 Hi everyone and welcome to our first Global Studies Assembly of the Year. Today we are celebrating the International Day of Peace. It's observed around the world each year on September 21st. Established in 1981 by a unanimous United Nations resolution, Peace Day provides a globally shared date for all humanity to commit to peace above all differences and to contribute to building a culture of peace. The United Nations invites all nations and people to honor a cessation of hostilities during the day and to otherwise commemorate the day through education and public awareness on issues related to peace. And Mr. T, will you go to the next slide for me? Great, this year the theme is shaping peace together and even though Peace Day was yesterday, we are really excited to be able to celebrate the day all together as an upper school. And we hope that all of you will consider taking the Peace Day challenge and if you do something related to peace to share that with the hashtag peace day challenge or shaping peace together. And right now I want to turn things over to Forest Hutchison. Hi everyone, my name is Forest Hutchison and I am the Senior Prefect for the Global Studies Committee. So today I have the honor of introducing Ms. Rosa Emilia Salmanca-Gonzalez, a finalist for the 2020 Women Building Peace Award. Rosa Emilia has been working steadfastly to build peace in Colombia for nearly 30 years. Her involvement in the Women's National Summit yielded important results and no doubt shaped the final peace agreement that Colombia so proudly hosts today. The involvement of the Women's National Summit and the 2016 peace process between the Colombian government and revolutionary armed forces of Colombia people's army was crucial to realize one of the most inclusive peace agreements to date globally. Rosa Emilia's quiet leadership is heightened by her keen intuition and with her intersectional approach and her understanding of war and identity she knows what spaces need her edge of support and experience. She began her career in education teaching intercultural educational programs to indigenous people and is excited to be back with students today. Before we welcome Rosa Emilia, I would like to turn the program over to Ms. Megan Chabalowski. Ms. Chabalowski is a program officer in the public education department at the U.S. Institute of Peace where she develops educational content and facilitates workshops for students and educators. As part of the public education team Ms. Chabalowski also manages USIP's peace teachers program and focuses on increasing young people's involvement and understanding of international conflict management and peace building. You may also remember Ms. Chabalowski from last year's peace day assembly when she gave us a virtual tour of USIP's headquarters in Washington DC. So please welcome Ms. Megan Chabalowski. Thank you Forrest for that kind introduction. It's lovely to see you all again. Happy International Day of Peace. It's great to speak with you all in Mississippi from my home in Washington DC. As Forrest said I'm Megan Chabalowski from the U.S. Institute of Peace. I am so excited that we could help bring you your guest speaker Rosa Emilia Salamanca Gonzalez to you today from Colombia. I want to thank Ms. Phil Pot with whom I've had the great privilege to work this year and last year as part of USIP's peace teachers program and the many other St. Andrew's teachers and students who have made this assembly possible. Each year USIP helps raise the profile of the International Day of Peace through the peace day challenge as you've heard which asks people across the U.S. and around the world to join us in taking an action for peace and sharing it on social media. So this assembly today is a great way to participate in the challenge. So thank you all for doing so. My organization the U.S. Institute of Peace was founded by Congress to serve the American people and the federal government by promoting international peace and the resolution of conflicts abroad without using violence. To accomplish this we work with governments, local partners and everyday citizens in countries where there is war or violent conflict in support of those who are working to build a more peaceful and inclusive world. We believe that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical and essential, and so does your guest speaker here today. Rosa Emilia was recently a finalist for USIP's inaugural Women Building Peace Award. Every day women around the world are leading movements to create enduring peaceful societies. The Women Building Peace Award honors the inspiring work of women peace builders whose courage, leadership and commitment to peace stand out as beacons of strength and hope. So please join me in welcoming Rosa Emilia to whom I am turning the floor. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for this invitation. I want to thank Megan, I want to thank Kathleen, Emily and of course Forrest and Ami or everyone that has had something to do with this invitation. Thank you so much for bringing the opportunity for me to talk with all these young people that I find that is really very, very nice, a very beautiful experience. I also want to say hello to Forrest Hatrison and thank you for the introduction. And well I was thinking very much how to talk with you. I, one of my dreams have ever, all the time I was telling Emily and Megan and the others, I was telling that I want to see Mississippi River. That is one of my dreams. But I haven't had the opportunity and I want to see it because it has so or you hear that the Mississippi has so many memories, so many things that happen through coming and going through the river of Mississippi. So one day I will go there and I really think that it will be a fantastic experience for me to understand what is all what happened through and coming from Mississippi River. But meanwhile I want to show you who I was more or less at your age. I was studying in Bogota and I had a lot of ideas. I all the time was trying to discuss and understand why my country had so many problems. Since I have memory, Colombia has been involved in different conflicts. They, our country have had different moments of different conflicts and I have never known what it has, what is to be in a country in peace. So one of the things that we really want to understand and to learn is what is a society that can live in peace. But I think that it's very difficult now in the whole world. It's very difficult to imagine a society that is in peace. And what does it