So I will read some from Collapse, I do have copies with me and then I'm going to attempt to read something brand new after. The whole world is standing rock, heart under hand, hand under heart. I don't know what they want from me. I was forced into those schools with their flags and red brick, principal's offices and special ed class. They wanted something I could not bleed. My heart beat red cloud and crazy horse. My heroes didn't wear shirts and shoes, not bound up in clothing. I was all hair in the wind, backseat free as bear horseback cantering through fields, standing in the back of pickup trucks, leaves from trees raining down on my face, my church in the green. I have no allegiance. Don't know what they want from me. I was eight when we drove south, got an Indian doll at the roadside stand in the backseat of the white station wagon, the white whale we inherited from grandpa. I learned the word reservation. A word like projects and penitentiary. I wondered what are they reserving? What is the project they work on? I could not understand. I would not. My stubborn hands on the doll's perfect black hair, brown skin, buck skin dress. My favorite t-shirt was orange, red cloud warrior, arms raised to the sky. And I never pledge allegiance to the country that takes away my heroes. So the whole, the manuscript was started in 2016. It was during the election. There's a lot of election ranting in it. Lots of gentrification ranting. So I'll read some of that. Bang bang, niner gang. If you grew up in San Francisco, you remember when Joe Montana ruled, probably rocked a red satin 49er starter jacket a time or two. When the winds filled the drunken streets with revelry, when ocean beach filled that rare, hot day. You probably remember, we always protested here, that the police were dicks, but they didn't kill us all of the time.  These days, you'll get called a gangbanger for wearing the color of your home team. In the park where you grew up, the white boy calls you out. His dog's chasing you and your food. The white boy moved here with the blizzard of folks who stand in line, laid into the night to eat burritos. Mr. Snow ain't from here, but it's so comfortable in his whiteness. He says red jacket makes you a gang member. Calls homeless, disgusting, calls you wet back. Your family has been here longer than he's been born. There are only white folks in the park now. Buildings burn to make way for the crop of them.  The firing squad without question.   I know the police have always worked for the rich. The war on drugs was always about locking brown people up and why these prisons are built, but I swear this town didn't used to be so mean. The newspaper doesn't mention that you went to school, had never been arrested. The newspaper said you were agitated, threatening. There are words that start with a T, thug and threat. There are trials. Police are never charged at trials.  To them we are bangers, we are beggars, we are tent city trash makers. We, the former tenants of San Francisco, dead in jail, sleeping under the freeway out here somewhere between Stockton and the grave. Mothing your flame. Saw you swiping faces to the left, to the left. There you were, looking smart in glasses.  I put you safely in my to-do box where you found me. You sent for me in the rain and I came to you nervous. The night was muggy when we hugged. Your lips turned up in a way I had never seen. I was pressing the weight of my body on you the whole time we talked and drank and drank. Said too many things too fast. Mad smiling magnets kissing in the middle of the bar, pushed together by strangers, twinkling Christmas lights and old school jams. We were lime squeeze. We were pomegranate juice and mint garnish swimming in tequila and rye. You said you loved me that first night and I believe you. Also for the same person. Terminology. Finally found the word for never finding the word, letharagica. Are you saying it's all in my head, all psychogenic, all jammed up like a shoplifting hoarder's attic? I'm always searching, checking for your next text. I was just about to do something but what but you, I remember and remember earworm eating my apple heart. You sticky, sticky hamster wheel. My teeth so tight together we should be together. I swipe left through tinder. There's no cuties after you. After you, there is only more you. I swipe right and then you left but you say you're not gone. I'm all amygdala lost my cortex. Oh, how I adore you tracing my muscles, naming them. Loosening trapezius under scapula. My nerves lighting up under your fingertips. The protuberance of my mammary gland in your mouth. Langua like ocean. The fleshy folds. The organs of speech. The pinkish or reddish margins. How I miss them like the edge of a wound. Jails have ATM machines now. Plastic cards by commissary and child support. For an extra $3 you can add a personal message. Don't worry about us. We'll be fine or we love and miss you. Happy birthday. After we slide our credit cards, a woman behind us struggles to shove in her few wrinkly dollar bills. On the block the kids stay out all night lining the stairs with hundreds of flaming prayer candles. Spray the walls for poody from two six.  