- ATD Fourth World

Message from Eugen Brand, Director General of the International Movement ATD Fourth World on the occasion of the International D from ATDFRA on Vimeo.

“Before I found this place where we are tonight, where we can come together and think together, I thought I was going to die before ever getting the chance to say those things I have deep inside of me.” So said Doña Flores, a mother from La Paz, Bolivia, during a meeting of the Fourth World People’s University there recently.

How many people never get the chance to speak of the injustices they suffer due to the poverty that imprisons them?  How many, locked in shame, never have the opportunity to talk about the humiliations they endure and instead seek to find some dignity for themselves in their silence? How many are condemned to keep silent by the anxiety and fear born of living in close proximity to daily violence that threatens to prey on their children?

And how many, even in the midst of the most disadvantaged and forgotten neighbourhoods, have the courage to act like the young girl who tried to calm her father’s anger toward their neighbours with the words, “… or they won’t let me play with their kids, daddy”?  From the heart of emergency housing camps, ghettos and slums, so many families do everything within their power to survive, haunted as they are by natural disasters, evictions and war.  For them, it can never be a case of  “every man for himself.”

This is why young group facilitators in Central Africa have turned their attentions toward former child soldiers who were kidnapped and forcibly recruited but are now disarmed. “What is left of childhood for kids like them?  If we weren’t friends with them, what friends would they have?” In reaching out to these child soldiers, the group facilitators are training the adults of tomorrow.

On all the continents, the teams, active members, friends and supporters of ATD Fourth World come face to face with the same challenges: an economic system that breeds injustice, education systems that punish and exclude, governments that turn a deaf ear to the knowledge and experience of their most vulnerable citizens, and an international community which fails to set its objectives in the context of human rights.

In the economic, academic and decision-making spheres, so often cut off from the daily realities of many, it is vital to create opportunities to break the silence, to create the necessary conditions so that those too often denied the chance to come together, talk freely and think together can finally do so.  Today, more and more women and men of all walks of life are showing the way forward by investing in the construction of human communities where everybody can take pride in contributing to building the future. In the words of one man from Haiti during an international seminar Breaking the Silence held in Lima, Peru: “Yes, I’m here for my country; but I’m also here for the world.”

And then there are the young people of the Traveller community in France who wait for society to see them and their families through different eyes: “People only see the chaos. They don’t understand why we live in caravans; they don’t understand us.”  In their search for recognition and dialogue they have organised a football tournament, a photo exhibition and a Manouche jazz concert and invited the inhabitants of local villages to these communal events.

Some of these young people will be among those in Brussels this 17 October to tell representatives of the European Parliament:“It is difficult for us to understand this world but we want to find our place in it…”  Their words chime with all those who mark the day by affirming their fight against poverty and their insistence on hoping for a brighter future. “When my friends couldn’t afford food, I helped them out… I want to work with kids who went through the same things as me, with those who had a tough life. I’ll know what they are going through, I’ve been there.”  On Tuesday 19 October, in Strasbourg, a delegation of young people will give this message to Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations.

At the crossroads between some of the most forgotten places of the world and the world’s most powerful offices, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty continues to contribute ever more strongly to breaking the silence through bringing people together in a spirit of peace.   

Thus one young man from the Central African Republic was able to say to parents in a working class neighbourhood of Bangui, “Seeing what you’ve done here gave me the strength to start a school project on a tiny island in the middle of the Ubangi River.”  Children there sit on old canoes in the shade of a mango tree. This young man could find a teaching job in the city but prefers instead to work with these children even if it means he himself risks not earning enough to feed himself.  This 17 October they will be working together to make it possible for thechildren to have a place that protects them from the elements.

Who will build this new school in which we can all dream of the future we wish to see and where we can all learn how to break the silence?  Who will build this school based on mutual trust if we do not all begin to do so ourselves?