Daniel Clements is British and has a passion for working with young people. He is currently training to become a teacher, with strong ambitions to engage in educational reform. He sees the challenges people face today as deeply spiritual, and has a desire to enable people to overcome inner darkness and live lives of truth and compassion.
Besfort Syla is a graphic design/photography student from Kosovo. He works as a graphic designer in his home town, using his platform to highlight and tackle social issues. His journey with Caux and IofC started when he participated in the CPLP in 2018. He is comfortable with showing his emotional side and he loves hearing others’ stories. He thinks that sharing stories and listening enable us to come together and be the change the world needs.
Asmaa Sleem is Egyptian and believes that the main hope of any nation lies in the education of its youth. She is also convinced that hope for this world means spreading peace, mindfulness, justice and moral integrity through people’s education, raising awareness, living consciously and the power of togetherness. She sees herself as a lifelong learner and has worked in peace facilitation and conflict transformation.
Alvin Odins is currently working as a programme officer with a humanitarian organization. His focus is on implementing stabilization policy within the context of peace and security. Outside work he is engaged with information technology, reading, cooking and mentoring young people. He enjoys personal quiet time
Georgina Flores and Lorena Mier y Teran are the founders of We Love From (WLF), a letter-writing initiative which they run from their hometown in Merida, Mexico. They met during the Creative Leadership conference in 2020 and struck up a friendship when they discovered that they lived in the same city.
A couple of months after the conference finished, Georgina came up with the idea of sending letters of love and hope to people across the world who are facing difficult situations. Lorena loved the idea and together they founded We Love From.
They reached out to their friends and family and even to schools, asking people to create handwritten letters to Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Honduras and Colombia. The response was amazing and surprising. Those who received the letters were so filled with joy, they expressed their gratitude on social media.
‘I would never have thought that with a piece of paper, a pencil and a little bit of your time and effort, you can really make a difference in someone else’s life!’ says Lorena.
This experience has taught Georgina to ‘never underestimate the power of [my] ideas, even if they seem small’.
I would never have thought that with a piece of paper, a pencil and a little bit of your time and effort, you can really make a difference in someone else’s life!
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We took the opportunity to ask Georgina and Lorena a few more questions:
How did the idea of We Love From come about?
We wanted to give emotional support to people who were far away – and this was a relatively easy way to do so. We also wanted to engage as many people as possible, and to increase awareness of what is happening all across the globe. Letter-writing achieves both of these goals.
How do you implement the project?
We ask people from Mexico to write letters of hope and encouragement to a different destination each time. We send their letters to someone we know in the country concerned and they distribute them to shelters, NGOs, random people on the street, etc.
How do you choose the destinations?
Initially we talked to friends in different countries and planned all the logistics with them, making sure they would be able to receive and distribute the letters. Now that more people are interested in the project, we have received messages from people asking for their country to be a WLF destination and offering themselves as receivers and distributers.
What is the biggest lesson you have learnt from the process?
One of the biggest lessons is that something as simple as a pencil and a paper can really change a person’s day or perspective. It can make someone feel hugged and create connection even if the writer is not physically there.
Lorena, you have mentioned that reading the cards before sending them off is your favourite part. Why?
I love reading words that come from the heart, from children, youngsters and adults, and the creativity which makes each letter unique. It makes me very happy to think of people taking time to write a letter to a stranger, sending them good wishes and support, and to think that someone will smile the way I did when reading the letter.
Georgina, what is your favourite part and why?
My favourite part is when the people receive the letters (even though we haven’t been there to experience it). We love it when people go to the trouble of letting us know that they received a letter and felt moved by it, and that it brought them hope and made their day. Then you know it is all worth it.
What are your future plans for We Love From?
We want to explore more destinations and make the project bigger and to create more awareness about situations around the world. One challenge is how to sponsor the shipping cost for each destination. We are working on this.
What advice would you give anyone who wants to start a project?
Start first, worry second. There will always be problems you didn’t anticipate but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to solve them. Start and you will figure things out as you go. If you never start you will never know where you could end up. If you believe in your project and you are passionate about it, people can feel that. As they get moved and excited, more and more people will join you.
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Since 2007 Rob Lancaster has worked on trustbuilding projects and programmes in Asia, Africa, and Eastern and Western Europe with over 30 different teams, primarily of Initiatives of Change. His experience ranges from leadership programmes in Caux, to the reconciliation process and grassroots consultation in South Sudan. Rob has Honours degrees in both Law (LLB) and Arts (International Relations/French) from the Australian National University, as well as a Master’s of Public Policy (MPP) from the University of Oxford.