Each night they bring the biggest red heart balloons the kind sold for valentines in high school graduation. They fill the street with beating heart cars double parked and spilling liquor in his memory. When the phone rings, you press five as fast as you can so as not to lose a precious moment of his voice. You accept that he can only speak to you on a police recording. There are options. More money for more minutes. You can buy them so we can't call anyone but you. You pay for time with no idea what words will fill it. How many ways can you say love or absent? You describe reaching for his side of the bed using his chapstick because it's the last thing to touch the softness of his lips. Lips you fell on and into in a bar. Lips you woke to like a life raft at sea behind security glass cracked and dry. They are an unkissed desert. You roll his chapstick on the thirst of your lips until you reach the empty plastic.  Feel nothing but exhaustion. Down the street, the kids are wrapping, dressed up, passing blunts, blowing smoke at the unfair sky.  You mourn with them. You have suffered a kind of death also. In the morning, you pour two cups of coffee, empty his into the garden out back. The dogs are bored with your sadness, refuse belly rubs even when offered.  You internet search the things you can and can't send him. These companies have made phone apps to send your money to jails. These enterprises who make the packages you send your beloved, the same who offered to send your college student modified food products. You tell them all the ways to recreate crackers, ramen and chips, to pretend it is sustenance when in fact it is currency. The first time you saw your son's college dorm, it struck you. These companies build prison cells. Prisoners build the beds and desks and both to house your child, your man, perhaps yourself one day. Outside at the memorial, they are barbecuing tonight. You put chicken in the oven, can't light charcoal without your grill man. You tell yourself you must live, you tell yourself to write, wait his call, wait and wait, lose weight. Memorize the number that has replaced his name, find his wet white dress shirt, bought for the courtroom, limp in the dryer, walk his letters to the mailbox, tell yourself you are living, a brain connected to a body, a hand to put money in the machine, a heart commodified, a special message. Don't worry about us, we'll be fine. Hurry one more. So I'm gonna read one more, it's a little bit long, but it's brand brand new, I've never read it before, so. And I'm gonna cuss, cause that's what I do. It's called all of the fucks. Number one, sleeping face on my pillow, a face I knew 30 years ago, innocent and serious like our prom picture. I crammed to understand this face, twisted and rage, blank when adoring, inside or out, there's a flatness.  I tried not to let him know the fucks I give, the mountain of fucks, tucked neatly into my chest.  He stomped on me, but his absence hurt more. I knew his rage, I shared it, out of control and uncontrollable, even now neither of us could work a straight job, not cut out for being managed. I scratched his face and threatened him, even when punching, I crushed on the soft cotton of his clothing, the way he swaddles himself in layers of it, leaves wet mounds of undershort shirts and drawers beside my bed, still smells like soap and sugar.  The second calls, a recording interrupts to remind us this call is from a correctional facility, counts down the seconds until it cuts us off, leaves him leaning concrete, sweating a dorm of 160 men in 110 degrees, no air, no freedom, no end in sight. He is the one I would marry. Then there's an international call, my Rosta, a pig farmer who fancies himself and love. He's lost his cell phone at sea and overloaded fishing boats sinking into the Aquamarine. He says my name over and over and calls me queen, asks me when I'll be ready for retiring, how many jobs he has to take to take care of me. The fourth is an ex who comes to lie on the floor next to my dying dog, weeping this illness, this loss, all of the death he has suffered the past year, or maybe he cries remembering when we first dated how we kicked this dog roughly off my bed, how I calmly told him that anyone who could hurt this dog, who does nothing but love, who lives to be close, just closeness, that's all he wants. Anyone who could hurt that must have a serious problem, I said with my back to him. After that he was never mean, he doted on both dogs even after I broke it off. He whispered love in velvet dog ears, words he was never brave enough or sure enough to say to me. Thank you. Thank you so much.


