Small gardens replace in our classrooms or our homes. One thing i did was i endeavored when there was an issue of conflict between a muslim and Christian Community, i had the Muslim Community school right down what they felt would be the ideal garden, the shapes and sounds and images that warmed them and brought a sense of peace. Then i had the Christian Community to the same. Then i had them actually create each others garden, literally tending each others garden. I think that kind of work is very valuable and can be a tremendous source of healing. You think about any kind of trauma, not simply war, but natural disasters, the idea of bringing aspiration to action and doing things for others i think is very important. One thing i wanted us to brainstorm together in addition to some external places and spaces we can create, i think there is some internal spaces that we can that we can build and nourish through things like spoken word, giving victims and the people around them restored sense of voice. Obviously, journals, theater, music. There are a limitless set of options. I think one thing that has been very effective for me in working with the victims of trauma has been to have them not only write their own stories someone gave me a book yesterday that was a very good book from what i have been able to see called sold. It was perhaps for young adults. It is about a girl who was trafficked from nepal and it was very powerful. I want to see the young adults themselves writing the stories. It is an amazing way for people of every age to begin that process. Or perhaps they can take a story what i have my students do is change the endings of stories. It gives them a sense of empowerment, helps them to recognize that they can alter what they perceive to be inevitable. There is great strength in giving voice in these ways and others. It is no small matter. There is an indonesian phrase that i conjure on a regular basis. It means, to wash the eyes. You will see that phrase in my Childrens Book and you will see in the book that the very talented illustrator opens the book with a view of the moon from the earths perspective and closes it with the view of the earth from the moons perspective. The idea is to constantly shift perspectives not only so we can empathize and build peace in those ways, but also so that we can change the way we view ourselves. We can name ourselves differently. We can do identity the link and find a future that is more robust. And perhaps by virtue of changing our own stories, it means to wash the eyes and indonesia they use that phrase to speak of the need at the end of the workweek to go and get a different view and to relax and to recline. But it can be used to think about something even more powerful, this notion that we can see ourselves in the world and our own potential and the beauty that resides both within and externally by washing our eyes, by changing not necessarily the way we look, but the way that we see. A gap toothed state of mind. I think it is a powerful part of the work both to prevent and to heal trafficking. We can see visible in the work, we can see as their bodies become stronger that the people who are doing yoga and who are working together in one place, having an opportunity to find strength through peer resources as well as mentorship, that they have changed the way they see. Having given an opportunity to wash their eyes. I think we can do that in an organizational level as well as an individual level. I did mediation conflict we call the conflict resolution then, now we call a conflict transformation. Some conflicts never resolve, but they can be transformed into something more productive and interesting and useful, perhaps. I would always have the kids who were the bullies, the gang leaders and the class clowns, be the negotiators are the mediators. The reason was because, as many of you probably know, it allowed them to see themselves differently. They were already hungry for attention, already dynamic and charismatic and leaders, but the idea of giving them the tools to engage in benevolent readership, to remind them they can do that, too, and there are those who will listen and follow and who will be interested, even if they are speaking softly is an important one. The work they do to also bring in the traffickers, the perpetrators, i think is therefore very important. We mustnt forget about that. I think that excuse me. I think that is part of culturally competent work. We need to meet the community where they are on some levels. We need to build bridges between schools and organizations and businesses in the community and the families that exist and if we are going to be culturally responsive, then we have to address the culture that has created this. We dont have to be arrogant about it. We dont need to come down and tell other cultures what theyre doing wrong. The idea is to bring local knowledges to bear. It is to also unearth and explore and truly excavate the reasons why you have perpetrators. What is happening here, how do we empower them to behave differently and to see themselves differently in their task in the world. We all know organizations that have succeeded by virtue of using this method Second Chance is one with gangs. They have former gang members who go out and persuade. It is not about being scared straight or instilling fear, but it is about really working with clear and powerful knowledge, a deeprooted knowledge of the problem. And only then can we have, i think, a full and effective set of solutions. I think there are two important tools for helping the victims as well as their communities as they reintegrate into society, to feel empowered, to find meaning in helping others, to feel safe in their new circumstances for their worldly for they will be forever changed, but not necessarily forever damaged. There does need to be, i think, this Work Together, building bridges to eliminate isolation, alienation, and to find a sort of future orientation. I think we need to bring in their own personal history in order to move forward, in order to first grapple with it and then unearth something brighter. A brazilian poet talks about planting dates, even though we will never meet those who are tasting our dates, this idea of being