 Tēnā koutou katoa. Kō Mangatūtiri te Maunga. I belong to the mountain called Mangatūtiri. Kō waihau te Awa. I belong to the river called Waihau. Kō Pākiha te iwi. I belong to the tribe that's called Pākiha. Kō Elliot, Tuck, Jacobson me kō Falkana ngā whānau. I belong to the families called Jacobson, Tuck, Elliot and Falkana. Nō Ireland, Scotland, Denmark me no Sweden. Toku Tipuna. My ancestors came here from Ireland, Scotland, Sweden and Denmark. Kō Meriang tohku ingua. My name is Meriang. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. I wanted to start with this very simple form of my pepeha because it's a form of narrative. It's a version of a story of who I am and where I come from. It's a particularly important one to me because the mountain and the river that I belong to form a very deep part of my personal identity as do the places from which my ancestors came and the country to which they came. But it's just one example of the many ways in which personal narrative are embedded and woven through ancient practices and ancient wisdom here in Aotearoa, New Zealand and all around the world. And I'm nervous today as I was just saying to Matthew and I wondered why am I nervous in a room of such warm and open and welcoming listeners? And it's because I care. I really care a lot. I care about the initiative and the people who are hosting this initiative. I care about all of you and I care really deeply about story, really deeply. And so I had a plan when I arrived here yesterday morning about what I was going to talk about and I'm not going to do that. I wanted to tell you a large and a grand story about change, a story to which Billy hinted in my current project at Action Station, although at the end of my talk I'm going to just pull a few threads out of that story. Instead, I really noticed over the past two days some emerging themes for me of why I care so much about story and why I was so thrilled that these two days here were focused on the theme of story. And I'm going to explore about so many reasons why a story mattered to me, but I'm going to explore a little bit four of those many reasons and explore them through the form of personal narrative of stories from my life. So the first reason and perhaps the one that's easiest to explain almost entirely scientifically, that stories matter so much. Is that our brains are designed or have evolved, I'm not going to get into that debate, to make sense of the world around us through story. There was a time when we survived largely as hunters and gatherers and when the hunters went out and came back from a hunt, the first thing they would do is tell a story about that hunt and that hunt story would be retold. And it wasn't being told purely for entertainment purposes, it was being told as a way to mark out the territory into which tomorrow's hunters would be travelling. So that story gave us signals of how to make sense of the territory through which we were moving as hunters. It gave us some idea about which rocks we might want to check behind for Saber Tooth Tigers. It gave us ideas about which territory we might want to go into to find mammoths to hunt. And over the many, many years of human coexistence, the wire or the pathways in our brain that receive, store and recall story-based information have become very deeply worn. And so we are literally neurologically wired to understand the world through stories, which is why stories are sticky. Somebody this morning raised that question of which kind of stories are sticky. The truth is all stories that really work as narratives are sticky. So just for a minute I keep looking at Kate, so I'm going to use Kate as an example. Kate was speaking yesterday and she shared many interesting ideas and posed some very interesting questions, and I can remember most of them now. But I also remember very clearly a story about Kate walking along a beach after a breakup and really having, you know, in the thick of some feelings of uncertainty, let's say, and the clarity with which a voice said to her that she belonged there. And in a year's time, I cannot attest to you with confidence that I will remember all of the ideas and questions that Kate posed, but I know I will never forget that story. Because stories are sticky. They stay with us. The other thing that stories do very, very well is remind us of subjectivity. And I've been thinking about that so much in the past two days. I was thinking about Sam Johnson's story. And in Sam's story, the thing that makes the biggest difference are many, many small acts by ordinary people. And I was moved by that story, and it was followed almost immediately by Vivian's story, which spoke to me about the way in which change can be facilitated through large institutions, even the kind of enormous bureaucratic institution that I worked in the United Nations and with UNICEF. So, you know, the kind of institution that it might be easy for us to dismiss or imagine exists somehow at the opposite end of the spectrum to the kind of people-led movement that Sam was talking about. And so what stories do is they remind us that Sam's story is Sam's story. And Viv's story is Viv's story. And they can both be gifts to us and we can learn from both of them. But by presenting them to us as stories, we're given the space to hold space for other stories. So I want to start off a little bit with the stories that explain something of who I am, because when I first sort of encountered personal narrative as a tool, it was when I'd left school and I'd moved to Hamilton to study law. And I had made a choice that I had no comprehension at the time of the