Artisans of Democracy: the Indivisibility of Human Rights

The chapter this month in Artisans of Democracy was about the European Union and how, over 30 years, the highest levels of the EU came to recognize the existence of poverty in their midst and their own role in both mitigating and eradicating it. Even as the E.U. was being founded in the midst of broad rising prosperity, pockets of people were being left behind, with no chance to catch up on their own. When this fact was discovered by E.U. bureaucrats, they made changes in the way they dealt with extreme poverty. "The E.U. has learned to avail itself of the experience of non-governmental organizations representing disenfranchised groups, in particular the Fourth World Movement, which enabled Europe's poorest citizens to influence the shaping of policy in many of the E.U.'s institutions, including ambitious anti-poverty programs."

"This story shows how discovering the reality of extreme poverty can transform your vision of the world and your personal and professional behavior. Institutions as well as individuals resist facts that will force them to rethink established ideas. To do this, they need a sense of security and an understanding that their larger interests are at stake. The story also describes how personal relationships can spread to involve first small groups and then larger institutions. It is told by several voices, those of European civil servants, politicians and activists, but it is the voice of Robert Pendville that [guides it]. One of the early pioneers of the new European institutions, he [spent] his entire professional career building these institutions."

One of the main messages of the Fourth World Movement has always been that the misery of the Fourth World families is a denial of human rights which demonstrates the indivisibility of human rights.

It is not realistic to separate political rights from economic rights. Wherever one is denied, the others will follow.

Summed up in this statement, first engraved in the Plaza of Human Rights in Paris on October 17, 1987, and since then in thirty-three locations around the world, from the UN Headquarters in New York to the Philippines to Burkina Faso:

Wherever men and women are condemned to live in extreme poverty, human rights are violated. To come together to ensure that these rights be respected is our solemn duty.

(La ou des hommes sont condamnes a vivre dans le misere, le droits de l'homme sont violes. S'unir pour les faire respecter est un devoir sacre.)

Right now, or this Friday, October 17, 2008, U.N. International Day for the Eradication of Extreme Poverty, take a few minutes to bear witness to someone you know who is fighting poverty, in their own life and/or on behalf of others.

Artisans of Democracy 3

This morning my friend and I met to talk about the next chapter, “The Powerless Renew the Struggle for Equity: Hospital Trade Union Reaches Out to Cleaning Staff,” by Annie Fifre with Bruno Tardieu and Isabelle Frochaux.

From the introduction:

Before: Trade unions are increasingly confronted by the challenge of organizing and representing temporary, contingent and/or unskilled workers. These workers are particularly hard to reach and organize. They also tend to be considered less combative and effective in the struggle for more justice. Yet, in the name of that very ideal of justice, it is discouraging for unions to see the gap widening between the most vulnerable workers and the rest of the work force. The tension between the unions’ two major goals – gaining the power to win struggles, and reaching the most powerless – seems hard to reconcile.

After: In one hospital [in France], unskilled and temporary cleaning staff, traditionally left out of and sometimes afraid of unions, eventually joined a union and even the union staff. This produced changes in the relationship between workers, in the strategy of the union, and in the very organization of the hospital to take into account the cleaners’ knowledge of the patients in its system of information.

We really liked this chapter. It was clearly written with vivid anecdotes illustrating the process.

One of the main things we noticed was that this was a 15 year long story. It started with the author’s introduction to the Fourth World Movement and making the connection between her own life and her mother’s life with the things she read about in the FWM books. After her co-workers donated funds for a FWM rally in 1982, she started putting the FWM newsletter up on the hospital bulletin board. Slowly she began to realize the gaps between her involvement in the FWM and her work as a lab technician and union organizer; and the relative invisibility of the cleaning staff at the hospital. It was the newsletters on the bulletin board that helped her to open the conversation with the cleaners. After four years.

This confirmed for us that all of our work is part of a long process and reminded us not to be discouraged when changing a situation seems hopeless.

I wondered about what is really hopeless. One of the anecdotes that stood out for us was from a time when the cleaners started to come to the laboratory staff parties. One of the cleaning women came a few times and then stopped. Much later she explained that someone had said to her, “I didn’t know that one could mix rags with napkins.”

Why? Why would someone say something like that? It’s just intentionally cruel. I think it is a reaction of fear, especially from someone who doesn’t feel very secure about his or her own status in the workplace. Is there any hope that a person who would say something like that could ever really change? We basically agreed that anyone could change but that some people won’t. Even if they came to realize how hurtful they we being. I think someone who would say that knows exactly how hurtful it is.

My queries for today:

What is the difference between an ignorant and offensive remark and an intentionally hurtful remark?

Who are the people in my workplace/neighborhood who are the most vulnerable? How do they see me?

How long, o Lord, how long?

