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MDG--Peace-and-developmen-009
Peace and stability must be at the heart of the global development agenda
Basic lessons on how to build peace and stability needed More ...
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Remembrance and Reconciliation of Memories in World War II
She kissed the first American soldier she saw marching up the drive to freedom More ...
Ingrid UN2014-3
Poverty of the Heart
Speaking at the UN Ingrid Stellmacher explores 'Poverty of the Heart' and launches the Dignity Diaries, as a tool to discover what dignity in toay's world really means. More ...
Nelson Mandela in his own words
In our right minds? 57th Commission on the Status of Women
World Heart Day
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Atria-podcast
UN Speech 2014 Pov of Heart.mp3
Ingrid Stellmacher,
Dignity Diary
Georges Kisimbola, 20/07/2018
Dignity Diaries - Nick Makoha
Nick Makoha, 10/05/2014
Dignity Diaries - Kaneez Anwar
Kaneez Anwar, 08/04/2014

Ingrid's Insights

Peace and stability must be at the heart of the global development agenda

MDG--Peace-and-developmen-009

This article was first published on 9th Sept 2013 - sadly, little has changed.  I could simply amend the dates to 2023 and the year of the UN events and leave much ot the text, context and conflicts the same.  The level of violence and conflicts not contained have escalated, the environment has not changed and sadly as humans beings it would appear, neither have we.  So I am not changing it, re-writing or recycling it.  It stands as it did 10 years ago.  Testament to a moment reported.  What will have changed are the faces in the photo.  How many of them I wonder are still here?  What have we done, to help them?  The axis of the world is turning on so much instability and peace so precarious that the faces in the next photo could so easily be ours.  

9th September 2013

Every minute, someone dies from armed violence somewhere in the world (pdf) according to human rights groups and peace campaigners. Though the number of international conflicts has decreased in recent decades, achieving lasting global peace remains an elusive goal.
 
Next week, world leaders will gather at the UN headquarters in New York to discuss, among other topics, a new global development agenda. The body's eight millennium development goals, which include the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, expire in 2015, giving UN member states the opportunity to shape the future of development. They also have the chance to position peace and stability at the centre of the debate.
 
In countries marred by conflict and disaster, development tends to focus on promoting economic growth and progress in specific social sectors such as health and education.  While essential, fundamental issues for lasting peace and stability, rule of law and justice, good governance, social cohesion, economic and environmental sustainability, are often left at the margins.  
 
If we continue with the current model, the already costly global and local implications will increase. We are see rises in the recurrence, longevity and diffusion of conflict; the incidence and severity of disasters, degradation of the environment, depletion of natural resources, transnational crime, volatility in societies previously characterised as stable, financial crises and various forms of inequality.  We seem to fail to see it seems as that these trends are all interconnected.
 
At the UN development programme (UNDP), where our mandate directs us to respond to crises and support long-term progress, it is our experience that sustainable development is tied to the advancement of lasting peace and stability. 
 
To my surprise, I often hear arguments against including peace and stability in a new global development agenda. One of the most common of these arguments is that building long-term peace and stability is separate from the work of long-term human development. In fact, peace and stability do not fall outside the boundaries of development rather the two must go hand in hand.
 
Violence not only claims lives, but also unravels the very fabric of society, leaving schools and hospitals destroyed and a devastated population suffering the physical and psychological toll.  Nine out of ten countries with the lowest Human Development Index have experienced conflict within the past 20 years and about 40% of fragile and post conflict countries relapse within five to ten years. 
 
Investing in peace, stability and transparent and accountable governance, is fundamental to long-term development and prosperity. In Ghana, once known for political instability, military coups and violence, nationally led efforts with international support to address inter-ethnic tensions and promote dialogue across all sectors of society has paid off.
 
Ghana boasts 25 years of stability, four peaceful elections and has achieved significantly larger and more rapid increases in its human development index (HDI) than predicted for countries at a similar level of HDI value in 1990.
 
