do not tiptoe 8

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Do Not Tiptoe Magazine issue 8 is here! Featuring artwork and pics from Hannah Henderson, Tom Price, Rich Wells, Pete Henderson AND stories from people around the world.

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‘All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely. But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop,

skip or dance, just don’t tiptoe.’

Shane Claiborne

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I was in our bedroom when the tap came at the window. His eyes peeping over the windowsill, Hassan looked nervously left and right. He called my name in a hushed panic and jammed the note in to my hands, telling me to destroy it as soon as I had read it.

We’d already had a sense that something wasn’t right. Didn’t stop us of course, but there was an uncomfortable feeling in our guts from the start.

A basic plan was already sorted for our trip to the Moroccan desert, until a man who we called Tassel convinced us to cancel that and join him. We met him in the hustle and bustle of Fes. He might look like a city boy, he told us (and he did, wearing fitted leathers and with more swag than you know) but he was in fact from the small desert hood we were headed to.

Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t instantly convinced to derail our plans and join him but the idea became an opportunity to visit a friendly local’s family home, rather than heading to the well-known hotel on the well-trodden tourist trail. Sold.

H E L L O

Words & photos: Rachel Lees

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From hazy memory and a few throw away camera snaps, the next few days were a melting pot of starry skies, tagines, dunes and sunsets. It was magic. Then the tap at the window back at desert base camp came. The note from Hassan warned that Tassel, who we had spent the last hazy desert days with, was not who he said he was and we needed to get away from him.

That sense I mentioned, the one that said something wasn’t right way back in Fes? It spoke to me gently, like very quiet alarm bells that had been planted deep in my subconscious by a story I was told as a child. The one about the wolf in sheep’s clothing – the one that teaches us that people aren’t always as safe as they seem. Hassan’s note confirmed our suspicions, which only existed because I grew up with stories like that one.

It turned out that by the end of our trip, Tassel would be in prison.

Stories change things. They always have.

Jesus told stories. The Bible’s full of stories. In fact, before it was one book, printed and bound, it started out as stories told around a table or fire over centuries. They were stories that brought generations together, stories that created community.

That’s why we want to share our stories and why we want to listen in return – because ‘The End’ isn’t really the end. Stories change us. And if we are changed, maybe we’ll change other things. Maybe we’ll create something better, the kind of story we want to be a part of. A better world.

Find yourself a corner, get comfy, and let us tell you a story (or a few).

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Contents

09 ALMOST

11 WAR GAMES

13 THE COMMON LIFE

15 RITUAL FOR PEACE

17 FRIENDSHIP NUT

19 THE MONEYLESS MAN

22 STAND UP

25 PITS AND PLASTIC

26 MR DAS HAS GOT MY BACK

35 MY PEOPLE

37 IN THE JUNGLE

39 HOW ARE YOU

41 A STORY SUNG

43 BRALESS IN BRAZIL

45 NED'S DEAD

46 WE ARE THE SAME

49 CALL ME GRANDAD

51 THE GOOD FIGHT

53 STOLEN CHILDHOODS

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‘You can almost see the sea from here.’

And with that he broke my heart.

Muawya is my Palestinian guide, translator, taxi driver… my friend. He dreams of the sea. The dreams flow through his veins, occasionally spilling out of his mouth when the desperation gets too much to hold in. His family lives 15 miles from the coast, but his four children have never made it over there, never felt the waves lap around their feet or thrown their heads back in laughter as the water unexpectedly comes up too far. Muawya spent his childhood visiting the sea, but since then the peaks and troughs of violent conflict and the daily grind of occupation have created barriers too big to overcome. The physical separation barrier means the sea is occasionally visible, but never reachable. The emotional barriers of divisions between Israelis and Palestinians mean that at the moment, hope that the wall comes down also seems far off.

Muawya is as old as the occupation, and his family visits to the sea are one of its many casualties.

Sarah hates writing two line biographies – maybe because she’s indefinable but more likely because she’s still trying to work out what she wants to be when she grows up. She’s spent some time monitoring human rights in the West Bank, less time swimming the glorious waters of Lake Malawi and a lot of time wishing she could sing.

a l m o s t

Words: Sarah Rowe Photo: Matthew Kosloski

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Don’t let it bounce!

My friend Ben is cradling his head in his hands. He looks utterly defeated. A broken man. Then moments later he is off again, bounding up the side of the pitch and howling at the players as they slip and slide through the slick mud.

Box them in!

Watch it, two on the edge!

Number 5 needs a pair of slippers, ref!

I made the last one up. None of it makes very much sense to me. I don’t really get football. I shift uncomfortably in my seat. My eyes begin to drift from the scene in front of me, past the young women in their patchwork kits, past Ben haring up and down the touchline (Feet! FEET! FEEEEEEEET!) and settle on the gate to the compound. It’s not what you’d call high security, just a rough wooden gate with two coils of barbed wire stretching out either side along the perimeter. A thin metal line between us and the outside.

Beyond I can see sickly palm trees and what the Colombian locals call a ‘bio-diversity zone’ – new growths of coconuts and pumpkin and starfruit. The sky is concrete grey like the world’s biggest bunker. I hear the players scream in despair and adulation.

There’s a war going on.

Literally. The other side of that gate. Guerrillas and paramilitaries ambushing each other. Marching up and down the road with machine guns. Dragging people out of their properties and killing them beside the slow, brown river that snakes through this rainforest. Or former rainforest, I guess. A rich habitat that has been inexorably taken over by

mono-crops of bananas and palm to feed Western appetites. They say the war is just a sideshow. A smokescreen to distract, while more land is robbed.

Make space! Down the line!

Because Colombia is at war. Right here, right now. And I am sitting in a carefully protected area of peace. A humanitarian zone. The people who live here, unnaturally clustered together in a tight impromptu community, are protected not by the wooden gate and the fence but by a sign that essentially says ‘Combatants, do not enter. The world is watching.’

It’s an isolated existence. Which is why it was so surprising, less than an hour ago, when a minibus came through that wooden gate containing an entire women’s football team. They were from another humanitarian zone, and had come to play the women of our community.

Head on it!

I don’t get football. I’ve never seen the appeal. But here I am sitting in the centre of an impossible patch of mud-soaked hope. Life won’t be beaten down. It keeps moving – fists pumping, smiles flashing, glorying in its own momentum. All those tiny moments of pain and joy.

