Savouring the Past - Anticipating the Future
VOLUME 26, NUMBER 5, NOVEMBER 2004
Just the other day Ian Smillie, one of the founding members of Inter Pares, dropped by the office to meet with current staff regarding some work of mutual interest in Africa. As we were chatting, Ian noticed a beautiful old wood bookcase topped with flowers and hanging vines and stacked with manuscripts, books and binders. The bookcase stands out among the more modern "off-the-rack" modular office furniture, and is one of our favorite objects in the office.
"That bookcase belonged to my father," he said. "It was one of the first pieces of furniture Inter Pares scrounged when we were starting up. It is wonderful to see that it has traveled with Inter Pares all this way and over all this time."
Indeed, it is wonderful, and in a way symbolic of how Inter Pares has retained its roots, even as it makes its way in the world toward a more humane global future we all hope to see some day. And the visit and discussion was a reminder that as we near the end of one challenging year and approach the uncertainties of the next, Inter Pares also approaches the threshold of its fourth decade of international social justice action.
Inter Pares will mark its 30th anniversary in 2005. Yet, in many ways it seems like only yesterday that this adventure began. It was 1975 when several young and idealistic Canadian activists fresh from stirring experiences in Canada and overseas set out on an experiment in international social change action. And since its first days with borrowed furniture and youthful energy and optimism, Inter Pares has been a uniquely home-grown endeavour to build common cause relationships among Canadians and colleagues in countries around the world, north and south, among equals. And although there has been ongoing renewal of the staff team, Inter Pares retains deep personal and political links with the original generation, both within present staff and through our ongoing collaboration with the many, many people with whom Inter Pares has worked and grown since its early beginnings.
What does it mean to build something like this over thirty years? Most importantly, it means relationships, in Canada and around the world: shared experience, shared commitment, shared learning, shared action. And as the years go by, the relationships we have built are strengthened by shared roots and mutual support, each one nurturing the other. There is an ecology to it, an interdependency.
Inter Pares' actions take various forms. We think of it as naming the world, improving the world, and changing the world. This means political analysis - describing the world truthfully, the way we find it. It means material assistance - assisting people at the local level to improve the concrete daily conditions of their lives in the real world as they find it. And it means political action - carrying out policy activism to help fundamentally change the world so that it ceases to be the way we find it, and becomes a more humane place for every child, woman and man.
Building something over thirty years is also growing and learning. Our memory is part of the knowledge that leads us forward into the future. Our experience makes us confident about the possibilities for influencing the quality of the future that we share - a future based in relationships, affinities and common aspirations. We also know that what we hold for the future depends on what we do with the past - with the experience, the knowledge and the relationships formed over these years.
What we hold for the future is rooted in an active engaged memory of our past and the legacy of those who created Inter Pares and those who have spent part of their precious lives participating with us in our joint action. This Bulletin explores just a few of these relationships and the shared experience they now contain.
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| Reviewed October 27, 2004 |  |
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