mean? What does peace mean? I think for a long time we thought that it was only justice, that it was only trying to see how things are not so bad for poor people. But slowly we understood that there were a lot of different kinds of discriminations that were involved in all the issues of peace. That peace was not only what you can feel as violent in the public sphere, but also what you can feel that it was violent in your private sphere. So walking, walking and seeing so many things, at the beginning when I just went to university I decided to study anthropology. And in that time to be an anthropologist was something very, very nice and very special because Colombia has a very incredible, diverse of people living here. So we have a lot of people that came from slavery and sugar cane plantations in other centuries. But we also have indigenous people and we have also people, peasants that are living in the rural areas and we are very, very diverse. So being an anthropologist was in the 17th, the 18th, I was in the university at the end of the 70s and beginnings of the 80s in the past century. I discovered the whole world of diversity. I discovered the richness of being with indigenous people. I discovered the richness of culture. I discovered the richness of so many different points of view. So at the beginning I was trying to work also to pay my university. I studied in a public university because I really wanted, because I defend very much public institutions, public health, public education, all this kind of institution. I think they are so important for people, especially in my country. So I studied in the public university, in the national public university. It's a huge university. It's one of the biggest ones in Colombia. It's a very good one. And then I try to find money and to do my work and to create the wordness about what I was seeing in society. I was, at the beginning, I tried to work also as a clown. It was really fun because I, yeah, you always think of a peacemaker as a very serious and committed person. But we also have fun. We also can smile. We can also have other ways of going and coming in different languages with people. So in the young times I was a clown and I also had a group of muppets. And muppets were very useful to create awareness with people, going to different places, to schools and everything, to community places, to tell the story of what was happening in our country. After that, I decided to work very closely with Indigenous communities. And why? Because I think that the Indigenous people are people that are ignored by societies. They are the original inhabitants of America, but we sometimes think that they really don't exist. They are in some places. So one of the ray invindication that we have for peace was to bring on board Indigenous communities. They are very, many, many Indigenous communities we have in Colombia. We have more of 86 different languages, although we speak Spanish as our main language. But we have many languages, even in some of our islands we speak English. In what we call San Andrés and Providencia, they speak English. They come from English speaker slaves. So after that I decided to work in education and intercultural programs for education. So I had the great opportunity of being also a teacher. And that taught me a lot about children, about how, because they were culturally very different to what I was used to have. And I was. So we decided to begin to do the intercultural programs of education. But that was like, I was inspired so, all the time, so much by people. People have so much knowledge. Sometimes we think that knowledge only comes from academy. And I think there is a special knowledge that we can really see in all the academy, in schools, in former schools. But we have forgotten all the other knowledge that people are taking away all the time when they just leave, when they have all the fights, when they fight to survive, when they fight and they know so many things about how to survive, how to move over now to really survive. So I really learned. I had a an incredible school in between the Indigenous people. They taught me so much about nature. They taught me about relations. They taught me about community. And because this talk is about building peace together, it's very important to see people that in their own ways and in their communities, they build peace and they build relations and they build so many things together. So they taught me that being an individual was very important, but being a community was even more important because it was the magnificent relation and dynamic of many individualities that were so powerful working together in the achieve of justice, in the achieve of peace, in the achieve of non-discrimination, in the achieve of many of the things that we, that all the time we are discussing about and that working together was the way also to try to find how and why politics were done, why these politics and not that other policies and how things were drawn. So there was a lot of things that in community you can come together and find more answers in the discussions, more ways. You can be very creative in communities. So we moved and we have many, many difficulties in our country. It's not the worst country in the world, but as many other countries that have lived in conflict, in armed conflict, we have had a hard time. But I think that we also have a hard time because we have many different conflicts that are in contact with that, that was the political conflict. The political conflict in Colombia, I don't know if you all know where Colombia is. Colombia is in the southern, in the southern part of the continent and it is the corner where you have two big seas, the Atlantic and the Pacific. We have a beautiful landscape and in that country many things have happened. We had many political struggles and many political conflicts, armed conflicts because it was a very unjust country. But war is something that is very difficult to understand. Once you start a war or an armed conflict, it's very difficult to stop it. It's very difficult, it's very easy to do it, but it's so difficult to stop it because then many things come to that conflict, proud and people don't want to understand the others and they think that if they don't defeat the other they will look like weak and it is really very difficult to de-scalate a conflict that has arrived. So we had a conflict for 60 long years. Still we have conflicts, but in the last part of that conflict things were really bad because there were many actors