Peacemaker of the month
For Burundian street children Christine NTAHE is the beloved « Maman Dimanche ».
Every Sunday she offers them a warm meal, currently to 200 Kids, and furthermore she takes care that 600 street children can attend school. In 1993 Christine began to work as journalist for several national radio-stations dedicated to children. In 1999 she managed to start a radio-program named « Encouraging Women», to give women and mothers a voice for their testimonies during the civil war, when they risked their lives for achieving reconciliation between the two ethnic groups.
Christine Ntahe, member of the NGO Search for Common Ground Burundi, in 2005 was nominated as one of the « 1000PeaceWomen Across the Globe», for her extraordinary engagement for street-children since 30 years.
In 2012 the Foundation for Subjective Experience and Research S.E.R. granted Christine the S.E.R. Reconciliation AWARD » for her Sunday Radio-Emissions with street-children. Many other national and international accolades followed and honored Christine as women of courage and of reconciliation: In the presence of their most loved « Maman Dimanche » they could speak about their day-to-day problems, articulate their experiences of discrimination and violence. When children of well-off backgrounds joined, prejudices deriving from poverty, social exclusion and ethnical separation were released and reconciliated towards an experience of community and equality of the children.
Additionally, during the Civil War Christine’s program transmitted messages from children in refugee camps in search of their parents as well as of parents seeking their children. Thus she contributed to the re-junction of thousands of segregated families. Meanwhile Christine decided to publicize the collected testimonies of these unknown mothers to inspire future generations by their voices, faces and pictures.
Christine Ntahe recently, on 8th of February 2019, has published this book entitled „Elles, un hommage aux oubliées“ in Bujumbura (Burundi), which contains a collection of testimonials and pays homage to the forgotten Women and Pioneers of Peace in Burundi.
For more information: « Elles, un hommage aux Oubliées », published by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, Cape Town, South Africa, INSB: 978-1-928332-41-1
S.E.R. at the UN
The SDG Global Festival of Action – Bonn, Germany
Mai 2019
The SDG Global Festival of Action mobilizes, inspires and connects key stakeholders to intensify SDG advocacy and SDG action. The S.E.R. Foundation is excited to take part in it!
Reconciliation at the UN
‘Humiliation was the worst’; Holocaust survivor at UN, asks world to act with ‘empathy and compassion’
More than seven decades ago in Auschwitz, Jewish teenager Marian Turski felt he “had no name, he had nothing, but a number” tattooed on his body. Speaking on Monday, at the annual Holocaust Memorial Ceremony, at United Nations Headquarters in New York, the 92-year-old called on the world to express renewed “empathy and compassion”.
Sharing his extraordinary story, he said that the worst part of surviving the Nazi death camps was not the extreme hunger, the coldness or the deteriorating living conditions, but “the humiliation, just because you were Jewish, you were treated not like a human being, you were treated like a louse, a bed bug, like a cockroach”, he told those who had gathered to commemorate.
Mentioning conflicts going on now in Ukraine, Sudan and Yemen, Mr. Turski said that when it came to giving advice today, “the most important words are: empathy and compassion”. He highlighted the importance of “protecting our children” from all catastrophes.
His story followed testimony from Inge Auerbacher, who was liberated from a different camp, on the same day as Mr. Turski. She described how in the concentration camps “life was especially hard for children, for whom the most important words in their vocabulary were potatoes, bread and soup.”
Inge was born in Germany and spent three years between seven and 10 years of age in the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where only around one per cent of its 15,000 children, survived.
Lamenting the rising wave of anti-Semitism today, Ms. Auerbacher pleaded for everyone across the world to “make good choices”.
“My hope, wish, and prayer, is for every child to live in peace without hunger and prejudice. The antidote to hatred is education, no more genocides, no more anti-Semitism”, she added.
Ms. Auerbacher also wrote the words to the song “Who am I”, which was performed during the UN Holocaust Remembrance ceremony by the PS22 elementary school Chorus of Staten Island, New York.
The role of education and history was emphasized by Sara Bloomfield, Director of the powerful United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington DC, who added that “after 2000 years of various forms of anti-Semitism, it doesn’t seem to be an eradicable disease, nor does hate”.
Drawing parallels between the horror of the Holocaust, and the present, Ms. Bloomfield added that it’s essential to “look back, to remember the victims lives and to remember that we failed them. We can’t fail them again by forgetting, by ignoring anti-Semitism and by not learning from our failures”, she concluded.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked each 27 January, when the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was liberated by Allied troops, 74 years ago, in the final months of the World War Two.
28 January 2019
Human Rights / UN NEWS