Another argument I often hear is that mixing peace and security efforts with development work can compromise national sovereignty. The reality is that early action to address the root causes of crisis, such as social inequality or low access to justice and security, is key to preventing brewing tensions from escalating into full-blown conflict. Waiting for the security council to intervene under "exceptional circumstances" may prove to be too late for many thousands of people.
 
In today's world of social media and instant connectivity, ideas and violence spread like wildfires. One final, dramatic and tragic act of protest by a fruit seller in Tunisia ignited simmering tensions across borders in the region fuelling rage and desperation.
 
The uprisings that followed were a reflection of tensions and social and economic inequalities that had been beneath the surface for years. Had an alternative development pathway based on inclusive growth and the rule of law been followed, the outcome could have been different.  Isn't it aleast worth trying?
 
Some also argue that we cannot work effectively towards these goals because peace and stability cannot be measured. Though our experience with measuring progress against these outcomes is more limited than our experience with measuring progress towards socioeconomic outcomes, the fact that they are measurable is beyond dispute.  A plethora of initiatives, tools and mechanisms exist for the purpose of identifying and measuring conflict, and violence-prevention outcomes, including within the UN organisations. 
 
In Timor-Leste, for example, when returning refugees and internally displaced people destabilised the country's fragile peace between 2007-09, the UNDP and its partners trained community mediators to decrease tensions around land ownership and helped the government to establish a department for peace-building. Up to 13,000 families were able to return peacefully to their homes by 2010.
 
To evaluate these and other results, UNDP tracks success in terms of milestones that a country achieves – from accepting the need for development and conflict prevention to including such prevention (pdf) within national policies.
 
While armed violence and conflict continue to take lives, destroy infrastructure and deplete employment opportunities, their most destructive force lies in derailing states and societies from their long-term development goals and prospects for a better future. During the forthcoming discussions surrounding the next global development framework to succeed the millennium development goals, world leaders must work together to include peace, and put good governance and stability at the heart of the debate. 
 
 
 
 

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Remembrance & reconciliation of memories - World War II

Mum 19
 Adele Bernard (c) I G Stellmacher

On May 8th 1945, church bells rang across France as General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces, announced that the war was over and six-years of Nazi occupation, oppression and brutality, had finally come to an end. 
 
But it wasn’t a radio broadcast that delivered liberation news to my mother that day. It was the sight of American soldiers surging up the long drive to the chateau my mother and her family had been evacuated, when their house was bombed into oblivion.  Absorbed into a crater so vast that people came from the far side of town just to peer into the hole where her home once stood.  The day her house disappeared and the life she had once known with it, was carved into her memory.  May 5th 1944. Just one month before the allied invasion of Normandy - D Day.   
 
My mother was 19 years-old the day those soldiers marched towards that Normandy Chateau.  She ran to the first soldier she saw, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.  It was a delerious moment she would never forget.  As was the injustice of being banned from joining her two brothers in the drunken celebration that followed that night. Enforced by a concerned mother who trusted neither the men nor her daughter not to get consumed in a moment she might forever regret.  Recalling that day my mother admitted that she was probably right! 

That was 71 years ago and while I wasn't there to witness what took place that day, I have relived that story through my mother’s eyes every time she shared it
at the kitchen table with me as if I was.  Some small detail added and emotion revealed with every telling, adding more colour to the canvas like some giant painting.  Suddenly that memory is alive in the room.  Visceral, real and immediate, with a powerful energy of its own. A legacy, living on in every gesture and every tear until one day my mother confessed that she thought about that kiss and that soldier, so often wondering what happened to him. If he made it back home alive.

"He was about the same age as me"  she recalls. "Did he live or did he die after coming all that way for us?  She asks herself as much as me while searching for an answer inside my eyes somehow, as if I might know.  I wish I did but my response was always the same:

"I hope he lived mum. I’d like to think he did."
 
At the National World War II memorial in Washington DC, one veterans day, I sat in the midst of emotional scenes of aging men in wheel chairs, sharing war stories about their time in France with children, grandchildren comrades and friends around them and suddenly I found myself looking into the faces of these men.  Their medals and their memories proudly on display wondering if one of them might be him? 
 
The irony is it was not my mother's occupiers, the Germans, who bombed her house in St Cyr L’ecole that day, a military town just outside Paris, but her liberators the Americans. 

