By Kate Plant, Director

I am sitting breast-feeding my son early on this 10 August 2007, he
is now 7 weeks old and has already grown so much. Each day I ponder
whether I'm teaching him the right things and what a mammoth but
enjoyable task it will be to teach him about the world and its
intricacies.

In pondering such things, I begin to think about how I would explain
peace and poverty to him. That age old problem that affects from the
poorest to the richest nations, at varying degrees. I think I'd
start with a definition of Peace.Wikipedia describes peace as a
"state of harmony http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony, the absence
of hostility. This term is applied to describe a cessation of violent
international conflict; in this international context, peace is the
opposite of war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War, Peace can also
describe a relationship between any parties characterized by respect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect, justice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice, and goodwill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill, More generally, peace can
pertain to an individual relative to her or his environment, as
peaceful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful, can describe calm,
serenity, and silence."

I'd then move onto a definition of poverty. A commonly used
definition was produced by the European Union (1984) and defines it
as "the situation of people whose 'resources (material, social and
cultural) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum
acceptable way of life in the countries in which they live'. For
practical purposes, it is usually interpreted as 'those whose incomes
fall below half of the average income (as measured by the median) for
the nation in which they live'. In other words it is a measure of
relative poverty."

Once he's old enough to talk, I can see him asking numerous relevant
questions including 'Mum, what causes war/peace and poverty to exist?
Why does it still exist, especially when the human race has at many
stages of its evolution, tried to solve it?"

To this I would respond, 'Great question my son, there are many
reasons war and the fight for peace exists including human's
differences of opinions, societies need to increase its wealth, and
maybe even the 'use/miss-use' of a countries natural resources and
other environmental factors. Meanwhile poverty maybe caused by the
equality of opportunity that has long been a key concern of
governments and society.'

'As far as why it still exists. There have been numerous attempts to
indoctrinate the attitude of achieving peace and alleviating poverty,
by most governments around the world (both developed and
underdeveloped nations). Most recently on an international level,
the Millennium Development Goals (MDG's) are a set of key goals that
our world's Governments adopted 5 years ago to look toward building a
better world. These goals symbolized partnerships and opportunities
to respond to this world's challenges and to begin to meet the calls
for positive change by our society for 2015. The MDG's are focused
on promoting poverty reduction, education, maternal health, gender
equality, and combating child mortality, AIDS and other diseases. As
part of reaching these MDG's, poor countries have "pledged to govern
better and invest in their people through health care and education".
Also, "rich countries have pledged to support them, through aid,
debt relief, and fairer trade." [www.undp.org/mdg; accessed 10 August
2007]

So son, this is a big world and everybody has varying agenda´s that
often conflicts with our world's natural and built operations. The
MDG's are just one method for man to change our past actions and an
opportunity to build a world of healthy binding actions for our
future generations.'

"So Mum, what can I and each of us do to bring enduring and genuine
peace and alleviate poverty to our world?"

I would in turn suggest he continues EACH DAY to act responsibly and
with each task/activity/event/job he undertakes to look at how he
could be kinder to each person he comes in contact with, enjoy
solving problems and conflicts through open fair discussion and
negotiation, build strong ties and foster cross-cultural
understanding with the people of other countries, understand everyone
is unique yet together these differences build a better 'whole', vote
for peace, use our world's resources sustainably, recycle and reuse
these resources at every opportunity and be fair and equitable in
every action he takes. But I'd also stress, that it's not enough for
him just to embark on this conscious lifetime without empowering
others to make a similar pact with themselves and future generations.

Enjoy each day to its fullest, as there will be no other like it!