significance of this choice, which was that I made the choice to study law at the brand-new, just-opened, that year, law school that was being set up by Margaret Wilson. It was a radical law school. I was attempting to be the first law school in New Zealand that would be founded on bicultural principles and on a bicultural approach to the law in New Zealand. I'm not sure that that original vision has been sustained over the years, but I had the opportunity to study there with Moana Jackson and Margaret Wilson and others. And one of the first things that I learnt there was that the story of my country, when I had learnt it to that point, was missing a lot of stories. And so the first time I encountered personal narrative, it was as a means for voices that had been excluded from the established mainstream narrative to interact with, sometimes challenge, and almost inevitably disrupt, that mainstream narrative. There was the stories of women saying, actually, this was also happening in the world, why this was happening, and it was the story of cultural and ethnic and other minority groups. So what they taught me was, I cannot interact with the world without first engaging with my history. And so I start with this photo, which is of my great-grandfather, Marcus Ashley Tuck, and my great-grandmother, Metha Johansson, in there you have the Irish, the Scottish, the Swedish and the Danish, all in one photo. And that photo is of them in Papua New Guinea, where they were missionaries. And this photo is of my grandfather, Chibald Elliott, in Nigeria, where he was also a missionary. And this photo is of me in the centre and my older sister and some of our friends in Papua New Guinea, where we were also missionaries. So a part of my story and a part of the lens through which it's probably useful for people to understand the career I went on to have an international humanitarian work is that I come from a long line of missionaries. And it's been important to me to place my personal story in the context of that historical narrative. So what it helps is it helps me to make really explicit that the experiences I had in Afghanistan, in Gaza and East Timor were inevitably filtered through the prism of the experiences my ancestors had had and the understanding that I carried from them. We did leave Papua New Guinea and we returned to New Zealand. That's me with my prize lamb. I went to some of my next door neighbours and I had a childhood and then a young adulthood in rural New Zealand on a farm, predominantly a dairy farm although Dad always kept a few sheep just so that we could have them for lamb day. And I also grew up in a brethren family which those of you particularly who aren't from New Zealand may not be familiar with the brethren denomination. It's statistically the smallest Christian denomination in the world so don't feel bad if you've never heard of us. But if you are from the United States there are some similarities between the brethren denomination and Mennonites, theologically. There are some differences. In New Zealand we have an exclusive brethren and an open brethren and let's not get into that. Anyway I grew up in a brethren community, rural New Zealand and if you know that about me there's a whole lot of other things about the way that I move through the world and the sense that I make of the world that you might understand in a different way than if you don't know that about me. My first career choice was to be a lawyer and I think that's an important thing to know about me. I love that wigs so much. I'm 21 years old appearing for the first time before the High Court of New Zealand presenting, wait for it, Coca-Cola. But we were up against Lion Nathan. No, it doesn't make any difference. The piece of my narrative that matters about this is that I have always had a character, a mind and a personality that loves to discern right from wrong. I like very much to be able to say this is right and this is wrong and law was a wonderful career for somebody with that personality. It is also quite a dangerous career for somebody with that personality because what it does is it reinforces the tendencies that I already had and the sort of innate desire that I had to understand the world through this prism of this is right and this is wrong. So I also feel that if people know that about me it helps them to understand sometimes who I show up as now in the world. Finally, this is a photo of me three days after my 20th birthday when I was marrying the son of the pastor of the Brethren Church and yet look at my dress. So what this tells you about me is that I very much wanted to fit in and I very much wanted to stand out. That is not a dress that your average Brethren bride was wearing in 1993. But that part of my story leads me into the point at my story in which my belief and the clarity of what was right and what was wrong began to break down and some of you got to hear a little bit of this this morning and the personal sharing. I'm not going to go into quite so much detail as I did then. But my marriage didn't last. I got married at the age of 20. We were divorced by the time I was 25. And for somebody who had dedicated her life to being an obedient and pleasing daughter and a good Christian that was devastating. It was devastating. Not only could I not stay in my marriage but it was so devastating that I couldn't stay in New Zealand. I didn't know how to be in this country. If I couldn't be the person who I thought my family, my friends, my entire social circle was connected to the Brethren Church. If I couldn't be the person who I thought they needed me to be. So