Good morning world! Welcome back to our channel! We are here in the middle of the countryside of Cambridge, just on a small road in the middle of nowhere. Beautiful location for our next video. So today we will talk about our filming setup on the bike. Yeah we had a lot of people asking online about what cameras we were using on microphones or how we set everything up so I thought we could just do a quick video and we can show you guys all about it. So let's go! So we'll start at the front of the bike. This is a GoPro Hero 7 and it's mounted onto the bar which is just behind the windshield on our bike. Now I don't know if this bar is on every single bike but it was really useful that this was here for us because it's the perfect place to mount it because it's quite high up. It's still behind the windshield and it's quite high up and it has quite a nice view of both of us and the surroundings from behind. That's mounted onto the bar using the Camelo which we got from Amazon. We've got links for all of this stuff in the description so if you want to check out any of these products you can just check the links down in the description. So yeah it's the Camelo handlebar mount for motorcycles and it seems like a really robust piece of kit. It's made of metal and it's attached to the bar there and it's really solid. It's really solid so at the moment I couldn't recommend that enough. So now going to the back of the bike we have a very homemade setup to give you that sort of vantage point of both the rider and the pillion from behind and everything around them. It's a really cool angle. This was actually completely random. We just went to B&Q and we just were looking to see what they had that would work for us and this is what we came up with. It's essentially a big selfie stick which we have a GoPro MAX 360 camera attached to the top of and that extends out really far so it can give us an amazing vantage point over the bike and that is attached to our rear pan. It's actually screwed on with four screws and this was originally a coffee table leg and it was just in B&Q and we thought it looked like a similar sort of size to our pole with the foam kind of handle and we cut off the end and it was amazing because it fits in nice and snug which we don't have to do anything else. You don't even have to secure it. It just fits in like that. It's absolutely amazing. So onto our third camera that is the old classic the GoPro mounted on the front of the chin of the helmet. Now again this is a Amazon product that we found which is attaching with four bits of adhesive to the helmet and it feels really really solid. It feels like it's not going to fall off anytime soon. I've got the link in the description for that one as well and that one the GoPro is not on it because we're currently filming with it but essentially the GoPro goes on the chin and that gives that third vantage point from the riotous perspective. The riotous perspective. For our audio setup what we've done is we have the GoPro attached to an audio splitter and that audio splitter gives us two input feeds for the GoPro. The GoPro has the media mod on it. It's actually a GoPro Hero 10 with the media mod attached so that you can plug in external microphones. So my external microphone is actually wired into the helmet and round so that it's actually on my intercom mic and it's actually just taped together with my intercom mic so even if my helmet is up or down I can still talk and record talking.  She's actually using this one which is what I'm using at the moment. Both of these lapel mics are Movo PM10s and the link for those is also in the description and we really like the sound of these ones so I definitely recommend these lapel mics. They aren't really that expensive and they actually sound pretty good. So Lavi's one pretty much goes inside the helmet and is just sort of taped in front of the mouth like that. So that's basically our filming and audio setup but what we're going to do now is we're going to jump on the bike and we're going to show you what it's like in action. Okay rock and roll. So I found that if you beep a bunch of times at the beginning of when you want to start recording with all three cameras then that really helps with syncing them all back up together when you get into the editing suite because it can often be really hard to find out where you are in the video and getting all of the different angles in the same place so just a little tip. But this is our three camera setup in action. We're rolling down this beautiful little country road in Cambridge and it's a beautiful location to just show you guys our motorbike studio setup. So as you can see we've got the GoPro mounted to the front here behind the windshield and that GoPro is sort of the one that I can talk to as I'm driving along and that just gives us another perspective. Hopefully you can see sort of me maybe a little bit of lavy behind me and a bit of the surroundings and then you've got the one on my chin that one I can sort of direct you know anywhere that I want to film can look to the left look to the ride the rapeseed oil is coming up at the moment coming into flower that's really really beautiful absolutely beautiful. It's a beautiful time of year in England so yeah that's sort of the rider's perspective one the one on the chin and that's also the one that's recording both of our audio because lavy has plugged herself in like I said before we're both using the Movo PM10 lapel mics which are perfectly reasonable and I think they sound pretty good. Yeah and then you can see on the back here the GoPro 360 max and that one is the star of the show in my opinion like that just gives you this amazing perspective that the other