HBP's Academic Advisor and York’s Dean of Health featured in CBC report about peace initiative
CBC reporter Mary Wiens featured Harvey Skinner, dean of York’s Faculty of Health, in one of a series of reports on the non-violence movement in the Middle East, that aired on CBC Radio's "Metro Morning" March 31. Below is a text summary from CBC News online. An audio file of the full report is available on the CBC News website.
Non-violent revolutions don't happen overnight. It is only in the last stage – as we saw in Egypt, or in the peaceful overthrow of many governments in Eastern Europe – that they seem spontaneous – maybe even inevitable.
One place where the revolution is still very much in the making is along the fault lines between Israelis and Palestinians, where many individuals and groups, in their own way, are committed to non-violence in many different forms.
It includes a very quiet initiative by a group of Canadians. CISEPO, founded by Mount Sinai's Dr. Arnie Noyek, is now headed by Dr. Harvey Skinner, dean of health at York University. Call them the Quiet Canadians.
The Canada International Scientific Exchange Program (CISEPO) doesn't hold rallies, or put up posters. Instead the group holds academic meetings and publishes papers in academic journals, like The Lancet. They've built cooperation between these very different groups through projects with universal appeal, like an infant heath screening program.
"A lot of cooperation occurs," says Skinner. "But it occurs very quietly. If we can, as Canadians, create an umbrella for (Israeli and Palestinian) colleagues to meet and then do this again and again, it's doing a little a lot. If you sit across a table, you find out we have more in common, especially those of us who are in health, and it can build over time, respect, trust, co-operation. And we keep doing this again and again."
"We're building what we call a network of co-operation. Doing it quietly. Not front page in the media. Nothing's bleeding here, right? You get a terrorist attack in the region, instantly you get press. We hold a meeting like this – quite remarkable. Not even that much interest in the press."
The audio file of the full report runs 6 minutes 27 seconds.
POSTSECONDARY STUDENTS BUILDING BRIDGES OF TOLERANCE THROUGH “WEEK OF DIALOGUE”
By Shlomit Kriger
Feb. 23, 2011, TORONTO – As nations around the world continue the struggle to forge peace, students at York University are raising awareness about the connection between global health and international cooperation. At 5 p.m. on Thurs., Mar. 3, Health as a Bridge to Peace @ York University will hold an international video conference highlighting two case studies involving two networks of doctors and health professionals in the Middle East and North America. Dr. James Leckman of Empowerment and Resilience in Children Everywhere (ERICE) and Dr. Arnold Noyek of the Canada International Scientific Exchange Program (CISEPO) will discuss their challenges, successes, and how health helped them to bridge differences. Students will also have the chance to provide their input and ask questions. The conference will be held in partnership with Peace by Peace at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and is the first of its kind at York.
This event is one of several student initiatives aimed at cultivating tolerance and understanding that will take place as part of an international “Week of Dialogue” running at postsecondary institutions in Toronto, Hamilton, London, Ontario, Canada, New Haven, CT, USA, and Karachi, Pakistan, from Feb. 28 to Mar. 4. The week is designed to create a safe environment for students, faculty, and community members to engage, plan, act, and reflect on issues related to peace, culture, health, religion, resiliency and community. The activities will be interconnected on local, national, and international levels via blogs, videos, and social media.
“The week aims to build an environment for fellow students where they can better understand each other while building relationships based on trust and understanding,” says Inbal Marcovitch, Co-President of Health as a Bridge to Peace @ York University and a graduate student at the Faculty of Education. “Through the video conference, students will be challenged about the lessons they can learn from the success of the doctors and health networks, as well as how this knowledge can be applied to their local context while maintaining the international perspective.”
“Medicine has always been a transcendent medium through which personal differences seem to melt away in the beat of a heart,” adds Andrew Joshua Kobets, MD Candidate 2012 at the Yale School of Medicine and Co-founder of Peace by Peace. “By infusing its practice into the conflicts of neighbouring populations, we can permeate its ideals into everyday life, thus allowing its life-preserving principles to eclipse the arguments that spiral us toward death.”
