peace
Cultural Diversity Helps Us Grow
In life, we learn so much from our experiences. They shape and teach us, how to see our world and those who share it with us. When we get to know one other, we break down stereotypes, open communication, bridge understanding and come to appreciate the unique gift each person offers.
I was 11 years old when I went through my first interviewing process. I was applying to be one of four students selected to represent Cincinnati, and the United States, in an international friendship program known as Children’s International Summer Village. Founded right here in Cincinnati in 1951, CISV chapters across the globe host summer camp-like villages where delegations of 11 year -olds from diverse countries learn about peace by gaining understanding and building friendships. Impressionable minds come to see beyond differences to realize how alike they are as human beings.
I was a finalist that year which meant that, while I didn’t attend a Village, I and my family began the process of welcoming to our home Irene, a girl from another country, Sweden. While she was here, she and I attended a day camp similar to the village only we went home every night, where we spent our days among dozens of other young people, many of whom spoke limited to no English. And the following year, at 12 years of age, I boarded a plane with other Cincinnati children to spend five weeks in Sweden with Irene’s family.
I will never forget those early experiences and the influence they have had on my life. It is an incredible gift to come to know someone different from yourself. You grow as a person. You grow in your perspective. You appreciate differences. You thirst for learning and you become more welcoming to those whose cultures, religions, backgrounds, and ways of life are not like your own.
Lisa and Sandy Desatnik with Camilla Sonderyd Molnar
Since then, I continued my journey. In high school, I became involved with AFS, an interchange program. Camilla, who I still consider my Swedish sister, lived with us for a year. I was president of the Wyoming High School chapter my senior year. As an adult, I volunteered as a driver for the Tennis Masters Tournament in Mason for about 17 years getting to meet people from around the globe, even opening my home to a young tennis player from Brazil one year. I served on the board of the CISV Cincinnati Chapter for several years, and my brother and his wife adopted my niece, Kalianni, from India. Through my career and personal life, I am involved with causes that bring people together through and celebrate difference.
The lessons that you learn from getting to know and appreciate people who do and say and experience life unlike yourself truly are transformational. Stereotypes are dispelled as you come to know people as individuals, human beings who have their own unique qualities and share a common need for being seen and welcomed. Communication barriers are broken down, replaced with open conversation. Workplaces and communities are strengthened by diverse people participating together. World peace is given new perspective as places on a map and cultures that are foreign to us, represent individuals, relationships, and feelings.
You need not have to wait until adulthood to enter this classroom. Teaching young children to value and include others who are different from themselves is an incredibly important lesson. There are so many opportunities through school and the community to get to know others with different beliefs, ways of getting around, learning styles, backgrounds, ages, and cultures. As adult role models, we have a great responsibility to be setting an example, to be encouraging those experiences, to be helping children navigate the journey and grow into caring, welcoming adults.
And, as adults, we too can learn and grow so much from each other. When we include people who are different from ourselves, we are all better for it.
Watch Peace One Day – LIVE, here – September 21, 2013
September 21, 2013 is Peace One Day, the loudest call for peace the world has ever seen with a 24 hour broadcast. Children’s International Summer Village is a partner organization. I am an alumni of CISIV, having participated in interchange when I was 11 and 12 years old; and was later involved in AFS during my high school. This is a wonderful and very important effort. Please check back on September 21 to view the broadcast. There will be actors, musicians, and opinion makers from around the globe.
Ladybug Hikes With A Purpose
I got a letter in the mail a few weeks back (I’ve gotten a little behind on my blog posts – sometimes work gets in the way) from a friend. Denise ‘Ladybug’ Hill was off on another trek, an 800+ journey.
“Second only to the love of my family, I am most content when I am alone in the wilderness,” the note began. “In 2004, at 48 years of age, I took my first hiking steps on the famed 2,174 Appalachian Trail to fulfill two promises I made to my sister, Cheryl Rose Walden. I promised Cheryl, during her final stage of a ten year battle with breast cancer that her memory would last forever. I fulfilled that promise by planting hundreds of packets of forget-me-not seeds in 25 states and 3 countries during my treks. I also promised my sister that I would renew my faith and become closer to understanding God.”
A Little History
I think I first met Denise when she was training for her first trek, walking the Appalachian Trail in 2004. She wore a heavy backpack as she walked distances in training. I knew back then she called her journey ‘Walking for Walden’ and she was raising money for Hospice of Cincinnati in memory of her sister, but that was the extent of my knowledge.
Since then I’ve heard her stories…like when she was working to complete the Pacific Crest Trail in 2009 and found herself surrounded by a swarm of rattlesnakes. Her cell phone didn’t work in many places…but it did there.
“I had spoken to Bruce (her husband) earlier that morning and a ladybug crawled into my lap. When I mentioned my ladybug friend, he said, ‘That means you’re going to have good luck today.’ Little did he know, I would be SO lucky,” she told me. (which by the way is, you guessed it, why her nickname is now ‘Ladybug.’)