Time! You’ve still got time!

When not watching footy or willing flesh-eating parasites to leave his body in Colombia (yeah, that happened) you can find Chris improvising on stages around the world. Somewhat unexpectedly, he also happens to have the biggest collection of tea known to humanity and knows how to make the perfect brew – 100% parasite free.

W A R G A M E S

Words: Chris Mead Illustration: Peter Henderson

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It felt like a family gathering from the start – at least in the sense of grudging obligation. There were so many things I could be doing that weekend, not least catching up on sleep. Yet there I was, dragging my suitcase along the frosty pavement for a weekend in a monastery with my ‘sharing group’.

We’re an unlikely bunch, my sharing group. Among us a hair stylist and a doctor, creatives and finance-geeks, charity workers and musicians – and we’re led by a super sophisticated, high-flying French couple. And before I knew them, I’d chosen to share my life with each of them.

To love each other in community means knowing each other’s stories. That takes trust, vulnerability, and total acceptance. And it takes a lot of time. Late in to the night, we talked and we listened – telling our tales of innocent beginnings in a harsh world, of brokenness and disappointments, of healing and hope, and of the unquenchable love of God.

Entranced at the privilege of being allowed so intimately into one another’s histories, we laughed and cried and prayed and sang for hours that night. But it wasn’t just the words that changed things between us. It was the way we ate.

Sat around on the floor, shoes kicked off and mugs littered about the place, we tucked in to a pile of cheese as we shared our stories. The brie was melted in its wrapper, having been inadvertently left on the coffee machine, and we were like kids in a sweet shop. Before long, the broken crackers and torn up bread were just getting in the way and all pretence of politeness was long forgotten. We went straight in with our hands, laughing as we scraped the cheese off our fingernails and I knew it then – we were truly family now.

Claire is a non-resident member of the Community of St Anselm, a monastic-style community at Lambeth Palace. With 35 others, she shares a rule of life, a lot of food, and too much of each other’s personal space.

T h e C o m m o n L i f e

Words: Claire Jones Photo: Lambeth Palace

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I always start my mornings very early to do my exercises. I've done this for nearly 20 years. I don’t miss it.

Even if I'm driving – when the time comes I stop the car and I run around it 1,000 times, walk fast 1,000 times, jump like a frog 100 times, push up 20 times, and swim in the air about 100 times. I twist my waist 100 times, I stand on one leg 100 times and then the other leg 100 times.

You have to keep that going every morning to renew your memory.

That is trauma healing.

Because of the war in South Sudan most people are traumatised. We who work with traumatised people inhale their trauma, so we have to get rid of this. When you are traumatised you cannot help other people; you have to make yourself the healing of the healers. That’s why I do these exercises every morning.

As I do this I say, ‘love, joy, peace, patience, compassion, sympathy, kindness, truth, gentleness, self-control, humility, poverty, forgiveness, mercy, friendship, trust, unity, purity, faith, hope.’ And then ‘I love you, I miss you, thank you, I forgive, we forget together, I am wrong, I am sorry.’ These words I repeat when I do my exercises and as I do I examine myself: ‘Am I keeping these? Are they really in me or am I just saying them?’

I have to see in which of these 20 I am weak and during the coming day I reflect on them. And these keep you healthy, get you out of stress, get your heart to relax; you can live even with inevitable problems, be calm in things that you cannot solve, or cannot correct. You can correct where you can and where you can’t, you are able to live with it.

That is trauma healing.

Bishop Paride is a peacemaker of epic proportions. At 80 years old he has more than a few accomplishments to his name, not least establishing Kuron Peace Village and winning a UN prize recognising his efforts in promoting peace in his beloved, war-torn South Sudan. We reckon his daily ritual has something to do with it.

R i t u a l f o r p e a c e

Words: Bishop Paride Taban Photo: Tom Price

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For my grandmother, the people of Papua New Guinea felt like kin.

She travelled there to live and work as a nurse when she was a fresh-faced 21 year old. She swaddled babies and mashed bananas for malnourished children in the hope they would put on weight. She taught women how to play hockey and even dance (until the men decided they were having too much fun and that they needed to come home to their villages).

These were some of the better memories.

She (begrudgingly) kept a gun under her bed and, upon orders from the consulate, had a guard dog that she never let bark or bite. Race relations were still tense back then, but my grandmother stubbornly continued to see and love people for who they were. People.

Now, my grandmother and I are in the back of a truck facing each other. We are perched on termite-eaten wooden benches as we bounce violently over dirt jungle tracks. We don’t mind the rough ride. Wide-eyed and breathless, I buzz with excitement at the unfamiliarity of it all. The air is thick and wet, with every corner bringing a new scent, rotting fruit or an unexpected blast of freshness from the mist that hangs over a nearby stream.

Eventually we stop at a market, giving us a welcome opportunity to check our bones have not been shaken out of place. The market is the first sign of humanity we have seen in a while and the

first sight of food, which makes us even hungrier than we already are. Palettes of colourful fruits are laid out before us; banana, papaya, starfruit, guava, passion fruit.

While my grandmother speaks to a colourfully dressed stall holder, her well-accented Pidgin eliciting laughs and claps of surprise, I squat down to investigate a pile of bananas. In my periphery I see a little hand come up and gently touch the banana pile next to mine. Not a black hand as I expected, but a white hand. I look up and see next to me a small albino girl, about five years old. She has the beautiful features of a black New Guinean but with pale, unpigmented skin. She stares at me with immense curiosity, like she’s working out a complex equation. Perhaps she has never met someone like me. Another human being with the same skin. Holding her arm up next to mine, she looks at our white skin for a while before breaking into a huge smile.

Reaching in to her pocket, she gives me a nut.

It is a friendship nut.

And just like that, I have kin in Papua New Guinea too.

Lucinda is like a real life 'Where’s Wally?' She’s not a wally but she's always disappearing around the world – usually to combat some human rights abuse. At the moment you’ll find her in Australia – she’s there working at changing policies to make sure positive social change ruddy well happens.

f r i e n d s h i p n u t

Words: Lucinda Bourke Illustration: Louise Hubbard

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You consider yourself a citizen of the earth. Tell us more...

