Part 2, Week/Lesson 6 – Constructive Program 2

The area I feel most drawn to in the “real wheel” is Shanti Sena and its application to resolving conflicts. A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to participate in a small group dialogue with Former Under Secretary General Sergio Duarte, who has worked on nuclear abolition as a diplomat. When I asked him what was missing for disarmament organizations to create one cohesive global movement against nuclear weapons, he said “There are many things missing… but one is a reliable system of international security.”

It really stood out for me. And it made me think how unreliable our current security system is. So I feel inspired by groups of individuals engaged in Shanti Sena, because I think that is the future of conflict resolution and global security. Just like the police and army has academies, wouldn’t it be amazing if there were sophisticated training institutions for nonviolence applied to transforming conflicts?

To me, one of the takeaways for this week was that “unreality” ultimately deceives us by telling us that we are separate from each other. That drives crime, war, poverty, racism etc. It feels silly that many “solutions” offered to those problems do not attack the root cause. A great example I recall from the Search is that of imprisonment, which punishes the individual, thereby escalating the isolation rather than solving and preventing the problem. The current security system is similar to that. We “protect” our country and ourselves by weapons – yet these things separate us more, and threatens us more.

It is getting late in the east coast so my brain stopped working! Looking forward to everyone else’s comments.

Assignment:
Choose one area of the “unreality” model to focus on (consumerism, war, crime, racism, poverty, globalism) at your local level (svadeshi). First, define and describe this problem and how it manifests in your community. Then, look to the model of the Real Wheel and describe possible solutions to this problem. For example, you look at the issue of crime (“unreality”) in your neighborhood. What are the predominant forms of crime that persist? How can nai talim (education) be used to resolve this issue? Finally, what can you do as an individual to contribute to the solution?

Nagler’s talk on Svadeshi touched upon many relevant points in my life currently, especially this concept of working on the issues within your home community, region, and country. As you may know, I am currently not doing this, as for the past year and a half, I have been in between working on the empowerment of interpersonal violence survivors in Boston and community and post-conflict development in Uganda. While I agree that making change within Uganda’s communities and issues is a very difficult one to do due to the inefficiencies caused by not understand the culture and peoples as well as one understand their native land. This is why I never choose to be in a position to be directly on the ground facilitating dialogues and programming, but rather choose to implement systems and manage Ugandan doing this work during my professional career in Uganda. I truly believe it is not my place to be in a Ugandan classroom teaching life skills and girls empowerment. I believe just as Gandhi developed personally and professionally while outside of his home, I am doing the same during my time researching, experiencing, and living outside of my comfort home zone. The things that I have experienced, learned, and developed during my time settling and working in a new environment are priceless and have unearthed skills and aspects of myself that probably never would have been uncovered in the safety net of Boston. However, at the end of the day, I know that I need to take the skills, knowledge, expertise, and experiences back to my home and work on the issues found within my community. I am not sure how this will look but I know that I want to continue addressing the issues of gendered violence, something I have been working on for the past 5 years in Boston. But thanks for this course, I want to find a way to teach and incorporate nonviolence into this work. Anyways, this is getting off subject, but I wanted to introduce the concept of localism regarding work before I answered the assignment since I will be looking at the issues in both of my homes, Boston and Gulu, Uganda.
In Boston, one of the most prevalent areas of “unreality” is consumerism. The problem is the notion that material goods provide status, worthiness, fulfillment, and happiness. This also manifests into anxiety, a constant state of want, and competition. Consumerism can be seen in different avenues starting from the subliminal messages that advertisements send consumers (buy this in order to be happy, popular, etc.) to the stress we as a society put on individuals to spend endless hours working a job they do not like merely for money to buy things that they really do not need. If we look at the model that Nagler was speaking to in his talk, my community spends a high percentage of their income of material goods that are not needed (i.e they fall outside of the three needs: clothing, shelter, and food- and also the material needed for work). Simplicity can be used to resolve this issue by changing the message that we are taught (that we need material goods in order to be liked, worthy, important). Changing this message will help us lead lives that are more true and simple since we strip away the superfluous materials that clutter our lives and souls. As an individual, we can curb our consumption to include items that are necessary and trivial to our lives and needs. Additionally, we can learn to let go of the attachment to our materials goods. At the end of the day, we need to understand that our materials are not ours and are part of God; by having a strong attachment to material goods, we create a state of perpetual anxiety about losing something that we think is critical to our life, but at the end of the day isn’t (this is if we are talking about things that fall outside of the three critical needs and our work needs). Ironically, the issue of poverty is prevalent in Gulu, not only due to the war that spanned over 23 years but because of immense corruption found nationwide. Poverty can be seen in the following examples: “family is unable to pursue rape charges because they are unable to afford a $10 rape kit test and hospital bill” “family of 4 are extremely malnourished, able to afford HIV medicine, because their income is at maximum $15 a month. Their one month old child dies from malnourishment and HIV.” These two examples have come from my community in the past month. However, I want to be very clear that the way we (westerns) view poverty in Africa is extremely mislead and hurtful. I have experienced one too many times a pity of foreigners for Ugandans that are living a life they are proud of but to the outsider, it looks “miserable” and they wonder how someone could ever be happy. Poverty and happiness are not mutually exclusive and in a way, I have seen and lived the principle of simplicity during my stay in Uganda and it is extremely liberating and meaningful. The principle of trusteeship can be applied to the economy in Uganda especially if the concept was applied to machines and other capital equipment that could be used for income generating activities.