There are not that many people I know who get rescued from a den of deadly snakes in an emergency helicopter. But I know one.
Denise and I and another friend spent a weekend last fall hiking through Ohio’s scenic Hocking Hills State Park. That Saturday, Denise and I spent the day 
together walking more than 8 miles. When you spend so many hours alone with someone you get to know her pretty well. At one point she stopped and wanted me to continue. She wanted me to experience the peaceful solitude of walking amidst natural wonders, of being in my own thoughts and just appreciating what I don’t always take the time to see. This, she told me, is what it is like for her every time she is on one of her treks – and she has done a lot of them.
This Time Was Different
So this time, when Denise took to the trails with hopes of raising money and awareness for Hospice, I had a deeper understanding of why she left. This time I felt the desire to read her story that she has posted online.
Cheryl Rose Counts Walden whose spirit is Denise’s rock was a loving mother, daughter and sister to four younger siblings. Her ferocious fight against a disease the ultimately won the battle was testament to the strength of her inner core. Denise described her sister as ‘living a simple, yet full life, graced with peaceful and loving energy.’
As Denise raced to the hospital one last time memories of their childhood together kept her going. ‘Mental images of me with my sister, Cheryl, playing, laughing , scheming, cooking, crying, singing, dancing, and praying were reeling at fast forward speed in my head and as vividly as those actual moments in time. Tepid tears flowed freely down my face as I tightly gripped the steering wheel with both hands replaying the images of my youth,” Denise wrote.
Five years after her sister’s death Denise kept her sister close by sharing memories, raising money for breast cancer awareness, burning a candle in prayer every Christmas, and visiting Cheryl’s gravesite in a beautiful Tennessee setting overlooking the Great Smoky Mountains. Hiking became Denise’s choice for honoring her sister.
After trekking close to 4,400 miles on the 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail on a hike dedicated to Hospice of Cincinnati in her sister’s memory, this is Ladybug’s emotional finish.
I just heard from my friend. Her 800 mile hike that was originally taking her from Mexico to the ends of Utah had to be diverted, and she is completing her remaining 675 miles in our region. I’ll more than likely be joining her along some of that journey.
If you’d like to read more about Ladybug’s former hiking adventures: please visit www.walkingforwalden.com
If you would like to support Ladybug and her Hikes for Hospice
please send your donation to:
Hospice of Cincinnati, Inc.
C/O Bethesda Foundation, Inc.
P.O. Box 633597
Cincinnati, OH 45263-3597
We Can learn A Lot From A Child
If you haven’t yet heard about Mattie Stepanek, let me tell you about him. In June 2004, three years before he would have been old enough to drive, he lost his brave battle with a rare and fatal neuromuscular disease.
In his life, he experienced the difficult loss of three siblings. He endured physical, emotional and spiritual pain. But Mattie was an astute young boy who had profound wisdom about things that matter most. He celebrated life every day. He recognized the beauty in everyday circumstance and he lived knowing happiness is never out of reach, if you just look with your heart.
Mattie began sharing his thoughts when he was just three years old. His poems and essays are among the most beautiful I’ve ever read. They are his legacy, his heartsongs.
Believing in Someday
Maybe,
Someday,
We will all join hands
And live together…
Helping each other,
Loving each other,
Maybe,
Someday,
We will all make the world
A much better place…
And be like a gigantic,
Smoothly rushing river of peace –
A loving circle that nothing can break,
Maybe,
Someday,
We may start with just one person,
And one permanent peace agreement
Within one’s self, within one’s world.
Personal peace can then spread
Within and between the families,
Then within and between communities,
And then within and around the whole world.
Maybe,
Someday,
We can become
As close to perfect
As anything and anyone can get.
Let us each join our own Heartsong
With this old song of the heart, and believe…
“Let there be peace on earth,
And let it begin with me.”
Written in 2000 when Mattie was 9
Quotes to Give You Thought
Award winning photographer Andrew Zuckerman traveled to seven countries to ask people over age 65 what they’d like others to know. In his new book, Wisdom, you can read about what they said. The October issue of Reader’s Digest included a few examples, and of those, I have my favorites.
Desmond Tutu (antiapartheid activist, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Price and winner of the 2005 Gandi Peace Prize)
“Each one of us can make a contribution. Too frequently we think we have to do spectacular things. Yet if we remember that the sea is actually made up of drops of water and each drop counts, each one of us can do our little bit where we are. Those little bits can come together and almost overwhelm the world. Each one of us can be an oasis of peace.”
Nelson Mandela (civil rights leader, prisoner for 27 years for his antiapartheid work, co-winner of the 1993 Nobel Peace Price, elected South Africa’s first freely chosen president)
“Wounds that can’t be seen are more painful than those than those that can be seen and cured by a doctor. I learned that to humiliate another person is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. I learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. I felt fear myself more times than I can remember, but I hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers fear. Where people of goodwill get together and transcend their differences for the common good, peaceful and just solutions can be found, even for those problems that seem intractable.”