All I am is a kind of collection of everything that has come before me; from my heritage and my culture to the experiences I’ve had. I am, we are, the sum total of all of that plus, of course, that unique bit you bring in of yourself – your soul, your spirit. The magic.

Even my own body is made up of everything around me – the air in my lungs and the water in my blood, we are all totally interconnected.

We have to start thinking of the world as ourselves because my health depends on the health of the things around me. If you breathe in toxic air and eat toxic food and drink toxic water then you are likely to get severe health problems (which is what most of the problems we have are: industrial diseases from living in a toxic world).

We have to find some sort of way of communicating that to people and it is really difficult, isn’t it, because people see themselves as themselves. But we need to change the definition of self. When self becomes everything, when you are everything, then selfishness becomes a good thing.

It’s a whole different world view. The heart of the matter is finding any way we can to get people

understanding that the boundaries between themselves and the world are much different to what we are taught. Until we succeed in doing that, we probably won’t get much change.

How do we start that shift? What practical things can we do to break down that idea of self?

Fundamentally I think that we need political and economic change. The moment we are born we are thrown in to an education system that’s telling us to ‘study these subjects, work really hard, get a good job’. We are up against it from that moment we come in to the world. I really believe that we need to embark on the long journey of political revolt because otherwise we won’t see much changing really.

When it comes to going moneyless, I get a lot of criticism around how we can all do that, as if that was what I was suggesting we all do. People assume a lot. It is impossible for us all to move from where we are now to moneyless living.

But I think we can make ourselves less dependent on money and diversify our own personal economies. Doing the best you can where you are right now, you know? Start with looking at how you can meet your needs through ways other than money.

T h e M o n e y l e s s M a n

Words: Mark Boyle Illustrations: Rich Wells

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People in Greece and Portugal, Argentina and Indonesia, where there’s been really big shocks to financial economies, understand this. You have to get more creative. I feel like for our own resilience as a people we’d be wiser to start that process now.

You've spoken about how giving up money has given you peace, health and contentedness. What’s the root of this?

I think most of it was because of connection. When you give up money you end up having a much more intimate connection with the world around you. You can’t just pay somebody to do something for you – you have to build a relationship. And then you have to build a greater relationship with the natural world around you too, to understand where you get your food from and what season you’re in and the different foods that come with the different seasons. You just build up a rhythm with the natural world. Living without money and reducing your bills down to zero also just means you can actually devote your life to the things you really want to do. The things you are passionate about doing.

We are very addicted to more and more and more – whether it be money or stuff or climbing the career ladder. But actually when you stop that process you just become content with what you have. I don’t have very much but I am really content.

What's special about this interdependency you've found with the people and land around you?

For me it’s about intimacy. We all want intimate relationships with someone and the world around us. Imagine living in a world where you knew nobody apart from your computer and there was no connection and you went outside and it was just concrete. It would be a very dead, soulless, dull world, wouldn’t it?

On the other end of the spectrum, if you had a really intimate connection with lots of people, where you know them on a deeper level and you’re happy to help them out without wanting to get something from them, and they really want to help you too. Living in that sense of interdependency with the other person.

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There are things that happen through that that you don’t know until you live in that way – that’s my experience anyway. The level at which you bond is much greater. Especially with the natural world, it’s like we feel so separate from nature that we don’t even know it’s there a lot of the time. When you go out and begin to see and know wild creatures and wild plants and feel the rhythm of the world, going through the seasons and knowing what each season brings, you just get connected more. It is really hard to explain in words. It’s a real feeling thing. It’s a feeling of intimacy with the world. And it’s the opposite of the kind of lack of intimacy that we have in a concrete soulless environment.

I think that intimacy helps us on a spiritual level an emotional level, a physical level, a psychological level – every level. I see the amount of mental illness that's around as related to problems in relationships; a lack of intimate connection with the world. The more I connect with all these things, the better all my relationships with people and the land have been.

I do think that the industrial capitalist economy is going to crash under its own weight eventually.

You have to ask yourself the question, do you want to live your life propping that system up, even though that system is inherently destructive against people and land? What kind of world is it that we want to create? Do we want to create a world that is actually sustainable? A world that actually lives in harmony with each other and the rest of the natural world, with the other millions of species that live on earth? That’s the big question – which of those worlds do we want to work towards?

This guy. Honestly. What a legend. Lots of people might write Mark off as a massive hippy best to be silenced, but with a background in economics, the no-money thing makes business sense to Mark as well as sense on every other level. If simpler living helps us to connect to everything around us that bit better then we’re certainly all ears. Hippy or not. Thanks for leading the way Mark!

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Straight away you could tell that there was something different about Alvaro. He had that sort of leadership quality about him. He had presence.

The first thing he did when I met him was get out his phone to show me his Facebook page. That’s where he had uploaded photos of all the damage to the environment he had seen. You see, the local mayor was trying to cut down the forest where Alvaro and his community lived so that he could turn it into a sugar cane plantation. He had already wandered in with his cronies and started cutting the trees down. In response, Alvaro got vocal, taking photos and putting them up on Facebook, explaining to everyone that the chemicals used in sugar cane production pollute their water supply.

This was a bold move. In El Salvador there’s a culture of not speaking out. Until just 25 years ago, civil war ripped the country apart. Massacres, executions, landmines and bombings left a terrifying legacy. The idea that, for your own protection, you turn a blind eye to whatever is happening, is a deeply culturally engrained habit. But when it comes to the destruction of the forests, Alvaro says, ‘We shouldn’t just sit down and believe it is never going to change – we can make them change if we demand it.’

To paraphrase, he just thought, ‘Sod it. The police aren’t doing anything about it, the government isn’t doing it – I’m going to do it.’ Although he knew it was dangerous, Alvaro and his friends set up a volunteer association that monitors their land, set in a mangrove reserve, 24/7.

You have to get a little boat to get to the mangroves themselves. The water is thick with mud and by night everything is dark. You cannot see a thing. Imagine standing there in the pitch black of night doing the monitoring watch – the temperature drops, you’re barefooted because of the mud and you’re standing there by yourself just looking out. I feel like if I’ve recycled, then I’ve done a really good job for the Earth that day. But Alvaro’s community, well, they have gone way beyond that.

