How integrity and a caring activism can change the world!

So, here I am again at the end of my trip to Nepal.  It's beautifully sunny today and getting warmer every day. Yesterday I was with the CWISH staff (in a VERY cold office!) reflecting on the research training, the pilot and planning the rest of the project.

It's been an absolute joy to work with the staff and researchers of CWISH.  They are well organised, conscientious and thorough but most important of all they have integrity - bucketloads of it!  I've learned a lot about 'partnership' while I've been here and the trust that is integral to any kind of relationship.  And I believe that the trust I have for the key people I'm working with in CWISH  - Milan and Writu - is based on an integrity that is behind everything they do.  It is important to them and it is important to me that the focus and the aim of our work and, I suppose, our lives is clear - 'empowerment'.  I hope that the research team, after this week of training, is now empowered to take on the responsibilities of this project.  I certainly feel empowered by the whole process.  But at the centre of it all is the empowerment of children and I witnessed this becoming evident during the course of the week - from the way people were thinking, from little things they said and particularly in the reflections we all made together.  Inadvertently, on the last day of the training, I asked people to commit themselves to the project or face punishment after death!!  I organised a 'reflection' where we all sat in a circle around some candles, in turn, we took a candle and said what we had taken or learned from the research and then placed it back saying what we would 'give' to the project.  Milan told me afterwards that this ritual with candles was very common in Nepal but that people believed that when they made a commitment with a candle, they would be punished in the after-life if they broke their commitment!  We had a good laugh about that of course!

Before I got distracted by the candle story I was leading up to saying that I think the empowerment element of the training was quite consciously present, I believe, because all the 'facilitators' are activists.  I like to call myself an activist but feel ashamed to do so in the presence of a true revolutionary like Beth Protacio de Castro.  Although Beth was officially representing the funding agency for this project, Oak Foundation (she is a professor of psychology) she was imprisoned by the Marcos regime in the Philippines in her youth!  The other facilitator with me (also from the Philippines) Faye Balanon has a passion to her facilitation that is based on her social work background and activism and Milan is currently very involved in the activist movement of Nepal.   This activist spirit, to use a military term, infiltrated the discussions - but not in an angry and political 'let's overthrow the government' kind of way.  It felt much more caring and quiet; it was particularly present when we discussed the ethics of the research and everyone was nodding their heads and agreeing that we should 'do no harm' to the child participants.

So, I have to write my reports for today, I fly back tomorrow but will be back in Nepal in September.  I'm looking forward to it, I'm very excited about this research - it's going to change the world!!!

Overcoming challenges: logistic, academic and gastronomic

I've been in Nepal for 4 days and was going to do a video blog while I was here but the sight of the bags under my eyes and the serious difficulties in communication (14 hour electricity black outs every day) have prevented me.

So, a traditional blog instead...I was here 10 months ago with Jonathan investigating whether Children Unite could work in partnership with a local NGO here that works with child domestic workers - called CWISH.  And here I am now setting up a one year research project with CWISH on the concept of 'resilience' and child domestic workers.  Today we piloted the research methods (life-story interviews and focus group discussions).  It's been a bit of a logistical challenge because of the electricity black outs, the cold (and no heating) and also the strikes - there is a national strike tomorrow by students (due to a massive hike in fuel prices which affects the cost of pretty much everything in Nepal).  But the academic challenges we're facing are, to be frank, more interesting.  We've been training 6 adult researchers (teachers who are also counsellors) and two young researchers (one is currently working as a domestic worker and one is a former child domestic worker) and they are all used to the concept of child domestic workers facing difficulties (abuse, isolation, discrimination, violence etc.) but are struggling with the idea that in the face of these difficulties, something 'positive' can emerge.

This is resilience - it is a new concept and is particularly challenging for those who work with children 'in need' (such as child domestic workers) - as you have to shift your thinking about children from the welfare perspective (where children are often seen as victims and vulnerable) to a more 'positive' view of children.  Resilience is the ability to 'bounce back' in the face of adversity and we have been trying to find a hundred different ways of explaining this concept to the researchers, who, in turn have to explain resilience to the child participants in the research.  So far, we've come up with 'coping with or overcoming your problems'.

The other challenge the researchers are facing is NOT helping the children they are researching.  As counsellors their natural reaction, when a child tells them about an abusive situation they are facing, is to offer solutions.  As researchers, today, they found they had to stop themselves from doing this, distance themselves from the child and focus on getting the child's story (the data), not judging or analysing what the child was saying.  They said they found this hard.  But it was helped when we explained that we are undertaking 'action research' and that the findings will, we hope, help child domestic workers in the long term.

So, the challenges continue - mine are rather less severe - can I cope with curry for breakfast tomorrow!?  (Ah ha but I am prepared for this one and have brought my marmite with me!!)

