Charmain Jones has been working at RCN as our Community Relations
officer for the past 8 ½ years. In this blog she reflects on five key
lessons from her rural peacebuilding work. She is the only core funded regional
rural community relations officer in NI, funded by the Community Relations
Council.
1. Working in peacebuilding in Northern
Ireland for me is a lifetime vocation, not a job, it is something you either
have passion for or you don’t. Sometimes you think you are making progress, but
I find that external events can directly impact the work at a grass roots level
and set it back months if not years. To do effective rural peacebuilding you
have to be resilient. For me that means focusing on how I can work to make
things better long term.
2. You learn very quickly that
you work with very resilient individuals. For those of us of a certain
generation, some who have lived through turbulent times, each one of us has
travelled a very different individual journey based on our own life’s
experiences and with that comes many challenges. The initial challenge for me
is to try and slowly build a relationship with that person and help build trust
so that more open dialogue can take place between individuals about the past
and the future. I have learned that to do effective rural peacebuilding you
start with the individual, you listen, you support, you empathise and then you
help them on their own journey. That has a ripple effect on families,
communities and wider society.
3. I have learned the skill of “narrative
hospitality”. This means that I ask people to share their story with respect. I
want to learn, I want to listen, I want to understand and in doing that, I aim
to model the type of respectful conversation I want to have so that this is reciprocated
by members of the group. You must learn to walk in the shoes of the other
person and hear stories that make you uncomfortable or that are challenging. A
key part of my role is to ensure people who engage in this type of dialogue
come to no harm.
4. I have learned that urban and
rural have a very different way of engaging in peacebuilding. I have lived
beside an interface barrier most of my life and having worked in towns for over
11 years prior to RCN, the issues I worked on were visible and that visibility
meant you had to try to address them. Issues of division in rural communities
are more hidden and there can be a culture of polite avoidance amongst rural
people. Rural engagement is more about breaking down barriers in people’s minds
rather than physical walls, and that’s an even harder job. It’s about trying to
break the silence that has existed for years as people live cheek by jowl and
the legacy of the past still impacts today. This means my work has to be slow,
it has to be consultative but also it has to be undertaken with empathy and
compassion as I am asking people to step out of their comfort zones and discuss
issues on a cross community basis which they may never have done before.
5. There are lessons to be learnt
from rural peacebuilding that can support and aid urban regeneration and
reconciliation and vice versa. I am glad to say some government departments,
funders and other statutory agencies are starting to see that rural
peacebuilding needs to be done differently.
I was born in 1976 and lived all
my childhood and early adulthood, in what I considered then to be a normal
society. It is only looking back, decades later, that I realised how abnormal
things really were. Northern Ireland has significantly improved, however under
the surface many issues and division remains. For me it is important to
remember that we cannot do effective community development without addressing
community relations issues. This will continue to be my guiding principal in the
future.