This community itself is tiny, tucked right in the west corner of El Salvador. If you were backpacking through you may never even know it existed and I imagine 90% of El Salvador didn’t know it existed. Not until Alvaro took the campaign beyond his Facebook page, calling the local and national news and telling them, ‘you need to come down here because we have a problem.’

‘It must have been a big deal to stand against the local mayor’, I said to him. But he put me right: ‘It wasn’t actually. It doesn’t matter who you are – whether you are the president or whether you are king – I can still stand up against you. I can still defend my rights.’

The police of El Salvador took the case on.

It's hard to say which Amy loves more: Brazilian funk or Afrobeats. But whether she's dancing the night away under Latin American skies or rooting out the stories of heroes like Alvaro, the one thing that's certain is that she'll always have her camera in tow.

s t a n d u p

Words & photos: Amy Smith

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I have given up buying plastic.

Remember this, otherwise nothing else I’m going to say will make sense.

I had heard that bicarbonate of soda would make a great deodorant.

Intrigued, right?

Yeah, so was I.

I had already successfully made the switch from a plastic wrapped deodorant to one that was blissfully plastic free. The only problem was it was slightly – shall we say – overpowering in terms of smell. Which is why, on one particularly chilly February morning, you'd have found me on my hands and knees in the kitchen, clothed in only jeans and a bra, trying to find that precious jar of bicarb that held the promise of dry-for-24-hours pits.

Bicarb was something I was already using in other areas of my life. It had long been my default cleaner in the bathroom and kitchen for instance. I even know some plastic-free folks who use it as toothpaste. So to hear that it had deodorising properties as well was no surprise. Basically bicarb is a little bit of hippy heaven on earth.

What I hadn’t considered, as I searched for the plastic-free holy grail on that fateful morning, was that I was using this particular batch of bicarb as a cleaning agent.

That means it was pretty powerful stuff.

So, having finally located my highly-sought prize (under the sink, back of the shelf, no idea how it ended up there) I gleefully put a good pinch on my freshly-shaved-with-a-metal-razor armpits... and OWOWOWOW! Cue Claire hopping round the bathroom pathetically whispering ‘ooh, ooh, ahh’ to herself. I quickly realised my error and reached for the taps, grabbing a handful of cold, cooling water and splashing it up to my now on-fire underarm areas.

Thankfully I was alone in my flat, sparing my husband the distressing image of his wife clasping dampened towels to her armpits and lying flat on the bed for a five-minute breather. Since then I have learned the key to any self-applied bicarb action is definitely ‘less is more’.

Simple.

Does it work as a deodorant? Oh yes, it certainly does. But it is also worth remembering that you are also using it as a replacement for bleach. With great power comes also great responsibility.

And so my friends, may your pits be forever happy and may they never feel like someone just shoved a cactus up into them.

Happy plastic-free living.

Beyond being a complete ninja by attempting to give up plastic, Claire is training to be a Moravian minister. The Moravian Church is one of the oldest Protestant denominations in the world. We’re confident her no-plastic legacy will be just as long.

P i t s & P l a s t i c

Words: Claire Maxwell Photo: Hannah Henderson

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feature

M r D a s h a s g o t m y b a c k

Words & photos: Tom Price

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feature

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I moved to Kolkata, India, and I thought it would be easy. I’ve lived in a few different places, and they haven’t all been comfortable: a garage with a broken bed in Argentina, a snake-threatened hut in war-torn South Sudan, and most recently Tacloban, Philippines – the epicentre of one of the world’s strongest typhoons. India will be a breeze in comparison, I thought. Rapidly developing country, booming economy, globally famous film industry.

On the plane, watching infomercials about the must-see sites, eating the airline’s imitations of local food, it’s a whirlwind of excitement. Fast forward twelve hours and the taxi I’m in slams to a halt, jolting me back into the waking world. Bleary-eyed and jet-plane dizzy, I step out of the taxi, narrowly avoiding the torrent of auto-rickshaws hurtling towards me. Clumsily, I haul my wobbly wheelie bag over the broken ground and along a dirt lane to the place I’ll call home for the next eleven months. Someone (I’ve no idea who) unlocks a padlocked door, and I discover the bed I’ll be sleeping on for the next year is a plywood sheet.

Two days later and the hangover of culture shock is beginning to wear off. My wife and I are still in camping mode and drinking water from my filter bottle, but the initial destabilising whirl has eased a little. Now the emotions are settling, another problem presents itself: how do we live here? Everything is an unknown:

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where to get drinking water, how to wash our clothes, where to buy food – we’re pathetically clueless. The world begins to spin again.

Now, I know I’m privileged in a multitude of ways, and I know my facade of adventure-tested hardiness crumbles a little too easily. But I also know how to hunker down and push through. That said, there’s only so long you can live in emergency mode, whatever that looks like for you. Caffeine-loading is fine when it comes to exams, but if you don’t return to normal sleep patterns and stimulant-free drinks, you start to unravel pretty quickly. For me, the same is true of community. When it suddenly disappears, I realise how dependent I am on the network of friends, family, colleagues and strangers that create the world I operate in.

And this is where Mr Das comes along. Remember the mystery padlock unlocker? That’s Mr Das. Together with Mrs Das, the pair are our new landlords, surrogate family and unlockers of much more than our front door; they’re the key to our life in this small corner of Kolkata.

We occupy the ground floor of their house and to say they’re regular visitors would be an understatement. At first, Mr and Mrs Das’ expressions of care confuse our sense of boundaries

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and personal space. When they knock on the door at 7am to ask whether we’ll go to the market that day, or walk in later that afternoon and open the fridge to inspect, rearrange and comment on its contents, it takes a force of will not to feel patronised, infantilised and invaded.

But to stop the story there would be to do injustice to our upstairs-downstairs bond. In our first few days, Mr Das takes it on himself to give us a full introduction to the neighbourhood. He presents us to the market seller from whom we should buy our tomatoes, takes us to the place to get a bag of milk, points out the best value chapati. I’m pretty sure this has less to do with getting his friends some extra custom and more about ensuring that we don’t get taken for a ride when haggling for a bunch of bananas.