disciplined about the future. And giving to our children something that emerges from our own creative acts. Even if we cant see it, this sort of disciplined love, as he calls it, is what makes profits and revolutionaries and saints so effective. They have the courage to die for things they will never see. Im not asking any of you to martyr your self for the cause, but i am asking you to perhaps sacrifice and find others willing to do so and then work hard to build something and work hard to help young people to do something as well for something perhaps we will never see, having a longterm vision. I would like to close as i do believe my time is winding, and we can talk some more after this in conversation, but with a prayer from the navajo tradition because i was just in the four corners area a couple of weeks ago it goes as follows. In beauty may i walk all day long may i walk through the returning seasons may i walk on the trail marked with pollen with grasshoppers about my feet may i walk with dew about my feet may i walk with beauty before me with beauty above me. I walked with beauty below me may i walk with beauty all around me in old age wandering on a trail of beauty lively may i walk living again may i walk it is finished in beauty it is finished in beauty so thank you very much and let us help these stories find a different ending and we will help them be finished in beauty. Thank you for being here and talking to one another and for the important work that you do. [applause] thank you. And thank you for all you do. We both practice yoga, so were not going to do yoga right now, that we are going to stand and have a moderated discussion because we dont like to set all the time. As maya was saying, we do events, we do healing through yoga and meditation at odanadi. It is quite ironic in the home of yoga, in india, because of the caste system that still continues, they themselves are not able to participate in yoga because you have to be of a certain caste. It is ironic that westerners are coming in to teach them yoga, but, alas, this is the paradox of our life. We are just doing yoga together and i really appreciate that you were speaking about creating the spaces inside through gardens and having quiet time for healing. Can you share your own personal experience as how that helps you in your very busy, busy life . I didnt know what question she was going to ask me. I can. There is another indonesian phrase which means to be silent in a thousand languages. It is sort of beautiful, but melancholy in a away. Growing up in indonesia, i was granted many gifts. I was granted a community by and large of tolerance, of artistry, of sweetness and i was there and until age 14. I was born there, though my brother, the president , was not. [laughter] for the record. Again. [laughter] you had to. But it was a place it was a place of great diversity. Diverse cultures within indonesia. Were talking about thousands of islands. And each one possessing its own language and cultural artifacts and moors. There was a lot of conflict when i was growing up in the 1970s between the chinese, indonesians and the malay indonesians. My father was malayan. The chinese were often scapegoated because of times of poverty, the perception that chinese folks owned businesses and were doing better. It is not an unfamiliar story. But i remember several riots where cars would be overturned and i would watch from my window as people would be pulled out of their cars and harmed. Or stores would have their windows busted. And i remember the next day, there would be, perhaps in the papers, nothing about it. It was censored. It was a time when folks were not that embarrassed about censoring because i remember in the International Herald tribune we would have big black foxes boxes covering like, something mustve happened. But it was shocking to me the silence that surrounded these events. And the silence that does surround this trauma. And when we talk about gardens, there is a valuable silence, a stillness that can help us to sort of recognize our own feelings and thoughts. And it wasnt that kind of silence. It was a different sort of silence. There are many kinds of silence, and i wanted to think about how we can provide places for reflective silence and then of the voice, the stories, the imaginings and the activists words that must necessarily follow rather than the silence of shame or the silence so for me, practices like yoga, creating the spaces, are about a preparatory silence that proceeds sound, cacophony even. I remember that one of the my mother came across all of these unmarked graves from 1965. There was conflict in indonesia about the communists coup and counter coup and there was a lot of people who were well, the United States went through things in the 1950s. There was a lot of silence surrounding that era. And my mother wasnt really told when she arrived what had happened. And things were whispered in hushed ways. I think the idea is we have to be sensitive to why perhaps cultures or individuals to remain silent. We have to do a lot of work to make them feel safe. So a lot of these practices i think are about building safety. Thank you. Thank you for bringing silence to the very noisy washington, d. C. It is so refreshing because often we just hear about policy all day. It is important, too. It is. Im not going to put your brothers work down, but we need to get back to connect, right . And come back to the human part of it. Im wondering as an educator if you can talk more about the importance of empathy and how do you instill that in others who maybe dont want to connect . A lot of what i do as an educator is about building empathy. So we will do things like rather than simply having the facts of the civil war, for instance. Facts are important to building narratives. It is important they are accurate. There are some things that perhaps im not saying everything is relative, but what we do is we sometimes do things like pick a pill pick a picture and build a life. The civil war was an important time in this country because it was a documented war. There are amazing photographs. Ill have my students find any picture and begin to tell the war from the perspective of someone who has not been sort of featured in the textbook. So