Patrycja Pociecha (Pati) is a project manager, facilitator and digital education specialist. She holds a degree in Psychology. Since 2010 she has volunteered with national and international organizations: first, as a Project Coordinator for GFPS-Polska, a student organization which promotes Polish-German cooperation, later with the Initiative Mittel- und Osteuropa (InMOE) network. In 2013 she was inspired by IofC's approach, which links personal change to global change.
You never knew who you might meet in the Caux kitchens in the 1960s. The kitchen which prepared dishes for Asian guests was presided over by a small Burmese woman in her 60s. Few would have guessed that she was a former headmistress from Myanmar (then Burma) and a friend of Mahatma Gandhi.
Daw Nyein Tha – or ‘Ma Mi’, as her family and friends called her – became the youngest headmistress in Myanmar in 1921, aged 21. Her style was authoritarian. After 10 years, her staff and pupils finally rebelled when, as the Christian head of a Christian school, she refused to allow the Buddhist girls to observe a religious fast day. The incident caused a national furore.
Now I knew why Christ had put me in the school – not just to be headmistress but to learn to love people.
The issue was finally resolved when she accepted that she disliked the girls and that her pride and conceit made it hard for the teachers to work with her. She apologized publicly. ‘Now I knew why Christ had put me in the school – not just to be headmistress but to learn to love people,’ she said later.
This lesson stayed with her throughout her life, as she moved away from teaching and into work for reconciliation and justice both at home and around the world. She first encountered Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) on a visit to Britain in 1932 and embraced its message of inner listening and starting with yourself.
Wherever she was, Daw Nyein Tha remained a teacher – often using her hands to convey her truth. She liked to demonstrate a Burmese proverb: ‘When I point my finger at my neighbour, there are three more pointing back at me.’ The phrase became one of MRA’s best known songs, written by Cecil Broadhurst for the musical Jotham Valley and made famous by the Colwell Brothers. (Listen to the song here)
When she visited Mahatma Gandhi in his ashram in 1941, she used a handkerchief pulled taut between two hands to show the tension between two people who each insist on having their way. When one hand stops pulling, the other also has to yield and they can work together. ‘Yes,’ responded Gandhi mischievously. ‘It works very well with a handkerchief, but does it work with people?’
In Thailand in the early 1950s, she used a hollowed-out seed containing three tiny ivory elephants to make her point. Thailand and Burma had nursed a smouldering enmity ever since the Burmese destroyed Thailand’s ancient capital and stole its prized white elephants 200 years earlier. These memories rankled in Thailand, but had been largely forgotten in Burma. Now the Burmese airforce, chasing Burmese rebels, had bombed Thai border villages and feelings ran high.
At a meeting with the Thai prime minister, Daw Nyein Tha emptied the three ivory elephants into his palm. ‘These little elephants have been away from Thailand for such a long time,’ she said. ‘They were so homesick, they have got very thin.’ The Prime Minister laughed, and the story went out on the radio. Later the Burmese Prime Minister apologized to the people of Thailand on Burma’s behalf and backed this up with financial compensation.
Daw Nyein Tha spent most of the last years of her life in Britain and Switzerland, unable to return to Myanmar, then under military dictatorship.
She taught those who worked with her in the Asian kitchen at Caux some simple principles, as Marjory Procter writes in her biography The World My Country: ‘It was the people for whom you cooked that mattered…. Why you were cooking was more important than what you were cooking.’
Asked by an Italian journalist what someone like her was doing cooking, Daw Nyein Tha replied, ‘I am not cooking. I am obeying God.’
It was the people for whom you cooked that mattered…. Why you were cooking was more important than what you were cooking.
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Some time during this period, my mother helped in the Asian and African kitchen at Caux. She wrote the recipes she learnt, including ‘Daw Nyein Tha’s prawn curry’, in a small notebook. She also jotted down some ‘principles of Asian cooking’ – starting with the sweeping generalization that ‘no one east of Burma likes lamb’ and continuing with the essential components of a curry meal: ‘something hot and something mild; something dry and something wet; something sour and something fried; some sort of bread’. I still have the notebook, stained and blotched from use, as my mother offered a taste of home to foreign students in Oxford, where we lived.
Mary Lean, United Kingdom
You can read more on Daw Nyein Tha here:
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Watch an extract of this film from our archives (1950) showing a Burmese group with Daw Nyein Tha (05'57", first woman on the left, front row)
Watch Daw Nyein Tha speaking to three women in the film Ma Mi from Burma from our archives.
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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.
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