two just can't give you it's just like it just shows both of us on the bike all the surroundings it's like being followed by a little mini drone for the whole time and yeah I'm really happy with that setup and the way we bolted it on to the rear panya feels really secure and the shot I think is absolutely beautiful absolutely love it yeah it's a very nice shot so there we go that is basically all three cameras rolling at once with our two microphones rolling as well and this is what you get from the result and if you guys haven't checked out our first little trip up to the peak district where we first sort of tested out all this equipment then please go and check that out and if you don't know we're actually heading off next week on our round the world trip which is actually a Guinness world record attempt to become the youngest pair to circumnavigate the globe by motorcycle so we're heading out next week and that's going to be like a two-year trip and we're super excited to get out and get on the road so if you haven't already guys please subscribe to the channel because we have a huge adventure coming up and yeah we would absolutely love it if you would be following along with us we will see you next time


Okay, so we have enough for lunch. What about breakfast? How about this one? This is loaded with sugar. Is this really how you want me to start my day? Okay, which one do you want then? Let's see. High in protein. This is just what I needed to start the day right. So where did you learn all this? Come on dad, they taught us at school. Be smart, eat smart.


Congratulations to our new sergeants. I have all the faith in the world in you. I know you're going to be great leaders out there as you scatter throughout the department to different assignments. Wish you all the best and enjoy the time. Celebrate with your family. Congrats.


Where I come from, my country, the youth voice is never heard. The youth voice is never taken as important. Their voices are silent, and yet they are the most affected people in the community. And I'm so happy that today we stand with so many young people here willing to learn. Youth Diaspora Project was an idea we came up with, with how to engage with young people who are from conflict zones but currently living in the states. And the idea was that we could bring young people who are from different conflict zones as their area of origin, together to meet each other, to share their stories, and to talk about how to creatively engage with peace building. There are existing dialogues, there are existing diaspora dialogues dedicated to policy development. And if you look at who participates in those, there are entire generations missing. Young people do not participate in those dialogues. Young people have given up on the traditional institutional measures that exist for peace building. So part of our motivation in organizing the event is to increase youth participation in these policy processes, but also to change up the policy processes into perhaps formats or venues that are more youth friendly. And we all came together at USIP to talk about what it means to be a young diaspora in the states, how they relate to the conflict back home and introduce some creative ways to engage in peace building. We saw these two young people who are arrested from diaspora communities who are going to join terror cells. And instead, how do we have the next front page story be some of these young people who are trying to build peace in their community? I love to see how they can learn and get engaged on how to do that. We started by building and having people bring objects that symbolize home to them and to begin telling their stories about that and that's a very complicated story for diaspora. I think it means confusion most of the time, trying to figure out exactly who you are within your own community. A member of the diaspora is someone who is living overseas and usually they consider the country, then living to be their home, but there's always a strong cultural or ethnic link to the country they're from. Tell me about your stumbling. You know, I think as immigrants we have this issue of sometimes we're too, you know, like here I'm too Afghan to be considered fully American and then when I'm there I'm too American to be considered fully Afghan. So I definitely did make mistakes, but I think it's a lot in how you approach it. You know, I don't go into any community and think, I know the answers and I'm here to teach you, but I'm here to learn. You know, if there's a way I can help you, let me know. And if you feel like I can't, then that's fine too. I'll leave. That's not a big deal to me. And so I think going in with that perspective really helped me. And so I really was able to bridge that divide, but I did make mistakes. I've been struggling ever since I was like 10 years old with exactly being part of that diaspora because I was personally born in Western New York in a small farm town. So for me I feel way more American than I do Iraqi, but I never ever rejected my Iraqiness. I was always very proud of it. I just felt like I would never really be accepted if I went back to Iraq. So I would say being Sri Lankan to me is being confused because I can't be proud of it. I can't, but I have to be proud of it in some ways. But there's so much that's gone on, so it's very difficult to explain to people why it means I'm not on computer. I don't consider it whole. When people ask me where I'm from, well I say my parents are from Sri Lanka. Like I'm not from there. I was born in New York and then we moved down here when I was like two. So Maryland is like... The willingness to come out, to want to change what is happening in their community, in