Another highlight of this engaging and transformative week will be a program run by the Tzedaka-Sadaqah group at the University of Western Ontario aimed at uniting Jewish and Muslim students as they prepare sandwiches for an Out of the Cold program in London, Ont. In Pakistan, the SZABIST Social Sciences Society at the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science & Technology will provide an interactive session for students to examine their society`s culture along with the multitude of problems that people there are currently facing and the possible solutions to these issues.
“It is our hope that through using health and open communication, bridges of peace and cooperation are built and boundaries fade,” adds Lavina Sadhwani, Co-President of Health as a Bridge to Peace @ York University and a graduate student at the Faculty of Education. “By listening to one another and valuing health and dialogue, we would like to demonstrate that there is a different way to live alongside one another locally, nationally, and internationally,” conclude Marcovitch and Sadhwani.
Pay it Forward
By Ruchita Mittal
February 14th: A day to love. A day to express. A day to connect. And what better day to open the channels of communication than Valentine’s Day?
Keeping up with the theme of the day, Health as a Bridge to Peace (HBP) organized the event “Pay it Forward” at York University. Amidst the scores of tables in Central Square offering multi-coloured candy, their table clearly stood out with – wait for it – healthy nutrition bars!
And the key to getting these bars? All you had to do was grab any person (whether or not you knew them!) and bring them to the HBP table, answer a health-related question, get a goodie bag with granola bars, and pass it on to someone else!
It was an extremely simple yet ingenious way of getting people to meet someone new, pass on some goodness and learn about health at the same time. I saw several people grab the first person they saw, and in the process of trying to answer the questions together, connect with those strangers. Health became their reason for building new bridges, and Valentine’s Day their excuse to pass on the goodness!
Keeping up with the theme of the day, Health as a Bridge to Peace (HBP) organized the event “Pay it Forward” at York University. Amidst the scores of tables in Central Square offering multi-coloured candy, their table clearly stood out with – wait for it – healthy nutrition bars!
And the key to getting these bars? All you had to do was grab any person (whether or not you knew them!) and bring them to the HBP table, answer a health-related question, get a goodie bag with granola bars, and pass it on to someone else!
It was an extremely simple yet ingenious way of getting people to meet someone new, pass on some goodness and learn about health at the same time. I saw several people grab the first person they saw, and in the process of trying to answer the questions together, connect with those strangers. Health became their reason for building new bridges, and Valentine’s Day their excuse to pass on the goodness!
Health as a Bridge to Peace; A Personal Perspective
By Mohammad O. Al Haj
Social Entrepreneurship, Health & Regional Cooperation:
The Al- Quds Sound Institute Project
By Howard Weinstein
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 7% of the world’s population suffers from hearing impairment. The WHO also highlights that the prevalence of hearing impairment in Middle East varies from 5-9% of the total population.
In its more severe form, this disorder is keeping otherwise healthy children from going to school and adults from pursuing educational opportunities and/or securing employment, as they are wrongly understood by society to be deaf. Hearing loss, therefore, can be directly correlated with economic hardship in severely affected families and communities.
The Middle East is the region of the world most affected by genetically transferred diseases and impairments. This is consistent across boundaries and barriers of language, culture, religion and ethnicity. It is not coincidental that the Middle East is also the region of the world with the highest incidence of consanguineous marriage, or marriage among first cousins. Decisions around choices of marriage partners are based on intensity of religious belief and observance, dynamic experience of life within extended families, the shared values, beliefs, traditions of ethnicity, and land tenure.
Within the complex context in which life decisions are made in the Middle East, the choice of marriage partners is the simplest: closely related cousins are the partners whom you know best, and can be most trusted in this most important of life choices. People from every country of the region are familiar with the frequency of these genetically related disorders and disabilities.
What for us is a genetic anomaly in North America and Europe, where rates of incidence are a minute fraction of one percent, is a potential public health crisis in the Middle East, where the rates are at least 10 times more prevalent. In areas with substantial development challenges such as Palestinian Authority, coordinated action needs to be taken not only by government but by civil society to ensure that this significant portion of the population affected by genetically transferred diseases can be guaranteed their rights of access to social services, health care services, education, employment, and full and equitable participation in society.
