it a success.