Artisans of Democracy 2

“Beyond Harassment: A Parish Priest, a Village and an Outcast Family”
by Paul Arnesen with Bruno Tardieu

This is the next chapter in the book a friend and I are reading about how ordinary people, families in extreme poverty and social institutions become allies to overcome social exclusion.

From the introduction to the chapter:

Before: Poor families leading chaotic lives have a difficult relationship with their neighbors and local communities, who see them as causing trouble and representing all that they try to protect themselves against. Some families become the constant target of defamation and public outcry, and spend their lives being hounded out of one community after another.

After: The story told here is about such a family [in Britain]. Yet their fleeing from place to place stopped when one man, a parish priest, and then others stood by them, found means to support them, and created dissonance in the consensus to scapegoat them. They ended up finding their place in a community that had initially rejected them. Gradually, they found permanent housing, obtained education for their child and found friends in the village and beyond. … [This story] explores the dilemma of creating a link with the excluded while not alienating the rest of the community, so that they in turn can create links.

One of the real problems in this story was that the family’s needs didn’t fall into any one box. They didn’t exactly fit the criteria for intervention by any of the state agencies. The Fourth World Movement was able to support them as a family unit, which isn’t the usual way that government agencies treat cases.

One of the turning points in the family’s struggle was when they went away for a vacation together for a week at a FWM family center. The mother was able to help prepare activities for the children. The step-father was able to use his skills in gardening and forestry and to teach others. The son was able to stop fighting to defend his mother all the time and to play the lead in a show put on by the children for their parents. They were respected as a family unit and they drew strength from it.

The priest took a stand in his church on behalf of the poor and excluded. Even though parishioners threatened to stop coming if he married the couple in the church, he felt this was his mission as a priest.

This support helped other professionals to really listen to the family’s needs and seriously look for solutions. It also helped the parents to speak up for themselves once someone had seriously listened to them.

What my friend and I talked about was how hard changing the dynamic is. To facilitate a vacation trip for families who are only used to the difficulties and chaos of their lives, to help them each to succeed in something and to have time to relax, is a lot of work. Helping a woman who's been humiliated before to tell her story and expect respect is a lot of work.


My queries:

Do I take the time to really listen when people are trying to tell me about their problems?

Do I look beyond first impressions to really try to get to know people?

Do I reach out to people who are being excluded even if it would be embarrassing for me?

Artisans of Democracy

An old co-worker from the Fourth World Movement (FWM) and I are meeting monthly to explore our role as allies in the struggle against extreme poverty.

We are reading a book together: Artisans of Democracy: How Ordinary People, Families in Extreme Poverty, and Social Institutions Become Allies to Overcome Social Exclusion, by Jona M. Rosenfeld and Bruno Tardieu, (c)2000 University Press of America.

I’m going to try to blog a little about the chapter we read each month. We already covered:

“Restoring Dialogue Between School and All Parents”
“No More Power Cuts: Electricity is a Public Service”
“We Stand By You No Matter What: The Saga of a Small Business and a Homeless Employee”

This month’s chapter was “The Media & The Voiceless: One Ethic For All,” by Jurg Meyer, a reporter for the Baseler Zeitung newspaper in Switzerland since the late 1960’s. It is the story of how one journalist pulled the levers that changed the way the national media view the very poor in their country:

• to ensure that everyone’s rights are respected, including the right to privacy, the right to not have unproved accusations printed publicly, to have the right to respond and redress, especially for people who do not have the power to enforce their rights.

• to reflect the hopes and efforts of very poor people to improve their own lives and those who have a harder time than themselves.

From the introduction:

“In our information age, the way people and groups are represented in the media helps determine the place they hold in the economy and in the democratic process.”

“Before: The Baseler Zeitung is the largest German-language daily newspaper in Switzerland, a country that at the time of the story denied the existence of poverty in its midst; the newspaper was no different.”

“After: When a full report on the nature of poverty and the lives of the poor was published in the Sunday section of the Baseler Zeitung [in 1972], Swiss citizens were stunned. Very poor families began to be viewed as individuals and as citizens; they started to call on the newspaper to let the many injustices visited on them be publicized. Journalists started to reflect on their practice and its impact on the poorest citizens. This process challenged and changed the very ethic of the newspaper, as it did that of other major Swiss news media.”

One of the things my friend and I noticed were that this chapter didn’t reflect the difficulties in this process nearly as much as the previous chapter about the small carpenter’s shop working with a homeless employee. It all sounds rather magical, “I wrote this story and voilá the whole country came to see my point.” I don’t think that is really how it happened, and I don’t think the author intended that effect. I think this may be related to the fact that the story is about a process that began thirty years earlier, and some of the hardships have been skipped over. He did acknowledge the complexity of intervening in people’s lives, none of which are simple or one sided.

