“Battle Your Beasts”
The title chosen by senior students for the third Rotary International Peace Conference held last Thursday at Easterbrook Hall, Dumfries. Some 200 students from Dumfries and Galloway, with contingents from Dunbar and Barnsley, accompanied by teachers and Rotarians, made up the total of 250 attendees.
The key to the outstanding success of the day was that the content was designed and agreed by young people with young people playing a leading role in the presentation of the conference. During the day there were speaches by Cara Henderson, Craig Thomas Hammond and Zakia Malaoui, all of whom have battled their own or others inner beasts.
Cara gave a moving account of how loosing a friend to a senseless sectarian knife attack in Glasgow, then several years later being blown up in a Muslim area, had her questioning her own responses to these events and led to her starting the “Nil by Mouth” anti-sectarianism charity.
Craig suffered as a child with a disabling stutter that stayed with him into adulthood. He told of his school experiences of being mocked and regarded as a freak, the effect this had on his confidence and esteem. He was determined to overcome his stutter so he could as a dad read to his child at bedtime. This led him to take personal responsibility and with the aid of a speech consultant was helped to overcome his stutter. Craig has now become an inspirational speaker to help young people battle their beasts.
The final speaker Zakia Malaoui told of her involvemnt with the Homeless World Cup charity, based in Edinburgh. Asylum seekers, refugees, those whose homes have been destroyed by natural disasters or conflict around the world, often feel alone and excluded from society. By using football as the means the homeless can regain themselves by making friends and contributing to a team, thus rebuilding their esteem.
Senior students from Kirkcudbright Academy, Douglas Ewart and Lockerbie High School presented elements of the Rotary Peace Advocat training programme, to smaller breakout sessions that complemented the speeches. The first concentrated on who we were as individuals, how unique we were and appreciating that uniqueness, as a way to combat our own thinking of those who are different. The second session explained and then practised the skills of collaborative conversation, a form of stuctured negotiation to address a number of practical scenarios that had been suggested by the young presenters.
The conference opened and closed with short speeches by the founder of the Rotary Peace Project, Mrs Jean Best current President of Kirkcudbright Rotary Club. She opened by explaining the reasons the Peace Project existed, the pressures and influence of the media and social media on young people, the increasing prevalence of cyber bullying, self-harming and even suicide. The Rotary Peace Project seeks to empower young people to question influences, to make their own choices from a position of inner strength, to equip them with simple skills to address conflict, to be leaders in the 21 century.
Jean closed by encouraging the young attendees to start Peace Groups in their schools or youth groups, to approach their local Rotary Club to assist with training or to contact the Rotary Peace Project for assistance.
The event was given support by the District 1020 Governor Andy Ireland and was compared by Kirkcudbright Rotarian Maurice Halliday