The Season of Good Marketing Ideas

I faced the dilemma this year of whether or not to send Christmas cards (as a marketing exercise) as Children Unite, I guess, officially exists (although we don't officially launch until March).  It’s because I’m signed up to a number of ‘small business’ related email subscriptions that seem to constantly be promoting the need for flyers or re-branding or how to get 20,000 followers on twitter in 5 minutes.  So, I felt under pressure to use the Season of Good Will as a marketing opportunity and ‘promote my business’ to everyone I know!   On the other hand, it makes a refreshing change to get something ‘nice’ like a card through the post (rather than junk mail) – but only if you actually know the person who sent it I tend to find.

On balance I sent a virtual Christmas card.  And I don’t think I can be accused of bowing to the pressure to use it as a marketing ploy – as you can see for yourself (below) it’s from ‘all the staff at Children Unite’ and is an animation of Jonathan and I dressed up in Santa hats, dancing with Santa to…you guessed it…’Santa Claus is coming to town’!! Not a desperately serious card.

But I realised that nearly all the people I’d want to send a Children Unite Christmas card to - I’d be happy to make them laugh. I have no need to ‘promote my business’ to them. In fact, the ‘family’ Christmas card that Jonathan and I sent out to people this year was very similar – slightly more embarrassing as it happens - consisting of both us with our two daughters dressed up in flares and huge afros dancing to some vaguely Christmassy funky tune!!  (and no, I am not adding that here!).  But many people on the list got both cards as it is hard for Jonathan and I to differentiate between our friends and our work colleagues...all one big happy family!!

So, for anyone who didn’t get a card (sorry) and wishing you a belated Happy Christmas and Merry New Year from all of us at Children Unite!!!

THE story from Costa Rica

I’ve been in Costa Rica for 10 days working with one of our partners DNI (Defensa di Ninos y Ninas Internacional).  I have been commissioned by Anti-Slavery International to run capacity building workshops in Costa Rica, Tanzania and the Philippines over the next 6 months.  I’ve just finished the first of these in Costa Rica facilitating with Children Unite’s Chair, Mariela who also happens to work for Anti-Slavery and is a fluent Spanish speaker.

We were able to visit a slum area in San Jose called La Carpio – where DNI runs a project for child domestic workers.  La Carpio is also called ‘little Nicaragua’ as nearly all it’s residents having migrated from Nicaragua, it is very poor. We were given a tour of La Carpio by Nila – a local community leader who explained all the community activities she was involved in as volunteer, (on top of her 2 jobs as a domestic worker).  Her commitment to her community was inspiring and I’ve noticed that the more I visit grass-roots organisations the more ‘Nilas’ I meet.  I know this sounds like a cliché but they are the real heroes.  They are the ones I think of when people tell me how ‘good’ I am because I work on this issue and I squirm because I know that the Nilas of this world make so much more of a sacrifice than I ever could.  But, this time I made Nila laugh her socks off and I want to share my (slightly humiliating) story with you!!   Nila was showing Mariela and I the dirty black river in the community (which was quite a torrent as there’s been a cyclone over Costa Rica for the past week) and over the river was a rickety old swing bridge.  As we got closer Mariela and I asked if we’d have to cross the river and Nila said no which we were relieved about. So we stood at one end and watched the kids running across it without a care in the world.  Mariela was first to succumb to the  inner challenge to cross it and off she went with two girls who had also been our tour guides with Nila.  So, of course, as Mariela had done it I felt obliged and started crossing…however, half way across I heard lots of shouting (from Mariela) and the bridge started swinging and wobbling as a bunch of 5 or 6 boys were shaking it, jumping up and down on it and laughing at me - the gringa, clinging on for dear life and screaming at them – one of boys came racing under my arms and up the other side.  I eventually made it across the bridge but then had to think about getting back.! Me and the two girls (yep they went across again!) waited for the boys to go a bit further away and then we practically ran back over the bridge shouting ‘rapido, rapido’ in case the boys came to play the trick on me again!!  Mariela was very worried about me but Nila was laughing her head off – it was at that point we found out that she won’t cross the bridge ever and thought we were completely mad!!  But when Mariela questioned me about it I realized I hadn’t been scared, I should have been, but I wasn’t and I rather admired the boys…if I’d have been one these boys I would have done the same.  I don’t really know what the moral of this tale is but Mariela said ‘THIS is the story from La Carpio’ so I guess there doesn’t really need to be one this time!

Cup cakes, rubber gloves & political action

Earlier this month, armed with 200 pairs of rubber gloves I joined a roadshow in Bristol of the Methodist Women in Britain (MWiB). Here I spoke for the first time about Children Unite's campaign on the International Labour Organizations's Convention on Domestic Work.   Although we're not launching our campaign until March 2012 this was a chance to test the waters and see how the whole campaign idea is received. I asked the women at the roadshow to buy a pair of Traidcraft rubber gloves (for the bargain, today only, while stocks last price of £1) and then to sign them and give them back to me.   When we have a mountain of gloves we will organise an event to deliver them to Vince Cable's department of Business Innovation and Skills (responsible for adopting the convention). The President of Methodist Women in Britain, Jill Baker, signed the very first pair of gloves....to start the ball rolling so to speak.