of the conflict and we are a very polarized society. So one of the advices is that when societies began to come very polarized, it's very important to have some kind of dialogue. It's very important to reach the difference to me, not only to think that I have the truth. Maybe I have a little bit of the truth, but one of the things that creates wars and armed conflicts is thinking that people have the truth. And we have to understand that truth is something that emerged of the talk and interchange of experience between many people. Nobody has the truth. Nobody. There's no one that has the truth. You created all the time. So I think that one of the incredible things that happened in Colombia is that we began and polarized and have many people that were dead, disappeared. And then a terrible thing happened and the fuel for the conflict came from the narcotrafic. Narcotrafic is something that is global. Colombian people have been discriminated so much because they come from what they call a narcotrafic country. But what narcotrafic gave to this country was fuel for very own political conflict. But also the problem of narcotrafic is a global problem. There is a demand in many countries in Europe, United States, Canada, all over the world. And then some of the countries will cultivate where many poor people are, where many persons are very poor and have very little to live with. So this fuel of the narcotrafic money came to our conflict and really began a fire, an incredible fire during the 2000, between the 1998 and 2010, 2000 something. Finally we had a peace agreement. And in that peace agreement there was a huge involvement of women. And let me tell you a little bit about women. Women can be very strong and very persistent in achieving peace. We work in many ways. We try to do our best in achieving peace. And when we talk about achieving peace we are not talking about only the silence of arms and the stopping of killing with bullets. We are also talking in a more religious way. We are talking about peace that will end with discrimination. That will end with injustice. That will end with so many things that in societies are really the causes of the conflict. So when we are talking about peace we are not talking only about a naive peace, or a peace that will also like food make up in societies. We have to talk about peace in a deeper way. We have to go inside societies and then we have to fix so many things that are but not only in our societies but in the whole world. So we decided to work highly, very, very strongly in this peace agreement that women have been working previously in peace for a very long time. So one of the things that I I really want to share is that many women have a peace agenda. Although many women don't know that they have a peace agenda I have the fortune of being a recognized peacemaker but I know so many women in my country that are building peace day by day that is incredible. Where do you build peace? You build peace in your house but in your house is not only peace is not silence, peace is not confronting, peace is not debating, peace is not saying what they think of what I am thinking. Peace is not being a way of freedom. Freedom is something very important with respect and with inclusion and trying to have conflict resolution and transforming our conflicts. So I think that many women begin to have began to do peace or to change relations in their own country in their own families, changing the relations of power that you have in your house. Being and trying to be and having environments of equity and non-discrimination between children, between men and women, families, etc. So peace is something that you began to have in your head is a conduct, is a way of behavior, is a way of trying to have societies that can discuss, that can tense, that can have many debates but they will change in many ways culture. So peace is a strong question to culture and there are many ways of changing culture. With studies, with research, with culture, with art, with economy but if you are sure that you are changing the original structural points that have to be changed to have really as consequence a change of the system that will bring opportunities of a different behavior, non-discrimination behavior, a real distribution for people that will really have the opportunity for work, for health, for education. So peace is something that is really very comprehensive. When we did the appease agreement in Colombia, many of the women in Colombia were victims of the of the conflict. What is to be a victim of a conflict? Is to be endured by the conflict although you are not a combatant, not necessarily because you are a combatant but because you were near or you have a boyfriend that was a guerrillero or you have a boyfriend that was a militia or you have a boyfriend or you have a family or whatever or because you have sexual abuse or because you were slayed by different troops to work as in the cooking of meals. You have many ways of being all being kidnapped. So many women were victims. In Colombia we or you have been displaced of your territory and your territory has been taken away. So we have had so many different victims in our country, so many different ways of victims that we have 8,300,000 victims of the conflict in Colombia. That is unbelievable in a country of 40, more or less 47, 48 million of people. 8 million of people were victims of our conflict. So when the peace agreement began to to work and to everyone was working in this peace agreement, one of the things that the people were asking is that the victims must be in the center and putting the victims in the center of the agreement was telling these people that have been armed for so long that they have not only keying between them but they have affected society so highly. 