“We could tell the difference between British and American planes by the sound of their engines”, my mother would say. “If they were British we would carry on playing cards or reading but if they were American, we would run to the shelter like lightening because we knew they would drop their bombs anywhere just to get away from the Germans, make their planes lighter and stretch their fuel further.”
 
It isn’t only the image of the crater carved into my mother’s memory but that of her next-door neighbour and her severed hands dangling from the wire fence
opposite.  The rings she wore on every finger removed by the time my mother returned the following day.
 
The woman living there had lost her husband, her sons, her entire family and stubbornly refused to leave her house during those raids.  She had ‘nothing left to live for’ she told neighbours repeatedly and would rather die in her own home than in a shelter full of strangers.  She got her wish.  Someone else got her rings and hopefully benefited beyond simply wearing them.

My mother’s bitterness about the war and hatred towards the Germans remained undiminished until decades later when I lived in Frankfurt and got to know individual Germans through me and finally conceeded that the young could not be blamed for the actions of the older generation.  I had a sense of her needing to justify my being in a country with a people she loathed and a need to reconcile her emotions with my actions.  I have no doubt that the stories I told her about the people I knew, of the friends I made, and the shame that some of them shared with me about the war, opened a new door on to solid ground.
 
Revisiting the story of that kiss and her time at the chateau, my mother related how she and the other evacuated families had to share the building with the Germans who were housed in the stable blocks as barracks.
 
Living side by side was uncomfortable.  One day a soldier came to my mother’s aid when trying to retrieve something from the river running through the grounds.  Though she refused his help at first it was her mother who made sense of the situation and how that young German soldier was forced into being there too and allowed him to help. 

"They aren't all bad men" her mother explained.  He had told her how he didn’t want to be there anymore than they did either.  That he missed his family.
"I don't want to kill you," he said, "I don't want to kill anything.  But they send me.  They take my life and they send me - change for what? It's mad.

War is mad. When humanity turns on itself everyone loses and the cry for recovery reaches through the generations.  During these days of remembrace in which the UN also asks nations around the world to acknowledge in their own way what happened in World War II, the focus is on remembering and reconciliation.  For some it is impossible even now.  For others like my mother who cannot change history, she can change her relationship with those memories and in doing so shift her perspective retrospectively, to reconcile in some small way what life has revealed over the years. When the relationship you have with your memories change, you change too.  When the pain of remembrance and recognition meet, revelation is possible. 

'When truth and mercy meet, peace and reconciliation have kissed". (Psalm 84 1:1).

Post script:  I wrote this for my mother to mark Remenbrance day, November 11th, in 2016.  If truth and mercy were to meet today, would they recognise
one another I wonder?  Much less have the courage for such an embrace?   Peace and reconciliation take great patience and great strength - war on the hand,
just takes.... 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-63568523

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When The price we pay for Dignity and honour is poverty of the heart

Ingrid UN2014-3
Ingrid Stellmacher speaking at the United Nations in New York in 2014 to 400 NGO's during the launch of The Dignity Diaries.
The below includes extracts from her speech 'Poverty of the Heart'

Excessively patriarchal societies breed a harsh form of poverty. Polarising power, division, exclusion and discrimination. All of which contribute to escalating levels of violence, that all too easily become the norm.

We see it happening all over the world - all of us in this room, in the work we do, in some of the political institutions with which we engage, and for some of us - even in our own homes.  Poverty has many faces, many causes, with some effects hiding in plain sight.  It cripples humanity from the inside out and when it does, it creates another form of poverty 'Poverty of the heart'.

Research shows that the lack of development to connections in areas of the brain, through continual destructive and violent behaviour, limits the ability to exercise compassion and recognise emotional responses in others.  It slows the ability to communicate effectively, emotionally, and the most basic requirement of all, for humanity, limits the connections in areas of the brain that enables empathy. 

The way we treat one another, speak to one another, look at one another, or exclude one another, affects our own mental and emotional development, shaping who we are and the way we live.  It is a vicious cycle of destruction for everyone involved.  Forever treating a single group or person badly, literally leaves those neural pathways to possibilities and capabilities so neglected, that the conversation between our head and our heart becomes the ‘road less travelled’.

