Caroline Cox's to-do list for 2007:

January: visit Sudan, meet with local partners, assess human rights situation, bring donations for humanitarian work.

Rest of the year: do the same in northern Nigeria, Armenia, Nagorno Karabagh, western Burma, eastern Burma, and northern Uganda. Occasionally, Cox also investigates claims of leprosy or checks on an orphan rehabilitation center on one of her stops.

And that's just part of it; in between trips she writes books, makes speeches, irritates politicians, and in general raises awareness of the needy all over the world. She is, she says, a voice for voiceless. She will bring that voice to the 104th Diocesan Council meeting in San Antonio February 21 through 23, speaking on Thursday afternoon of Council and again at the Friday luncheon.

Baroness Caroline Cox is known the world over for her humanitarian efforts that began in 1989. It was on board a truck during the dark and bitter days of Communism in northern Poland that she undertook her first mission as Patron of Medical Aid For Poland, transporting aid and medical supplies beyond the Iron Curtain. This was also where she had her first experience of what Baroness Cox calls sharing the darkness with people in need.

Since then, Baroness Cox has worked with people in some of the darkest reaches of the globe - orphaned and abandoned children in Russia; Armenians of Nagorno Karabagh suffering ethnic cleansing at the hands of Azerbaijan; peoples suffering and dying at the hands of brutal regimes in Sudan and Burma; others caught up in conflicts in Nigeria, northern Uganda and East Timor. The one characteristic these people share, Cox says, is that they have largely been forgotten by the international community.

Dissatisfied by the policies of major aid organizations who refuse, for political and security reasons, to engage in certain designated "no go" areas and conflict zones despite evidence of widespread suffering, Baroness Cox set up HART (Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust) in the United Kingdom in September 2003. A United States office was established in January 2006.

Baroness Cox has served as a Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords in England since 1985. In recognition of her work in the international humanitarian and human rights arenas over the past twenty years, she has been awarded the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland and the prestigious Wilberforce Award.

She serves as a non-executive director of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, as a Trustee of MERLIN (Medical Emergency Relief International) and of the Siberian Medical University.  She is also Chairman of the Executive Board of the International Islamic Christian Organization for Reconciliation and Reconstruction (IICORR), a charity which she helped to set up to promote stronger relationships between Muslims and Christians.

 She is eminently qualified to advance Council's theme of "Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me." (from Matthew 16:24).  To Friday Bishop's Box Lunch information.