their countries it is very touching to me because that means showing a generation not just in outside countries that are coming from these more affected areas, how the young people are yearning for peace. Even you coming from far, far another country with our family, with our brothers and sisters for the world. Change my country is a step to change the world. If it changes, that means there is progress for the world. There is a hope that every other country could change. Thank you. These young people are struggling to find something that they can root to and that will give them a sense of opportunity and purpose. They're not given these alternative roads and alternative tools or shown that the tools that they actually already have at their disposal can be used to circumvent all of these other things. Well, music is a universal language so we can start there and hip-hop right now is the voice of youth. The notion of freedom, some say it's just a thought. I didn't think I could rap so that was really interesting. In fiction and fact, another government coup has started the attack. I think it took two times, two tries, going around the room for me to kind of get a beat going so I didn't know I had that in me. What I hope that you're going to take away from this is that there are many different ways that we can all bond and communicate and many different ways that we can kind of facilitate those things. And obviously it was interesting again to see you were talking about the message of hope of being on the attack against these regimes, you talking about your self-confidence, you having fun with your honey bun. But seriously, these were all very powerful messages and these were things that I didn't facilitate, I didn't say write about anything, I said don't write about anything, make no sense at all. And you instantly went to something that however whatever it was resonating with you and it was positive, it was a message behind it in some way, shape or form. So we have people expressing themselves in all sorts of ways using music, using photography, using film and the way that all of this gets out there into the world is through social media, digital media. You have a blog or you have a website or you go on Facebook. Training young people on how to use technology for social change is what I really care about. What tools would you imagine would make sense? So you're talking about sharing stories, connecting different diaspora groups and you're talking about sharing some resources. I want to give young people who have so much potential to achieve change some of the just tools and the knowledge of really how to reach out to their peers and influence the political process through online technology. Which communities do particularly want to reach? What we're trying to, what we're talking about is reaching the community background because of the way the government policies that people are not aware of how would these affect people, how does this policy affect people or like just making a decision that people are not being aware of it. But if you put it out there people would know what's going on in the government and they could have something to contribute to it. You know in the peace world there's a lot of global interest and global opinion. How do you make that visible? People really struggle to take global public opinion and turn it into something meaningful something that can have a political impact. Using online technology you could build a framework for that that can be really effective. We all share something, even for all different parts of the world there's a common theme in our conflicts and common thing in our problems and what we talked about is to be able to imagine what it would be like if you created a documentary where everybody from all, I mean people from all different types of countries are able to show that similarity to show people that we're not that different. Film and new media is a vehicle that young people get. It's a medium that allows young people to contribute their voices to policy development, deliberation, decision making. So we have basically an hour to kind of break it down and give you guys real core skills that you can then take and use and go out. It may seem a little daunting the possibility of making a film whether it be a short, feature length, whatever but actually when you break it down it's really all about telling a story. The film component is a really integral part of the project. This project wasn't meant to be just a conference. The idea was that whenever USIP has a conference generally we put out a report about it that's written and that goes and it meets with policymakers, it meets with people who are academics studying in the field and it has an impact but for the group we are trying to get we thought that having a written piece wouldn't be as accessible for them so we thought that we wanted to make whatever final product we had from the conference accessible for a broader youth audience but we also wanted to make it accessible for our participants to contribute. Maybe they don't want to write a report, maybe they want to do a film. Film is the perfect platform for those stories, for those voices and that's what makes this project different. It's not our voice, it's their voice.  