I am not speaking of the victims of violence and discrimination here, but more of the effect that the act of repeated violence and exclusion, carried out against an individual or group, has on the person doing it - the perpetrator.  What it does to them on the inside, especially in the way their brian develops as they become wired for violence.

Sanctioned by the culture you live in and woven into values backed up by laws to contain you, there is little chance of escape.  So what can we do to stop the violence inside and out?  In trying to grapple with any behaviour change we need to understand what has shaped it and what lies beneath, to create different approaches because your values shape the way you see the world.  And if you live in a world without compassion, how will you know what it looks like?  What it feels like?  How will you change it and why would you change it?  What would be in it for you? 

Dignity Diaries

In looking at poverty of the heart, I have been working with the role that dignity plays in our lives. Some tell me it is an old-fashioned word, an out-dated concept, no longer relevant for today. But it is relevant, for human dignity is the defining pillar upon which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself rests. Arguably the most important post World War II document created.  If dignity is weakened the world is weakened.  In my work, I have found dignity to be like peace and like love - you can’t touch it, you can’t buy it and you can’t hold it in your hand - but you know when you don’t have it.  


Like peace and like love, dignity is best known by its absence.  Its forced absence all too often used as a tool of war – to humiliate.  And humiliation is contagious.  So, do I belive dignity is still relevant in today’s world?  My work shows that it is and without it we lose a glbally agreed benchmark of behaviour.

But dignity is a complex concept, closely entwined with identity, with honour, with shame, with guilt, and humiliation because human beings are complex.  And because I work with human beings and their complexities, the often, fragile concept of dignity is the focus of a programme I am launching today called the Dignity Diaries.  Interviews providing insights and learning on the impact of dignity lost, or dignity reclaimed, in the lives of those at the heart of events from all over the world, reminding us of our value and that humanity still have much to learn about itself and our attitude to the planet.

Dignity Diaries

In one Diary, Ziauddin Yousafzsi, who you may know better as the father of Malala, the Pakistani schoolgirl short by the Taliban 2-years-ago, for daring to go to school, Ziauddin, now UN Special Advisor for Global Education, vividly describes how 'he did not clip the wings of his daughter in the name of, false dignity and false honour'.

'Freedom is her right' he declares, his own bravery revealed.  But it was not until speaking about the role that dignity and honour plays in his culture, exploring it in conversation - that he understood how it much contributed to the shooting of his daughter in trying to keep their lives small. Cultural norms have a habit of hiding in plain sight.

There is a moment in his Diary when his voice drops and he quietly shares how 'He feels ashamed to be a man sometimes', when he thinks about ‘how badly and unfairly men have treated women in his culture’.  It is a moment of humility against the background of a brutal reality, that many men face around the world, and we need to find a way to engage with them  and support them - as much as we need them to engage with us.

'Most forms of poverty we are familiar with but poverty of the heart is the road less travelled’

We are all familiar with the economic poverty of women excluded from contributing fully to life; keeping their world small. We all know that limiting the contribution of women, limits prosperity for families, communities, and economic growth. We know when women lose, we all lose.

Everyone in this room knows the impact of poverty of choice. When women are excluded the right to determine who has power over their own body; their own minds, and their own lives.  When girls as young as eight years of-age, many already maimed by FGM, are sold to pay off debts, without choice or power, to voice their own opposition, being married off to ancient men to have children with, when still only children themselves.


And everyone in this room knows that excessive patriarchy breeds poverty of education, access, and opportunity, including basic health education for their children. When babies and infants are dying of malnutrition in Afghanistan not just through lack of food, but through lack of the basic education allowed to young mothers on baseline nutrition and what babies need to be healthy. Not because that information isn't out there but because women themselves are not allowed ‘out there’.  Out of their homes to access the education for themselves and their children, by their husbands, their brothers, their uncles, cousins, until they want to, all in the name of dignity and honour.  Arriving at clinics sometimes so late in their child's illness that when they do get ‘out there’, their babies are too sick to save.