And it goes beyond groceries. Mr Das is there to

speak sternly to the mobile phone network cheekily trying to bill us twice, Mrs Das takes time to give us a chapati-making masterclass, and calls are made when we’re still not back home after the sun has set in our first week. We share the same plot of land, separated only by masonry and vertical distance – we’re aware of each other. When the electricity dies, Mr Das calls and makes it right, not just for him, but also for us, and he visits us in the morning to explain what’s happened. When our phones stop working for no apparent reason, he tells us that the president has recently remonstrated the mobile networks for poor service. He connects us to the wider community, to shared life, to the bigger picture. He relieves us a little of our ignorance and disconnection, by being insistently present and interested, despite the difficulty involved in the process.

His English is patchy and our Bengali extends to

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‘yes’ and ‘okay’, but the language that we have transcends the words we use and enters a realm of care, of unspoken information. We’re often just bodies communicating, and in some ways, this means that we communicate better. Rabindranath Tagore (a major Bengali literary figure) touches on it when he talks of an imagined utopian future where ‘the language of words will simply transform into the language of feeling’. Our bodies moving down the street experience the rain, and we realise our mutual experience of it, and we’re aware that we’re sharing that moment – this is our language, this is our communication. He is over eighty years old and slow, so I am slow. This means that we take more time to cross the road, and take in more of our surroundings, rather than rushing nervously past.

In exchange for our rent and presence, this gentle octogenarian gives us a whole lot of himself. Hopefully, over time, we will begin to restore some of the balance here. We’ll look for small ways in which our relationship might be less uneven. But right now, we’re working on limiting the

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frustration we might feel at things like having our fridge raided, the embarrassment of trying to find a dignified way of acting out the word for toilet paper. And we’re practising saying thank you with our faces.

In the socially crusading West, we often manoeuvre ourselves into the position of givers. It can be easy to slip into thinking that we’re the ones with something to offer a distant subject in ‘need’. But when the tables are turned, and you’re the one requiring a little help, community and sharing suddenly make a lot more sense than some kind of power-laden transaction.

When we have to leave the city, Mr and Mrs Das come downstairs and sit with us before we go. Mrs Das has cooked me a special leaving lunch and we spend some time looking through photographs of my family in the UK. The conversation is staccato and fragmentary, but I think that Mrs Das, who

likes me to call her ‘aunty’, says that they love having us. ‘And Mr Das, loves you. Too much’, she says, before breaking into a beaming smile.

Sitting on plastic chairs on the ground floor, I look at Mr Das and tell him that he’s been very kind to us. He bashfully looks away and says, ‘It is my duty’. There may well be a thread of duty driving the Das’ to practice such deep concern and hospitality, but it’s more than that. There’s a lot to be learnt from these wise, experienced humans and their care for a couple of clueless strangers.

Tom is a documentary photographer, writer and filmmaker working on people-centered stories in places such as Brazil, South Sudan, the Philippines, and most recently, India, where he and his wife Sarah were met with the hospitality of Mr and Mrs Das. He’s got adventure stories for days.

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You know the sort of ‘community’ that pastors preach about? The real, authentic, ‘doing life together’ sort of fellowship? A few years ago, I was so desperate to create it that I left the house I’d been sharing with some uni mates and moved in with a couple of people from church. I didn't know them that well to begin with, but Coral, Dave and I soon became the kind of friends that turn up to parties together.

For a while, everything was great. We had a ‘life group’ that was filled with good people. We ate together, prayed together, went to the pub after church together, watched the rugby together. We even went on holiday together. It was Community with a capital C.

And then, as fast as it had fallen into place, it crumbled. Coral started dating our friend's ex, unbeknownst to her but very much beknownst to me. Dave got a new girlfriend and was suddenly nowhere to be seen. Everything unraveled around me and I felt like I couldn't rely on anyone anymore.

Months of tension, unease and disappointment later, I came to the unwelcome conclusion that I had to leave our house. I'd been waiting for our life together to go back to normal, and it hadn't. It took a while to realise that it wouldn't.

So Hannah (my best friend) and Paul (her partner) welcomed me into their home. Luke (my boyfriend)

would come over and hang out with us three. Vicki (my sister) moved into a new flat with me. Cassie (both colleague and friend) helped me unpack. University mates threw us a housewarming. Our other sisters and our brother came to stay. All the while, I was busy mourning the loss of my Community.

A couple of years later I was listening to a podcast that questioned the wisdom of churches spending their budgets on ‘community-building activities’.

'Don't build community', this guy was saying. 'Look around and discover the community that you already have.' It was like a floodlight being turned on in my mind. I couldn't believe how narrow-sighted I had been. I’d tried so hard to create something I already had in abundance.

May you, my sisters and brothers, look around and find your community, and may you not be too busy building your Community to miss it.

Becca has wit up to her eyeballs. She’s so funny in fact that you can find her making people laugh from stages around the UK. Keeping you on your toes though, when she’s not super funny she’s being super serious campaigning for a better Europe for her day job. You can send her a thank you card for that one.

M y p e o p l e

Words: Rebecca Baron Illustration: Peter Henderson

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We were huddled under a dim camp light in the most solid shelter around and on a patch of ground that this group of Ethiopian and Eritreans had marked out as theirs. That’s the sort of set up in the Calais Jungle. In a 7,000 strong refugee camp people gather, quite naturally, in smaller communities according to where they are from. In the Jungle we found a Sudanese quarter, an Afghani quarter, Syrian, Iranian and so on.

I was spending the night with a group who had each made the truly perilous journey from Ethiopia and Eritrea that has become so infamous.

Our bellies were full as we sat in the shelter discussing for hours what life in the Jungle is like. Earlier we had shared together a traditional Ethiopian meal, and as is customary with meals of importance in their culture, we’d been feeding one another with our hands. It’s a serious mark of love to do so. An act of symbolism that, after a minute of squashing all my awkward English instincts, I wholly embraced.

That’s not where the wild generosity these strangers and refugees (people labelled ‘cockroaches’ in some corners of the media) ended.

After hours of discussion, and as my feet were becoming numb, I was told that they had a surprise for me. For me?

Eh?

I wasn’t here to be ‘treated’ but to witness the treatment of my brothers and sisters in their desperation in this apocalyptic holding pen just miles from our borders.

I n t h e J u n g l e

Words & photos: Rachel Lees

Yet after joyfully (and with a glint in their eye) making me aware of this impending surprise, they disappeared before shuffling back into the room where we were taking shelter from the bitter cold, carrying a bucket of hot water.

Two of them knelt down on the floor by my feet, untied my boot laces, and took off my muddy shoes and socks.