Getting a child a hearing aid at an early age will enable this child to be mainstreamed into local school, develop speech, thereby affording this child an education and a chance to break the cycle of poverty, which without a hearing aid, would be virtually impossible.
The NGO Godisa (now called Solar Ear Deaftronics) in Botswana, whose workers are deaf, developed the first rechargeable analog hearing aid, rechargeable battery which lasts 2-3 years but costs the same as a disposable battery and solar powered hearing aid and battery recharger. The products were then modified by another NGO in Brazil, Solar Ear, where they successfully developed the first low-cost digital rechargeable hearing aid. Al- Quds University in the West Bank, Royal Scientific Society of Jordan and in Israel the Wolfson Medical Center will redesign the present products to meet the special needs and specifications of the Middle East market. It will be the first co-existence program in the region where Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian youths who are deaf will work together on a daily basis.
Product innovations will include the development of durable components and coating technologies to protect hearing aids from harmful humidity, as humidity can dramatically reduce the life and durability of the hearing aid. Existing solar charger technologies will be studied and innovated taking into account the contextual demands of the Middle Eastern climate. For instance, during the rainy season there are several weeks where, for the functionality of existent solar-power technologies, there is insufficient solar radiation.
Such innovations will also come to benefit other developing countries that have experienced similar problems in adopting solar power technologies. Solar chargers will also act as a platform for new innovations such as cell phone chargers, which will provide access to wider markets beyond the hearing aid industry as well as create more employment and investment opportunities.
Al- Quds University in partnership CISEPO / MEHA, Stars of Hope Society in the West Bank and with additional business expertise coming from two Ashoka Fellows, propose to manufacture, assemble and distribute, throughout the Middle-East, solar powered hearing aids by people who are deaf for hearing impaired throughout the region. The cash flow generated will be used to develop and economically empower the workers, hire and train future workers with a disability and develop new technologies while practicing and promoting cooperation in the region. This region will hear the sounds of peace coming from the workers who are deaf. The peace building lessons learned will be implemented in Solar Ear’s future operations in the Balkans and Kashmir.
Eun Jae Ki
I recently learned that health is determined by many different variables. Many people think health is produced by biological, physical and psychological variables, but health is also determined by economic, political, cultural and spiritual factors.
While unquestionably it is our individual pathology and mental processes that contribute to our health, it is also important to understand that our economic status, social policies and culture also shape our health. These are the determinants of health that we do not always have tangible power to control. But by having and creating economic, political and cultural contexts that are “health friendly” to all it is possible to positively impact everyone’s health. But how can we do this? Where should we start?
As a second year Children’s Studies student, I remember having a discussion about Freire’s theory of oppression in one of my first year’s lectures. We discussed that an effective practice for working with children is a synthesis of theory and action. In a similar context of practice, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish made a statement during his speech for York University’s annual Inclusion Day that change happens when there is cooperation of willingness and action. Social inequalities, such as income inequalities, create people’s inaccessibility to resources that lead to good health such as access to healthy and affordable food. To have healthy economy, healthy policies, and healthy environment society should move for a change together, as one.
It seems as if I’m saying that society or the world needs some kind of revolution, but we already have both the tools and the right to bring change to our society. I asked Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish what society could do with children in order to help children to make a difference in their lives. He kept stressing the importance of freedom of speech. It is important to work with children to build a bridge of understanding, not a tool that causes separation. Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish kept emphasizing the importance of dialogue, our responsibility as individuals, communities, and nations to have dialogue and to act with purpose and bring about change. It should not be qualified with “if”. It is important to take responsibility for our own actions, to be honest and to tell the truth. He told us that “….it is good to die for a country but it is better to live and defend his/her own country and values.” Indeed, rather than giving up on the idea of peace or just standing on the side-lines because society does not seem to cooperate with “me,” it is better to let others know why the goal of peace is so important in our society. We should, as individuals and as members of a local and global community, build a dialogue and work together.
Now, why don’t we stop wondering in our own personal space why there is a war or collision in our society, and instead get out there, build a dialogue, come up with a purpose, and challenge to bring a change for peace? Social justice for all builds peace and health for all!