Okay so now you need to do something that you want to have immortalized. So we're going to be discussing today how we can better think about the future and find positive ways for working on post-conflict in Sri Lanka. There's a lot of different types of footage that was generated through these group flip camps. Some groups chose to go out and hit the streets and ask people if they even knew what Sri Lanka where it was. Do you know what flag this is? No, I don't. Can you guess? Okay, well it's Sri Lankan. Do you know where Sri Lanka is? Not exactly. Some people chose to do interviews with their family members or with their friends. My hope was to touch on the lives of a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds in Sri Lankan diaspora and sort of bring their stories up and say this is how people feel positively about our situation this is how people feel negatively just in a way that every other diaspora member can sort of relate and say you know what economically that's where I am or socially that's where I am in terms of my feelings about the conflict or back home or how I'm doing here. That's exactly where I am. They stopped me when I was on my way somewhere they stopped the car I was in and when they found out my name was Tamil they called another cop over saying it's just Tamil. But you could speak Singhalese.  There's a lot of build solidarity around who we are Sri Lankan diaspora is very divided on a lot of different lines and I think there's a lot of space for them to come together and sort of work for change both here both back home and just be a community. My name is Walgrain Marva I'm a grad student here at Morgan State University in Baltimore in the US and I'm here today because I want to start a discussion concerning issues back home I'm deeply concerned about the developments we have and I'd like to see a greater deal of change back home. Can you rate your role from one to ten and show us your future? Probably lower so like three or four. Explain why that rating. Because I don't really think I have too much a big role in Sri Lanka either. Because I've only been there once and I don't really do things that pertain to Sri Lanka. Do you keep yourself informed about the politics there their civil war when it was happening? Yeah. Do you feel strongly about it? Oh yeah. Because even if we lived here it did affect us because of the family there. Family you know. I want to see a change in our diaspora because right now youths have at most a minor role in what's happening back home. Now that's unfortunate because we have such an advantage here. What is it that we are such an optimistic and open-minded generation born in America raised with the ideals that we do not discriminate based on religion or ethnicity on color or language? No. Sri Lankan youths believe that we all come from the same motherland. That we're all Sri Lankans and that we do have a voice. Hearing a lot of the stories of different members of the diaspora at the conference kind of inspired me to push myself to do that much more. Hello. My name is Bahar Gadani and I'm a student here at George Mason University. My friends and I decided to do this documentary to test the American public's knowledge about Kurdistan as well as to understand some of the issues that the Kurdish diaspora faces in the United States. In order to do this I interviewed random Americans, Kurdish youth, and Kurdish adults living in the DC metropolitan area. For starters, let's take a look at how many Americans have heard about Kurdistan. Do you know where Kurdistan is? No. No. No. I haven't heard. No, I haven't. No. No. No. Do you guys want to take a guess? No. It's about the Kurdish diaspora movement in general but it's also geared towards the American public as well in terms of educating them about who Kurds are, what the diaspora movement here faces that's not necessarily unique to their particular diaspora movement. It's kind of assimilation issues that we all face coming fresh off the boat, you know, to the United States. We are, it's definitely going to be a short in this stage of the process but we just have so much footage and so much information I don't see why we couldn't run with it and make it something much bigger in the near future. I think it would be a really cool idea. This future, from one to ten, one being the lowest can be highest. My role in the future I would say hopefully in eight because ten to me is like, you know, present or something like that so I hope to be able to influence the health care sector primarily with women's health and reproductive health and hopefully as a proxy on child health. For me, those interviews really stood out of the footage that I've seen so far. They just hit the issues on the nose. They knew exactly what to ask. It was really impressive and the varying types of answers we got, the different people we were able to touch through this project and reach out to and get thinking about these issues to me that's really exciting. We all have a lot that connects us strongly to our homeland. It's time to put these strong emotions into something positive. We talked about building a stronger diaspora because I think a lot of times we think that because we're not in the country we're not able to make a change and today we'll definitely prove that wrong even if we're not there we can make a change while we're here and that's starting a building a stronger bond between us. Starting out I think it was maybe this arrogant idea that I'm going to come in and perhaps project my own ideas and experiences to this group of people where I maybe have nothing in common with it's kind of like what could you possibly have in Haiti or Nigeria. Iraq is so far away from all of these places but then listening to a lot of these stories it's like they live and deal with a lot of the same problems that you face which is we all come from these conflict-ridden countries and are all struggling to try and find peaceful solutions to these problems while living here kind of removed from that situation. When I was coming here I didn't know what I was going to expect but the sooner everybody stopped talking I felt like this is net