they will have to imagine what is this persons greatest fear or desire . What does this person need for breakfast . Do they have a family . You begin to build, add flash to the skeleton, build dimension is what i mean to say. Rapid is the same thing. You take a story and ask questions to address the things that are not said it is an important way i think to build history, to remember the real work of an educator is researching. And then coming up with understandings, not simply information. Molding that into wisdom. Rapid is where you wrap a story with Additional Information and research and emotion. That is a good way to empathize. Some call it poetry where you write a poem about another medium, like a painting or photograph. The idea is to begin connecting with history. One of the things i often do my classroom is i will create a visual bridge. I will do an outline of a bridge the goes from one end of the room to the other, and ill have students outline bricks through index cards. In each brick that will write from the perspective of someone who is not seen, someone who has been rendered invisible. They will write poetry, prose, letters, journal entries, you name it. Then they will put that as a brick on to the wall. By the end of the semester, the bridge is filled. It has been finished. They represent sort of a connection between the past and the present and the future, between our lives, the hallowed halls of learning, and the world outside between school and community, between the self of the learner and the many people residing in the world. So those are some ways that i think we can help with empathy. How lucky are those students to have such an amazing teacher . Oh, thank you. We will have a couple of more questions than open it to the audience. We want to shout out to our folks in india who are watching the survivors. They are also so grateful, it is amazing. They have so little. You come here and there so much materialism and there is nothing there, but theyre so grateful for our presence. What is interesting is when our Board Members who are back there you can meet them later we try to go back annually to work with the survivors. We are the ones who are transformed. So why dont we do more of that, kind of Service Component . We should. Why dont we . I think we should. When i was teaching on the Lower East Side of manhattan, we would have service day on wednesdays. Wednesday morning the students would create service projects. They would decide what they wanted to do. Some would work in public old folks homes to work with the elderly, to bring the connection with the elders and the youth. Theres a wonderful thing that happens between the two. We would also do things like the First Recycling project in the projects, on the Lower East Side. Or they would go and read two younger kids. School beautification. We had a project where there was an abandoned lot nextdoor that we transformed into immunity Garden Community garden. Teachers would take care of the composting and the paneling and our teachers would create the murals, in which teachers would have workspaces where poetry could be read later. The shop teacher could build the benches. Math teachers would figure out how to make a Basketball Court level. I still have a blister from laying down some of that sod. Service to ourselves, service to our community and in service to the wider world were very important. We can have global collaboration, have people Work Together. When we had the japanese tsunami, a lot of our students created projects and plans to think about what would be needed to restore a sense of strength to that part of japan, to rebuild the schools, infrastructure, and other things. The projects were largely aspirational. They did not have the resources, necessarily. But these are things they can do later. There were an assortment of things they could do to reach out to make people feel connected, scene known, cared about. They did that. They raised money. As well an important part of service is what christina was talking about, which is i think you have to not simply get kids to do good things which is wonderful but you have to help them reflect afterwards on what they accomplished, whether they might have a compost more, how they were impacted by the service they did and how they were transformed. The idea of looking at that reciprocal effect i think is very valuable to make service both relevant and enduring. We are so grateful for your service. Thank you. You are a tireless leader. She has been nonstop since shes been here from hawaii. I want to open it to our audience. We have some members of the press, too. We have a microphone here. Thank you very much. My name is jenny. I write for an asian paper. I would like to suggest a fundraising project about what you said today. I was born there, though my brother was not. A tshirt or Bumper Sticker for a fundraiser. They said youre currently writing a book. It is a young adult novel based on the robert frost poem that had to do roads to verge in the yellow road and i took the one less traveled and that is made all the difference. It is about a 16yearold girl in the world of war. A lot of it looks at the themes of conflict and a lot of it also brings in a sort of easter narrative, images, and motives into a western narrative construct. Im trying to create something that is a cultural hybrid. It is hard to finish. You dont want young adult novels to be pedantic, yet you want them to be instructive. I keep thinking, well, how much burgeoning romance do i need to include in order [laughter] to make 14yearolds interested. So i have a little bit of that. I try to find a 16yearold within. But im also doing some work with a colleague. She does elementary education. We do a workshop in hawaii. I am also beginning to work with people nationally and internationally as scarlet lewis is coming tomorrow, the mother of jesse lewis who lost his life at newtown. She is thinking about how to heal her community. We make these connections. But the idea of seeds of peace is to work with educators and create lesson plans connected to the standard. How do we have them teach what there are ready teaching but with in eye toward building empathy, moral courage . Your organization is called upstanding . Up