Promoting Peace and Security in Support of Children and Youth in India
I was born and brought up in a lower-class family in Mumbai, India. Surviving by receiving assistance from our community institutions, this life experience engrained in me the importance of helping others around me while supporting the capacities of organizations in need. Currently, government agencies, corporate and foundation donors are trying to create equal opportunities for the less...Read More
Making Sense of the World Through Stories
Rotary Peace Fellowship week 14 focused on storytelling with Rebekah Hatfield. Rebekah, a Bundjalung-Yugumbeh-Darumbal & Wiradjuri storytelling practitioner from Northern-New South Wales, Australia, began the session by asking, “Why do we tell stories?” The group 1 cohort brainstormed answers: “We tell stories to pass on information.” “To express our experiences and feelings.”...Read More
Post-Covid Recovery : Let the Green Heal Us
Rachel Carson, in her book Silent Spring: “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after the night and spring after the winter.” The devastation created by Covid-19 is just a reminder of our vulnerability as humans while highlighting the importance of prevention and mitigation strategies. It also provides some...Read More
Raised in Conflict
Thursday night was my favourite night of the week because my parents came home from work mid-afternoon and Mum would prepare a special meal of Afghan delicacies that I would eat after I finished a neighbourhood soccer match. I would go to school in the afternoon and finish at five. One particular Thursday I could not wait to finish school because there was soccer against a team from...Read More
Head in Sky, Feet Not in the Abyss
I work as a public school cinema studies teacher with detained youth in the United States. As I prepared to begin the Rotary Peace & Development Fellowship, I dreamed about how my Social Change Initiative would inspire policy to end juvenile incarceration, or at least put an end to the horror it causes my students and their families. Twelve weeks into the program, I’ve come to realize I...Read More
Stories For Peace
Stories are often relegated to the realm of entertainment. Certainly, in a world focused on measurable outcomes, stories do not share the prestige of the measurable units in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) subjects. Yet, the world’s most famous scientist, Albert Einstein, is reported to have advised a mother, who wanted her son to be a scientist, to read him “fairy tales...Read More
Can Mediation Do Harm? And, Other Stories
During this week’s online sessions in our Rotary Peace Center course (September 6th -12th 2021), our professor Roxana Cristescu introduced us the principles of mediation ethics, such as impartiality, voluntariness, confidentiality, self-determination, honesty, informed consent and the principle of “Do No Harm”. Our professor gave us a task to choose the three most important principles for...Read More
Innovative Development Program Design
Days after finishing our sessions on Innovative Development Program Design in the Rotary Peace Fellowship at Chulalongkorn University, the words of Professor Kai Brand Jacobsen came to mind over and over again. I was in Chocó, the jungle of the Colombian Pacific region. A territory historically marked by violence between guerrillas, drug trafficking, and illegal mining, but with a very...Read More