There, in the middle of the night and the middle of the camp, they washed my feet.

I knew it was significant. I felt it. In that semi-darkness tears pricked my eyes as I felt a humility that was unparalleled. Strangers on their hands and knees mimicking the radical act of the man Jesus who they followed.

This is community, I thought. Community that will get on its hands and knees to honour one another and to love one another. Here I was, a stranger passing through their community, and they gave me a welcome given to kings, a welcome I only wish I could extend back to them.

Brother.

Sister.

Rachel wants to get generosity and community down to a fine art. If you want to join her she'll be in the woods whittling something or foraging for food. Or else catch her writing about a simple life over at ‘The Foraged Life.’ The simple life, admittedly, she hasn’t quite got down to a fine art. Yet.

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The Dogon people of Mali have one epic greeting.

As you meet someone in the village you’ll go through this ritual of questions and answers and deliver it in a sing-song rhythm. It's through this community habit that you discover the health of everyone in the family – right down to the goats and their rice supplies. When you live in such a precarious environment, vulnerable to unpredictable weather and threats such as locust attacks, checking in on the health of your neighbours family, crops and livestock is more than just a nicety. It’s a practice that ensures the continued wellbeing and even survival of the community.

When one family is flailing, others step up and step in.

Curious by nature, Lilly's love of storytelling has taken her around the world as a journalist and a communications officer for Christian Aid. Her mad job means she occasionally gets to WhatsApp pictures of Highland cows to a Masai chief in Kenya.

Aga po (how are you?)Sèwa (fine)

Ounou sèwa (how are the kids?)Sèwa (fine)

Yahana go sèwa (how’s the wife?)Sèwa (fine)

Deh sèwa (how’s your father?)Sèwa (fine)

Nah sèwa (how’s your mother?)Sèwa (fine)

Ere sèwa (how’s your rice?)Sèwa (fine)

Hene sèwa (how are your goats?)Sèwa (fine)

Diaba Yala sèwa (how’s your onion patch?)Sèwa (fine)

h o w a r e y o u ?

Words: Lilly Peel Photo: Rachel Stevens

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I was one in 90,000 but I didn’t feel small – quite the opposite. When you’re among people belting out the simple ‘Aah-ah’ of Arcade Fire’s ‘Wake Up’ you feel important. Significant. An anthemic phrase in a language nobody can fully explain, but one everybody understands… it had this power.

In this space there was no hierarchy (regardless of how some may try to create one) and no dress code; just people, lots of them, in song.

When John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, he didn’t just want to tell a story, a reimagining of creation in prose. He wanted it sung, and an ‘adventurous song’ at that. And he’s not the only one; the poems of some of the classical greats like Homer were sung, generation to generation, before they were ever written down. As long as humanity has been able to communicate, we’ve been able to sing.

When we sing, we remember. We add fire to our history, we charge up our ideas, we unite our voices in protest or celebration. By some mystery, a connection is made, not only with those around us but with those gone before, the voices of the past that echo on in ours.

Perhaps the reason that singing together is so powerful is because when we sing together we have to synchronise our breathing, and when we synchronise our breathing our heartbeats start to beat in time, and when that happens we become joined together in community.

I consider myself a folk musician – a musician concerned with folk. A musician for people. ‘Am I singing for strangers?’ wonders songwriter Aidan Knight. As it was for Milton’s narrator, for the Greek poets and the alt-rock bands, the answer is certainly ‘yes’.

Whether or not they will still stay strangers is another question.

You could say that Will is a pretty good authority on the power of music and words. He's a musician in the experimental folk group Wavoka Gentle and writes regularly on art and music for Saatchi magazine and others. He also makes a mad good flat white. Yep, everybody wants to be Will’s friend.

A S t o r y S u n g

Words: Will Stokes Illustration: Louise Hubbard

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It's sweltering hot on the veranda as we cluster round to listen to our hosts. I'm sweating so much that I can look down and see my top turning a shade darker. We've come out of the teeth of a bitter January in the UK straight in to the hot breath of a Brazilian summer in the rainforest, and I am melting. Eventually it gets too much. I wrench myself away from the group and head to the bathroom. I splash my face with cold water and try to dry off with paper towels, and then think the unthinkable…

…I'm going to take off my bra. It's so hot and there are only other women out there, so I hope they won't mind. I unsnap the strap and it's such a relief. But now I'm left with a soggy bra in my hands and an afternoon of interviews ahead of me.

Coming out of the bathroom, I bump into Nega, working in the kitchen. I show her what I'm carrying and we share a laugh, then I mime putting it into a bag and she helpfully fetches a plastic one for me. I've interrupted her cutting up a mango into tiny, tiny pieces. It's incredibly ripe and the smell is beautiful. I watch as she gets on with it, putting it all in a sieve. She gently presses it through, separating juice from fibre into a jug below. She mixes in a little ice, smiles at me again and offers me a cup.

Oh my goodness.

It's the best juice I've ever had and I tell her so; she grins and laughs, shyly. Both times I've met her, she has been so cheerful, kind and friendly – exactly the kind of person you'd want to work here.

It's Nega's sister, Elineide, who runs Casa Noeli, this safe house for survivors of domestic violence hidden on the very edge of the Amazon rainforest. The building seems to exude love and safety.

A ‘hanging bottle garden’ blooms on the veranda. The walls are speckled with brightly coloured signs and posters bearing mottos surrounded by flowers, foam and glitter.

Despite the calm, when I visit I feel rage. Some of the women who’ve taken shelter here arrive with such low self-esteem that they don't consider their husband putting out a cigarette on them to be violence.

I feel such rage but also a profound sense of sisterhood: from the staff as they tirelessly campaign for changes in the law and social services. They are such strong, self-possessed women.

And then I learn that kind, sunny Nega, who I'd assumed worked here because of her natural disposition and kindness, was also stabbed by her husband before finally leaving him. She's the reason Elineide was motivated to open the safe house. I don't even want to think of what happened to her before she came here. So I choose instead to think of her laughing in the kitchen, cuddling the small children who pass in and out of her care, and occasionally dealing with sweaty westerners like me with just the right blend of humour and compassion. That's the woman she is.

Not a victim.

A force for good.