I didn't just leave my marriage. I went to New Zealand and so we go from this photo to this one. Which is me a few... I look like 10 years older. It's the cigarettes, Marianne. I stopped not long after this. This is me having run away from my life. No. Walked away from my life. Walked away from my life. I just kept walking. I took a flight to South Africa. I landed in Johannesburg, took another flight to Cape Town and I started walking and I walked for 11 months. And I walked through East Africa and I walked through the Middle East and on that long walk I learned that there was a world out there in which getting divorced was not the worst thing that you could do. And I discovered that there were all kinds of different ways that people held themselves in the world and all kinds of different beliefs that people used to guide their movement through the world and their interactions with each other. And I also wrote a lot of stories. And the other thing that I personally learned on that walk was that my parents and my friends and my family did not love me just because I was a good, brethren girl. They just loved me. I didn't come home but I was like, not yet. Haven't walked all the way. And I walked all the way to Jerusalem. And in Jerusalem I started the next chapter of my story. So if the first part of this was about the extent to which stories ground us in our subjectivity, our personal perspective and remind us that when we speak it's to me anyway really empowering to me really liberating to speak from my story so I don't have to know that this is true for all of you. And if I tell you my story then you can also filter the things I'm telling you through your own understanding of that story. In Jerusalem I began a chapter of my life in which I discovered that story was a way for me to engage with complexity. And I very rarely talk about the time of my life that I spent in Palestine. For reasons that are probably obvious to a lot of you it's a very, very complex social and political context there. And it's one in which the stakes are very high for many, many people. And it's one in which the stakes are high for people all over the world. So it's not only when I'm in Gaza or in Tel Aviv that I might be speaking to somebody for whom this issue carries enormous personal weight for them. But also here in New Zealand. But I want to introduce you to a couple of characters in Gaza who helped me get a sense of how a story could help me navigate that complexity. So this is Rajesh Sorani. He was my boss for the two years that I was in Gaza. He's a human rights lawyer. He's won many international and global peace prizes. He's also hated by many. He's a unrelenting advocate for the rights of Palestinians. Both vis-a-vis the Israeli government and vis-a-vis the Palestinian administration. I worked for him for two years. He made me cry many times. And he kept telling me I just had to toughen up. It never worked. I never did. But Rajesh's theory of change was that by engaging in the legal system he could bring to light what was going on, particularly in places of detention, both in Israel and in Gaza. His best friend was this man, Dr Iad Al-Saraj. Dr Iad Al-Saraj had a totally different theory of change. But his theory of change was that healing could come to the people of Gaza, his people, only through personally healing the wounds that each of them carried from their experiences. So while Rajesh set up the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Iad sent up the Gaza Community Mental Health Centre. And through these two men, I came to understand that there was no simple answer that one of them wasn't right and the other one wasn't wrong. That where problems are complex, solutions also are complex. And the only way that I really knew how to explore that and many of the other complexities of Gaza was through story. One day I came into the office and Raji was sitting in the foya with a couple of men and a woman. And I got a terrible shock where this is our office in the middle of Gaza speaking Hebrew. And I had never heard Raji speak Hebrew. He spoke English fluently. I knew he could speak Hebrew because he'd learned to speak it in prison. He was in an Israeli prison for quite a long time, but he refused to speak Hebrew. But he was sitting there right in his own office and he was speaking Hebrew and I thought, what is going on here? And what was going on was that he had this woman visiting him. This is Amira Haas. And Amira Haas, at that time, she's an Israeli-Jewish journalist and at that time she was living in one of the refugee camps in Gaza, writing stories about life inside that refugee camp for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and she was the only person in the world with whom Raji was willing to speak Hebrew. And I share that story as well because it was another example of how there was no way for me to really understand the full complexity of the situation I was in or the people who were trying to make sense of it other than through encountering characters, real characters, and engaging with them through the form of their story. Which brings me really to the last and the fourth quality of storytelling that I want to just emphasise today. So stories are important to me because they stick. They're important because they ground us in subjectivity. They're important because they help us process complexity. And finally, stories are, in my view, utterly essential to the work of human connection and social transformation because they are a medium through which we generate empathy for each other and for ourselves. So that's what I wanted to share.