8 million of civil victims of people of civil society that they had to repair those victims and women began to work very hard in this in this idea. This is one of the most inclusive peace agreements that we are in gender focus, in gender perspective, but we are still working and then I don't know if I can move forward to to answer some of the questions that I have been asked by the students. I don't know Megan if I can. That would be great. Thank you so much for your message and I know that we have some students who have questions for you and Lillian is going to start us off. Yeah okay thank you so much. Okay so what advice would you give to someone trying to start a career similar to yours? Oh that's very difficult. I don't have a special advice. It's something that is in your heart. You know that you want to work for others. You want to work you know in your heart that you want to be involved in things that not not only for you. You know you cannot go through the world without seeing injustice, without seeing all what is happening to other people. So the advice is just look to your heart and your mind and see if there is a call for you and you feel that you want to work with others. If that call is not that is very difficult because you will try to do something that it doesn't come from your soul from your heart. So you have to ask your heart and your mind and put your mind and your hand in the same parallel and answer. I want to work with others in these issues then you can have the answer and the road is your own road. I mean everyone will do their own path towards what they do. It's experiences is learning from others. It's being open. It's reading. It's reading reality. I think great question Eileen. Thank you. Sinclair it is your turn. Hi my name is Sinclair McKinney in 10th grade. My question is if you were able to work with one person in the whole world who would you want to work with? That is a very difficult question. I've been thinking so much. So many people I admire. Of course I admire people that are very well known in peace like Mandela or Gandhi and that is usual to answer. But I think I have worked with people that have taught me very much and those are the people that are known. When I tell you I work with indigenous people or I work with Afro-descendant communities or I work with the people that are in my country that suffer so much with the conflict and victims. They have taught me so much about life, about empathy, about changing the souls, about trying to reconciliation with others after suffering so much. I think that I have met already the people that I like to work with and those are the ones that I work with actually. Thank you Sinclair. Raymond. Hi my name is Raymond Huang and I have a question in Spanish if that's okay. ¿Cuáles son los problemas más importantes que usted está resolviendo en Colombia ahora? ¿Quieres que te contesten español? You want me to answer Spanish also? We have many many difficult problems. I think that one of the problems is polarization of our society. We live in a very polarized society and that is bringing many, we are still, our minds are, we have two big problems. Still we have many armed people in the country so we still have conflict inside the country in many of the areas because still there is some political groups that are in arms but also we have this horrible problem of narcotrafic and we also have all this well narcotrafic and all the organized crime that is so transnational. So this is a huge problem for us but at the same time we our society has to do a transition in our minds and hearts and souls and everything to go out of the conflict. So we are trying to implement the peace agreement but we have to implement it in what has been written in the document with all the things that we have to do for the next 15 years but we also have to change our minds and our ways of of or behave. So I think we have to learn many ways of resolving our own normal conflicts and trying to find a way not to have such a polarized society. Also because peace brings like the floor and many problems as a rise with very strong voices because there is so much inequality in our country that now we have one of our complicated problems is that everyone is trying to find a way to have the rights accomplished and we have to try to put our voices in the same way so we can work for a country that in some way in reconciliation and some kind of harmony we can move together towards peace achievement really. Great thank you Raymond for your question and we have one last question from Forrest. Hi so my question is how can we as students engage with your mission and the mission of your organization CSA and other peace building efforts around the world? That is a great question and I was thinking I really want to engage these these men and young women and young men with this accomplishment of peace. So I think it will we are actually now doing a campaign of women's peace builders. So we want you to take a picture of yourself saying we support women's peace builders and you can tweet to siace.org and we can do a lot of moments about and you can say I support you can have small videos or I support women peace builders because and I support women's peace builders in Colombia because and that will be extremely good and it will really be part of a natural campaign that we are having in our country so that will be really incredible for us if you can do this with us. So we are open and you can tweet you can put it in all your networks and so and so and put siace.org and put uc. I don't know what is your treaty address and the school so we can have like one I don't know one week or something like that in this time of building peace together we can build peace together you and us we can build peace together so I think that is an incredible good question and I hope you will do it. Thank you Forrest great question and Rosa Emilia I cannot thank you enough for joining us today on behalf of myself and Mr. Jakarski and the Global Studies Program and St. Andrews we are really thankful that you are willing to give of your time to speak with students today. I also would like to thank the USIP and Megan and her colleagues several of whom have been watching you speak today as well and Megan do you have any final things to say. Notice a big thank you to all of you and what a wonderful call to action and I'm excited to go do that myself so I've made some notes so it's lovely to see you all again thank you for having us and I wish that Rosa Emilia you could hear applause if we were in a scenario where we could give you a standing ovation for the words that you shared with us today and the importance of women in peace building so thank you very much. Don't get clapped only loud we can do one room of clapping so thank you so very much. Thank you. Bye. I'd like to see you. By everyone at St. Andrews if y'all will stay in the call we are going to transition I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Jakarski who's going and the Global Studies team who are going to talk about the wonderful virtual offerings for the fall. Rosa Emilia and Megan you are welcome to stay and hear that but I know you've got busy schedule so we will see you later. Bye bye. This is great Mr. Spickle thank you so much for