When Laura was little she used to sit in bus stops and talk to old ladies. They treated her like a mini old lady because she was so eloquent. Now she’s an adult who sings about Dr Who on her own podcast, preaches across South East England and lobbies her MP. She’s still eloquent.

B r a l e s s i n B r a z i l

Words: Laura Mead Photo: Tom Price

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I awoke to the sounds of laboured breathing. I just figured someone was having a bad dream.

In my half consciousness I turned my attention to the rattle of the windows and the whistling wind on the cold streets of Copenhagen outside. I pulled my blanket more firmly around myself, cleared my throat and went back to sleep.

I awoke the next morning to find the room nearly empty. There were eight of us holed up in the Danish youth hostel we’d called home for the past few days. Most had already gone downstairs for breakfast. I kept my eyes closed and listened to the murmur of chatter and the squeak of rubber shoes on the concrete floor.

‘Ned’s sleeping in late’, commented Jonathan, ‘should we wake him up?’

My alarm bells were starting to ring. I sat up and watched as Jonathan went alongside Ned’s bed and quietly spoke his name. Ned was on the top bunk, his back to the room as he faced the wall. There was no response.

I caught Jonathan’s eye as he looked back at me and Phil. It’s odd, but I think in that moment we all knew. Of course, you don’t let on that you know something; you just move to confirm your suspicions. There’s no real reason why we assumed the worst, just the lingering sense of there being only three of us in the room.

I hopped out of bed and hurriedly threw on a t-shirt. In a moment, Jonathan, Phil and I were stood next to his bed, imploring Ned to wake up. I reached out a hand and placed it on Ned’s shoulder. It was firm and cold.

The Rev Canon Hereward Cooke, a.k.a. Ned, was a 70-year-old retired vicar from Norwich. I’d known him for about five days. He and I were part of a gaggle of 25 people who had opted to cycle to Copenhagen in December 2009 to campaign at a crucial climate change conference.

He saddled up, like the rest of us, and embarked on the 150-mile journey to fight for our planet. Little did he know that his journey would end there, on that cold night in Copenhagen. He cycled away from the comforts that lay behind his front door for a better future and I tell his story now so that when we reach our destination, we won’t forget his contribution.

If he had his way, Jim would be permanently pottering in his shed, looking after chickens or attempting to make a dry stone wall. Fortunately for us though he works for Christian Aid, because despite wanting to be permanently by himself, he really cares about all the other people. He really cares about Lego too; his loft has enough of the stuff to build a Lego army.

N e d ' s D e a d

Words: Jim Atkins Illustration: Hannah Henderson

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'Would you like to visit my home?' Evelyn asked. I was grateful for her warm hospitality – I was already feeling dizzied by the labyrinth of alleyways in Matopeni, a slum just outside Nairobi. Evelyn took my hand and led me inside her small hut.

Though the room was dark, I knew there’d been kerosene burning, perhaps the evening before. I could smell it. But kerosene is expensive, so light became a precious commodity.

Nine people lived in this space, but at first I only spotted four eyes peeping out at me. Orphaned nephews taken in by the family, quietly assessing this stranger in their home.

This was an intimate space, the private struggles of a family somehow hanging in the air. Pulling back a curtain, Evelyn introduced me to her dad – and in that moment I was invited into their raw pain. He lay still, clearly very poorly. ‘Cancer’, she said. ‘He’s been having radiotherapy but it’s got too expensive.’

I felt uncomfortable asking how much it cost, but I did. £12. Each treatment was £12.

‘I am unmarried’, she said, ‘and I want to preserve myself. But right now, I’m not sure how we’ll find the money to bury him.’ In the silence that followed, her vulnerability was laid bare. I knew she was contemplating trading her virginity to give her father a dignified burial.

When the pause became too hard, I changed the

tone, thinking it was for her sake but perhaps it was for mine. I needed to know what kept her going, where there was hope in a life that felt so alien to mine.

‘My faith’, she said. ‘Every morning I thank God that he has seen us through another night and he’s given us another day.’

Pause.

‘And I've had some para-legal training. I help people here with the problems that they have. I give them advice. It doesn't earn me any money but it gives me satisfaction to help them.'

I smiled, surprised, pleased. ‘Me, too. I’m a lawyer as well.'

'So, you see, we are the same,' she said. 'We are the same.'

And in the dark, we held hands. We held hands and we contemplated our sameness.

Loretta is one of those people who does the things lots of us are scared to do. She speaks out for what’s right in front of super powerful people across the world, even if it gets on those powerful peoples' nerves. She’s Christian Aid’s Chief Exec, but perhaps even more excitingly, her family makes world famous ice cream and that has to have some perks.

W e A r e T h e S a m e

Words: Loretta Minghella Illustration: Peter Henderson

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Every morning Yessika Hoyos wakes up early in Bogotá, Colombia and goes to work after kissing her baby daughter goodbye.

She worries about her daughter – the child-minder says they’ve been followed on the street and Yessika has received all manner of threats against her and her family. It scares her.

The people who are angry at Yessika are powerful people. These are people who profit from the abuse of others, the ones who get stronger by trampling on vulnerable people. Many people in Colombia have their rights abused and Yessika stands up for them. Sometimes she wants to pack it all in and give up what she is doing – she doesn’t want her daughter to suffer like she did, to lose a parent like she did.

But she carries on risking her life.

Her office is in a central part of the city, and it’s more secure than it used to be. A few years back, this team of human right defenders discovered that their office was at risk of being blown up by military intelligence. She drives to meetings in a bullet-proof car, but the superficial protection – provided, ironically, by the government – is almost useless. People like her who defend human rights are methodically targeted by a system that thrives on disorder and intimidation.

Not long after her dad was murdered (when she was still a teenager and beginning to receive death threats herself), Yessika trained to be a lawyer. She wanted, needed, to continue her father’s vision.

He dreamed of a Colombia that is truly democratic. A Colombia where everyone is treated well and where bad people don’t get away with bad deeds. They made good on their threats to kill him, these bad people, but he made good on his promise to never back down from fighting for a better Colombia.

So Yessika continues, despite her fears, to fight for her father’s dreams. She cannot stop until the violence has stopped. She cannot protect her own daughter without protecting all the daughters of Colombia.