Dying of starvation is tragedy enough.  Dying of deliberately created ignorance and prevention of access to the right to health, is a crime - because these deaths are Avoidable. What gives them the right to choose a child will live or die?  Not their mothers and certainly not their faith.

----------

Research shows that different values activate different thought structures within the brain and even show that different areas in the visual cortex, the area which processes what we see, is activated in different ways, according to different cultural values and beliefs.  Creating a fundamental difference in the way we see the world and act towards others.  It is a difference we have to recognise the importance of - not just in our work - but in our world in general.  Because our values, act as an anchor of certainty in an ever increasing uncertain and unstable world – we need them. We hold on to them at any cost.  They create a framework by which we live, however harsh.  We fight for our values, go to war to defend them, commit unspeakable acts in their name - but there are no winners in war – everyone loses in one way or another and that all important framework of values, in the end is all too often left in tatters because of the lines we cross to protect them.

'Every daughter is like Malala in wanting an education', Ziauddin explains, and while I’m sure that desire is true, sadly every father, however, is not like him. We need to work together with men across civil society and politics to help one another.

Dignity Diaries

In his Dignity Diary, Andre Mostert a lecturer from South Africa, talks movingly about ‘white guilt’ how it affected him growing up under Apartheid, and how 30 years later - it affects him still. What touched me most is when he recalls the moment black South Africans finally got the vote and the lines of people waiting were so long, that he and his school friends decide not to queue…..

"The world had moved on right, but for us spoilt white boys, it was just voting yeah.  So, we go into a pub and watch it on TV.  And I'll never forget, we were sitting there watching journalists talking to people, standing in those lines for hours, that went on forever, and this one journalist goes up to an old black woman waiting patiently in line and says to her:

'How long have you been waiting in this queue?  She turns to him and declares:

'My whole life."


Says Andre “I get goose bumps even now just thinking about it. Because it was the moment I realised this isn’t just about them – or one side against another – it’s about us!  It was about us getting our dignity back, because we gave them their dignity back, simply on-the-basis of being human.”

--------------

When I showed Andre’s Dignity Diary to young women at a workshop in Rajasthan, India, for the Guild of Service. I asked Merra Khan, the Guild’s deputy, how long she had been waiting in the queue to make a difference to the lives of widows in India she had dedicated her life to - the answer she gave: ‘2000 years.’

-----------------

The good news is that narrowed network of neural development, can be changed, it can be expanded.  The world can grow bigger and more beautiful. Unexplored emotional areas of the brain can be activated due to its plasticity and new pathways in the language of empathy and compassion forged.  We can break out of that cycle of fear and negative behaviour - we can become whole again.

------------


Most of us in this room today, have been working our whole lives to get to the front of our own queue – like Merra and like the lady in South Africa.  We work to change things in ways that we can, to make a difference, to make something of meaning, to leave a legacy. 

The Dignity Diaries is my way – I know you have yours, that’s why you’re here today, in the Dag Auditorium at the United Nations, as we take heart from each other and share what we’ve learned.  I hope you will join me in exploring how we can implement the Dignity Diaries in our own areas of work. 

Please, sign up - and maybe someday soon we’ll meet up at the front of the queue or better still, there won’t be one anymore. ….

Thank you.


Interviews with Ziauddin Yousafzsi and Andre Mostert can be found by clicking on the link 'New Global Conversation' Dignity and Honour Campaign on our home page. www.lemenachfd.org
 


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Looking for Elsie


DSC 0103
Ingrid Stellmacher leaving Carteret Harbour
 

In the early hours of 11th August 1948, two lovers stole a 12-foot dinghy from Carteret harbour in northern France and rowed
14 miles through rough seas to Jersey.  The wooden boat bore the name ‘The Elsie’ and the name of her builders who were English:
J Husk Jnr of Wivenhoe.  

 
Eight years later those lovers would become my parents and the story of my father’s  promise to come back for my mother when the war
ended, and his 14-hour battle with that stretch of water’s unpredictability, one of the most dangerous tides in the world, became
part of our history and their strenght our legacy.