a diverse common-growth meeting I feel like it's a family meeting because I feel like we're all connected. We're all at a point now where we have these skills and we want to try to put this together into something concrete and we all have our own goals and we should really sit down and try to work with each other and move on from this conference after knowing each other to find effective methods and adding to what already exists with ourselves. Personal level to understand where you're from to understand your stories to understand your background to understand your message and to get to know them so you know exactly what those people are and not just generally putting them in a box together. I think it's an opportunity to get young people who are involved and contributing to Peace Back Home together to talk about the similarities there are between the different conflicts and the differences and by talking about those things to figure out ways in which we can contribute to making peace at home and ways in which we can better understand what's going on at home and this created a forum where people who spent a lot of time here who hadn't shared ideas and come together and it was incredible. Very inspirational. So just that everyone has a role and it might not be the same role but making sure that we're letting the diaspora know that there is a role for you to play so I guess This conference really is inspiring because the ideas of using media and using art music as a way to build bridges and connections through different groups through that common language and that common understanding is really a great initiative and I think it's something that needs to be explored more. And diaspora populations for better or for worse have a strong influence about what's going on in their home countries and part of our theory is that we can help diaspora groups make peace here they can make peace at home and part of the theory is that you can get youth populations to talk with each other across these ethnic barriers that are more or less responsible for the conflict in the first place. If you can get these young people to talk with each other across these barriers maybe they can reach some sort of resolution that hasn't been able to be reached before. This other part comes in ethnicity over nationality. Now typically within the country because of the military leadership we're having what they've been practicing is a politics of ethnicity where they vote for someone not based on who is most capable to do the job but rather what ethnic group is from what tribe is he from what language is he speaking what part of the country those are determining factors when it comes to politics however once we leave the shores of Nigeria the dynamics completely change because I no longer care whether or not you're from my part of the country but you're from Nigeria you're considered my brother that's how that's how it goes. This project is different in a lot of ways USIP works with diaspora groups a lot we work with mostly country groups so the Darfur diaspora as a group the Democratic public of Congo diaspora as a group and often when we bring these groups together we often get a lot of adults we get a lot of people who are already active in politics a lot of elites and the idea behind this project is we bring all these groups together but we hardly ever see a young person as a part of that group having that input interacting with policy makers interacting with practitioners who are really working on this issue so the idea was to introduce young people to that dialogue and give them an opportunity and I've been to the USIP before I've seen important officials come here and there's not that many too there's not that many young people that come which is why a lot of the speakers were saying and to think that USIP is not focusing on the youth and recognizing that the youth do have something interesting to say something important to say and perhaps something powerful to say about the dynamics of their nation I think was what drew me to this conference that my voice does matter and one day I might be able to have a bigger impact that even I thought I could have Actually, I really want to say this to everyone here I really didn't know exactly what I was going to be doing today I knew my workshop but I have to say that you all inspired me I realized that what I'm seeing here is just a small cadre of the leaders of not tomorrow but today and it's inspiring to see so many young people who are really looking for new ways and new ideas to very old problems that still exist and recognizing that we have to find new ways and new ground to explore to deal with these issues and it's so powerful that it didn't matter who was speaking in the room from what country everyone had a commonality of wanting to make change wanting to find solutions and wanting to do it under a sense of community and understanding and this for me gives me a lot of hope for the future and today so thank you all I think in terms of this conference I would hope they would network with each other and learn from one another and not repeat the same mistakes that maybe someone else made so not reinvent the wheel and I think at times that can be very difficult to be able to take that leap of faith and go outside of the norm of what you're used to but I think it's necessary in order to create lasting social change I've gone to all the sessions I've listened I've participated and I've heard and seen their eyes they're ready to do what they can using the tools that you're giving them and today they'll go out there not just for themselves but they will also give other youth the same tools to use and that way one by one we will change this world