Ben is full of surprises. He's got scarily encyclopaedic knowledge of films and a hidden talent for netball. Last year he wombled his way to the Faroe Islands for a music festival and now he is marching his way into the Navy. Some things are less surprising though – like Ben's passion to see an end to injustices like this one in Colombia.

T h e G o o d F i g h t

Words: Ben Harris Illustration: Rich Wells

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He once caught a fish with a screwdriver. Honestly.

On those special days off from school he had, we’d take a nice walk along the canal and go fishing. I only had one rod but we found a screwdriver in my tackle kit one of those days. We dug it in to the ground, tied some fishing line to it and threw it in with a weight and hook. He caught one! It was wicked.

We’d always finish those days off by going to raid the Mars Bar factory bins for a treat. That or the bins of the industrial bakery near me, which contained every type of croissant you could imagine.

Not all the time of course, just on special occasions.

Day to day we relied on Greggs. I’d worked out that a lorry came to the Greggs round the corner from me twice a day. Once to deliver the food for the coming day and once to take away yesterday’s leftovers. I made mates with the lorry driver and would arrive with my pushbike when he did and leave with a black bin bag full of food. I’d balance that black sack on my handlebars and cycle from Kilburn in the north of London to Deptford in the south, where I’d leave the stash with my son and his mates.

Every year at Christmas I’d give that lorry driver a bottle of Bulgarian wine (I know my wine and Bulgarian is a good one). He deserved it; if he had got caught doing what he was doing, he would have got the sack just like that. He kept me, my mother who I was caring for, and my son fed for four years.

It’s completely ridiculous, you know. There are people in the world who are hungry or without money and yet we are surrounded by bins and containers filled with food that is perfectly edible and yet left to rot.

Here, they make use of food that is destined to be waste. It’s like a banquet. It’s wicked. If I don’t eat it this food is going to be thrown away and I resent that.

You can call me Grandad by the way. My grandchildren call me it (obviously) then all their friends started and then all the adults too. It’s stuck.

Grandad is a vintage bin diver who we met while at one of Brighton’s Real Junk Food Project café’s. The project ensures edible food ends up in bellies not bins and Grandad is one of their biggest fans. (We’re one of his.)

C a l l M e G r a n d a d

Words: Grandad Photo: Rachel Lees

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Bang. Another minute passes. Boom. Bang. Bang.

Sitting overlooking a beautiful city with the sunlight glinting on ancient stone-built houses, it was surreal to have each of these sounds interpreted by the group of locals with me. ‘They were rubber-coated steel bullets. That’s live ammo.’

I was in Hebron, or Al-Khalil in Arabic, meaning ‘Friend of God’. It’s the second largest city in the West Bank – holy for Muslims, Christians and Jews because it houses the tomb of Abraham.

The people here are used to this violent soundtrack to their lives.

Protected by my white skin and burgundy passport, I was able to waltz through checkpoints between the Israeli- and Palestinian-controlled parts of the city with little trouble. Palestinians, particularly young people, don’t have this luxury. Their every move is agreed or denied by Israeli soldiers. ‘I must show my ID and everything I buy’, one man told me. ‘Here, they know the times that I breathe.’

Down on the streets, the atmosphere is different. I walk down Shuhada Street, and it’s quiet. Very little traffic, shuttered windows, doors welded shut, and cages around balconies.

Welcome to Ghost Town.

S t o l e n C h i l d h o o d s

Words: Hannah Griffiths Photos: Hannah Griffiths & Susanna Vilpponen

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Here, there are only Israeli settlers, who live illegally under international law,* and international people. The soldiers call this a ‘sterile area’; this is where Palestinians are completely prohibited. Instead, I saw them through their caged windows, looking down onto the street below where they were forbidden to be.

I go through a metal turnstile, enter the Palestinian area and the gloomy souk with domed shops where traders have sold their wares for hundreds of years. Flimsy wire netting hangs above our heads protecting the sellers and buyers from waste – water, eggs, urine and garbage – thrown on them by Israeli settlers living above.

Just a few hundred metres further on, I reach a front door which leads me to a house overlooking the ‘sterile’ street. Plant pots piled high, jars of pickled fruit on the windowsills, and a tortoise in the vegetable patch are just some of the things

that greet me as I enter Zleikha’s home.

‘I always introduce myself as the oldest child in the old city’, she says.

Zleikha is Hebron born and bred.

Back in 2000, curfews prevented Palestinians from walking at night, there was frequent crossfire between Israelis and Palestinians and children were forced to play on rooftops. That was when Zleikha began working to restore peace in this place.

‘I wanted the children to have a change from the killing that they heard about every day’, Zleikha tells me.

Craft materials are spread around her living room; art is one of the ways she helps children forget about the hatred and violence, giving them back

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their childhoods if only for a moment. ‘Children are the future; they need hope.’

Walking around occupied Palestine, with its famous olive trees, it won’t be long before you hear one word: ‘sumud’. Most easily translated as ‘steadfastness’, sumud encapsulates the non-violent resistance of Palestinians against practices of the Israeli occupation. Practices like land confiscation. Child detentions. House demolitions. Movement restrictions. Sumud represents the child who continues to go to school despite facing almost daily harassment from Israeli soldiers, and the family on whose land Israeli settlers trespass each Friday to worship in an illegally built synagogue tent. In this place ‘to exist is to resist’.

I met many Palestinians who personify sumud. They, and their Israeli peace activist counterparts, continue to give me hope in Hebron.

Zleikha is convinced that a peaceful future will come too. No live ammo. No rubber-coated steel bullets. ‘When God’s will comes to change the world, it will happen.’

As I leave her house, I see a mural on her neighbour’s wall that reminds me of the hopeful vision she described: ‘They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.’

Hannah spent three months as a human rights monitor in Hebron. Her team protected schoolchildren, monitored and reported human rights violations, supported peace activists, both Israeli and Palestinian. She was working with EAPPI, and you can read more about its work at eappi.org

*Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that ‘the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies’.

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See you with the rest of the community at:

christianaidcollective.org

Oh, and you can also join our FREE text community too. Text JOIN to 70060* to receive monthly messages with campaign actions,

vids and resources to equip you to create a game-changing community where you are.

*Texts are charged at your standard network rate. We may contact you again in the future. If you would prefer that we didn't call you, text NOCALL CA to 70123. If you would prefer not to receive SMS messages from us in the future, text NOSMS CA to 70123.

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