 
Sixty-eight years later, I made that same journey my parents did.  What took my father 14 hours though to row, took us barely 2 hours in a Rib,
and Jersey’s Rowing Club’s competitors, just over 3 hours with a 3 man crew in their races across the same waters.  My father’s battle to navigate
Jersey’s treacherous rocks and unforgiving tides that night, to stop the boat from being pushed further off course and out into open sea, was
one my mother was convinced they wouldn’t win at times.

 
“I saw blood trickling from the corner of his mouth” She recounted. “He so was tired, the tide was so strong, the waves so high, and I thought
that’s it!  After everything we’ve been through we're going to die here!"

 
But my father's metal battle with the tides and his own exhustion won through and I have often thought about 'The Elsie’s' part in that journey.  How she came to be there that night and who the woman the boat was named after was.  For while Elsie appeared at the right time on the righ night for my parents to make their escape it was also Elsie’s presence that betrayed them, alerting harbour authorities of her secret arrival on the island.  Having made it to the last piece of land possible before overshooting Jersey altogether, my parents came ashore on a small rocky inlet at Vicard Point near Bouley Bay.  From there the only way out is up.  Forced to abandon Elise in full view, they scaled the Point’s dangerously steep cliffs and made the 5 kilometres into St Helier.  From the moment they left Elsie the authorities began to search for spies arriving illegally on the island rather than lovers looking for sanctuary, to marry and start a new life.  A life that would eventually lead they hoped
to England and settle amongst the British for whom my father had spied for during the war.


Trapped on the rocks where my parents abandoned her, Elise, pounded by the waves, broke up, and all that remained intact when she was salvaged were her ores and pieces of her that revealed her name and builder - not a French boatbuilder as expected along with the name Elsie, decorated with a blue star either side.  An afterthought added later perhaps?
 
John Collins, a key member of Wivenhoe’s History Group in Essex and authority on maritime history, tried tracing a boat named Elsie built
by J Husk & Sons but drew a blank.

 
‘It’s possible she had been built by Husk’s but not the yacht itself.’’ Explained John. 
 
“Husks only built boats and dinghies for vessels that they hadn’t built themselves, often as replacements, and mostly for yachts and
fishing vessels.”

 
He did find one boat named Elsie though, last registered to a Mr Albert Glandas, fils, in Havre.  Could this be Havre-de-Pas in Jersey?   
The Elsie registered to Glandas was built in 1875 but John couldn’t trace her beyond 1899.  That she would have survived the war years
and ended up in Carteret 51 years later is unlikely.


Peter Hall, Chairman of the Wivenhoe History Group, revealed that a fishing smack by the name of Elise was well known in Wivenhoe,
owned and raced by Friday Green, who won the America’s Cap and already detailed on Wivenhoe’s History website. 

 
https://www.wivenhoehistory.org.uk/content/topics/maritime/mike-boats/friday-green-and-elise-ck299       
 
Could it be the name Elsie was recorded incorrectly by the authorities when wrting up the report and was really a second generation Elise from Wivenhoe?  The builder after all is recorded as J Husk Jnr, not J Husk & Sons? 
 
Is there someone out there with clues about the boat, or the name of the lady she was named after? 
 
And my parents?  They were spotted at sea heading towards Vicard Point the same afternoon they beached Elsie.  Quickly found, the boat made headline news
in Jersey’s Evening Post, prompting extra police activity on the island which unlike mainland Britain, had been occupied by the Germans during the second World War. 

 
Three days later, anxious that they would ultimately be identified and arrested anyway, my parents, exhustated after their incredibly journey, having stolen a boat, entered the island illegally and made false declarations when registering at a bed and breakfast, gave themselves up.  They were arrested, held in custody, and 4 days later after a court hearing, deported to a jail in France having been banned from going back to Jersey for five years.

The mystery of Elsie remains unsloved but my
parents fight for how and where to be together was solved. They made it to England where they married later that year, in the beautiful county of Kent, after 43 love letters, 1 promise and 9 years in between.  They were together 59 years.

 They never returned to Jersey.


 


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Ingrid Stellmacher, 28/09/2012