I went to the event with my mum, a longstanding member of MWiB and the whole event was both familiar and surprising. It was very Methodist: lots of Wesley's hymns and prayers and a bible reading (I was brought up a Methodist so am used to this) but it also surprised me. For a start, there was the most beautiful display of cupcakes I've ever seen (all we ever got at our church was a rich tea biscuit and some weak orange squash).  But what surprised me more was, I suppose, the solidarity and the feeling of 'sisterhood' I found for women in Zimbabwe, Korea, Samoa - women all over the world.  The quiet excitement that in many developing countries the movement of Methodist women is powerful and growing.   I had a good laugh on my stall, joking about what to write on the gloves, how to deliver them to Vince Cable...the cup cakes went down a treat too!

But there was also a more serious side to the event – perhaps motivated by a sense of injustice at ‘a woman’s lot’, it wasn’t quite articulated as anger but there was definitely something there.  It was there when I spoke about child domestic work being seen as commonplace (and therefore ignored) because it is judged as good training for girls who will only go on to become wives and mothers.  Domestic work is something all women have a responsibility towards, even if they don’t do it themselves.  It therefore felt quite natural talking about domestic work, rubber gloves and political action.

Anniversary Q & A

It's exactly a year since I started blogging, since I gave up my job and started working full time for Children Unite.  So, time for a little reflection which I think will be in the form of an interview with myself ...courtesy of The Guardian newspaper's Q & A which I read religiously every weekend.
So, the following answers concern my last year...

What is your most embarrassing moment?
Putting my hand up when I was part of a 'panel' at a meeting in rural Nepal to say that I needed the toilet (rather than having some interesting comment to make to the group of 50 people attending).  I was pretty desperate by then though. 

What would your super-power be?
Being able to sync my mobile phone calendar with my computer calendar without every appointment coming up twice and others disappearing altogether.

What is your greatest fear?
Having to pay an enormous tax bill because I worked out my national insurance contributions and tax wrong.

What is your favourite word?
Clarity (NB not charity!)

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Quite a few of those...watching Downton Abbey (TV drama in the UK that follows the lives of domestic servants and their masters/mistresses at the turn of the century).  Also planning holidays around my work trips (trekking in Nepal for example).

Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?
The cast of Downton Abbey to discuss which of them would like to speak at Children Unite's launch event.

What skill would you most like to have?
To be able to make a decision and stick with it instead of constantly re-visiting it and wondering if it's the right one.


What words do you most overuse?
Since August (when I went to Scotland) I've been saying 'ah thunk ut's time ah poot ma perrrrsonal stereoh ohn' (which is supposed to be 'I think it's time I put my personal stereo on' in a Scottish accent).  Very irritating to listen to more than once I'm sure.

Forgive me, it's been a whole month since my last post

This feels like the start of a confession - Followers forgive me it's been a whole month since my last blog post - and that's not because I've been sunning myself in Spain or camping in Suffolk (although I did spend a week doing both of those). It's because at Children Unite HQ (shed in garden, cup of tea at hand) we're gearing up for the start of our first campaign so I've decided to write a monthly post instead of a weekly one. Ironically, the more I have to report, the less time I have to report it!

But I've also been busy because - WE GOT IT! We won the final of X Factor (see last post!) so I'm in the middle of the equivalent of signing record deals (completing application forms and finalising budgets - sounds a lot less interesting doesn't it!). I've had to halve the budget for the project in Nepal which has been quite a feat, but we got it!! We will be co-ordinating a year's research project with our partners in Nepal, CWISH, that looks at the issue of the sexual abuse of child domestic workers. I'm particularly pleased that there's a strong participatory element to the research, two of the researchers will be young people (former child domestic workers), there will be an advisory group of young people that will be consulted throughout the project and, in an exciting twist, some of the advisory group members will be turning the research findings into a 20 minute film that will be broadcast to the community. I particularly like this last element because I've been involved in turning boring UN documents into 'children-friendly' reports (written in children-friendly language) so that children can understand them. But what do you do when you want to feedback your findings to children (and adults) who don't read? You do it in film!

As for the campaign - it's shaping up. We will be launching it in November, we will be targeting the UK Government who have been shamefully unsupportive of the ILO's new Convention on Domestic Work, we will be using rubber gloves. I'll say no more at this point. But we will have a website, a Facebook profile and I’ll start tweeting again as we get closer to November (so I’m working on those things too).

Despite a few summer hiccups (our accountant went AWOL & my computer died), Children Unite is thriving; autumn is looking busy. Over the summer I’ve been swinging between a week of holiday, then a week of frenetic budget writing etc, another week of holiday (although camping ain’t much of a rest), then another week of designing our website and more budgeting...and so on. To be honest I’m a bit worried about the autumn, when everything is supposed to be starting and I’ll need to be at full throttle...but at some point in the next 6 months I’ll be going back to Nepal and the thought of the Himalayas always calms my nerves. That and a nice cuppa tea (with biscuit of course!).