Another thing we wondered about is how much influence the presence of Fr. Joseph Wresinski, the charismatic founder of the Fourth World Movement, had on the people who encountered him personally (like Jurg Meyer) and the difference for those of us who joined the Movement after his death. When my friend and I joined in the early 90’s, the long-term volunteers were still all in various stages of mourning, four years after his death. Today, there is a better sense of perspective, but it remains to be seen how the FWM will hold together and carry on through the next generation without Fr. Joseph’s personal touch.

Some of my lingering questions are:

How can I be a lever of change in my own community or profession?

How can I help very poor people to be heard? On my blog? In social service fundraising?

How can I transmit what I learned from Fr. Joseph’s writings and speeches and the people he taught?

The new monasticism, part 1

So now I’ve actually read the whole Christianity Today article on “The New Monasticism”, which I first saw on aj schwanz’s blog. (Thanks to Chris M. for printing it out for me.)

AJ mentioned that she used to think that "Quaker nun" was more her calling. I realize I have sought this out all my adult life. A commitment larger than myself. Answering a call from God to serve the poor. I sometimes think maybe in a previous life I WAS a Catholic nun. Or maybe in my next life, if I’m good enough in this one. :)

When I worked with the Fourth World Movement (an organization whose website is totally unworthy of the work that they do), I learned so much from people who had been Fourth World Volunteers for 5, 10, 20 years already, by their radical understanding of the life and spirit of the poor. The FWM was founded intentionally as an international, inter-denominational (including atheists, he would have added) community by Father Joseph Wresinski, a Roman Catholic priest who grew up in a very poor family.

When I worked for the American Red Cross, the sense of responding to the urgency and desperate need of people was a bonding element that defines and motivates and strengthens the people who work there.

At the St. Boniface Restoration Project , I worked for one of the great peace activists of our time, Fr. Louie Vitale, OFM as he humbly took up the cause of one of the poorest parishes in San Francisco to preserve and restore the still beautiful church, friary and school buildings as a gathering place and a resting place for hundreds of people, poor and not so poor, who come there every day. I learned up close about the profound impact of the Franciscan presence in the Tenderloin for the last 100 years

In each of my jobs, I have served the poor, from up close or far away. Seems so far away right now. I have basically taken the last five years off of my work directly with the poor, while I’ve been having little babies. Currently I work part-time, technically serving the poor, but mostly for the money and security. Also, I feel divided. I have been working for Catholics because frankly, they are closer to the poor in my town. But my loyalties lie with the Quakers. How can the Quakers in my town respond more openly, more fully to the poor who lie right outside our meetinghouse doors? How do I reconcile my wish for security, to protect my children and my ability to provide for them, with my desire to be open, to be of service to the wider community, to the Kingdom of God?

Only by the grace of God.

The new monasticism, part 2

This CT article mentions rightly that it is hard on a community to have people come and go too quickly. “Inner-city hopelessness is so deeply rooted that ministry takes years of building one-on-one relationships before it is effective.” says Don Stubbs. The Fourth World Movement tries to maintain some stable team members in each location, and limits direct contact for very new volunteers. In an article in the August 2005 issue of Friends Journal, the memoir of a woman’s work with AFSC among the Cheyenne in 1968, the author also refers to this practice.

An important part of the discipline of monasticism (and marriage) that wasn’t discussed in this article is that traditionally it’s not easy to get out of these commitments. The usual implication is that it’s a lifetime commitment. And sometimes (maybe not so much nowadays) it’s that sense of “Well, I promised, so I’m sticking around” that gets us through the dark tunnels of life and out into the brighter light on the other side. I think this is a good thing.

“Since God is the author of love, no couple [or community] can without God make good their promise to love one another for the rest of their lives. … Love must inevitably change and mature, and every relationship has its times of stress as well as its times of renewal. But there are periods in some [all?] married [or monastic] lives when all that can be done is to go on trying to love and to
continue to believe in the elusive and unique quality for which we gave ourselves to our partner [or community] until death should part us. …

What a triumph when old love is transformed into deeper, surer new love which can accept more fully what each has, and the pair [community] find a rebirth together in those things which are eternal and through this a renewal of their everyday living.”

from London Yearly Meeting, 1959, as quoted in Plain Living: A Quaker Path to Simplicity by Catherine Whitmire, 2001. [additions mine, 2005]

This is important to me because living in any community is hard work. One of my recent insights is that having children prepares us for when our parents and then our partners get old. We practice changing diapers, setting limits, forgiving weaknesses on our babies, who are in fact cute and we know that they can’t help it, so that we know what to do; we’ve developed the spiritual and intestinal fortitude to be able to wipe up someone else’s vomit and change bandages for people who aren’t cute, when it’s harder to remember that they really can’t help it, when we are thrust into roles we never asked for. In religious orders, this work still has to be done for their aged and disabled brothers and sisters.

What will the new monastics do with people when they have given all they can, and need to be taken care of? Will they still be around? It is a blessing to be able to care for these elders, but will the communities still serve the outside or have all their resources absorbed by old members?