Transcriber: Shorouq A Reviewer: David DeRuwe
So what does it take to clothe a child?
I'm not a mother, and I'm not a health professional,
so it's kind of strange that, for the last few years,
I have held literally hundreds of children.
I'm not even very good at it, because they always cry,
but I have come to believe that this act of holding
might be the most important thing that I can offer the world.
It's not even holding the child, but actually holding their clothes.
So I'm going to tell you today about what I have learned
about what it takes to clothe a child.
Our work, where I've been holding these babies, has been in Kosovo,
but, of course, I wasn't born in Kosovo.
I was born, a fat, healthy baby, in England,
but in 2006, I came to Kosovo with my partner Rob,
and still, 11 years later, we spend part of every week in Kosovo
and the rest of the time we spend mainly in Albania, where Rob now works.
Now, Kosovo is not a country of fat, healthy babies.
In fact, it has one of the highest child mortality rates in Europe.
But as I said, I don't know very much about babies.
I'm a teacher by profession.
And it was as a teacher that I started volunteering
with our charity in Kosovo,
and there that I really got engaged
in the work that I felt I could offer at first.
So I had many years of enjoying Kosovo's lush landscapes
and its beautiful long meals with good friends,
drinking tea and macchiato in Prishtina's funky cafes.
It was only after a while that I got sucked in
to a different side of Kosovo, a world of mud and of poverty,
and actually a part of Kosovo that some Kosovars don't know exists.
When I posted some photographs on Facebook,
one Kosovar commented that, "This is India."
And when I went to give a talk to a private school in Prishtina,
there was a girl with long blonde hair, who flicked it and said,
"Teacher, that's not my country,"
but it is her country.
It's a part of her country with huge educational challenges.
This community of rubbish pickers of the Roma, Ashkali, Egyptian communities
actually has 96% of its people who have not completed compulsory education.
That's an enormous challenge for all kinds of aspects of life,
and it's something that I, as a teacher, felt that I could help with.
So having first met this particular nine-year-old girl
and worked to get Gjelane into school and to help her,
and actually now, hundreds others like her
to get into school, to stay in school, and to succeed in school,
that was the part of Kosovo that I felt that I had something to offer.
But then I learned that there were a lot of children
who we weren't managing to get to school,
because they were dying before their first birthday.
In the UK, out of 1000 children born,
there are four who will die before their first birthday.
Just to have an idea of what that would be like,
let's go back to little baby Elizabeth,
and let's make hundreds of her, thousands of her -
little bit of a dizzying prospect, especially for me.
And of those, four won't make it to the age of one year old.
In Kosovo, that figure is 12, and in Albania, it's 13.
But in the Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian communities in Kosovo, that figure is 41.
And that is scandalous really.
Those are children being born into the same healthcare system
as those 12 out of 1000.
If you look at the graph here, you can see that the figure showing child mortality
amongst the Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian
is worse than the number of children dying in Iraq or in Bangladesh
or in the countries that you can see here like Congo and Eritrea.
Down at the bottom here are countries like Singapore and Slovenia,
which have very good child heath,
then my country,
then countries like Croatia and the US.
And then right up at the end are countries like Angola
with the worst child mortality in the world.
But there is some good news in these statistics,
and that's in those two bars of the graph there.
The higher one shows what the average child mortality rate
was across the world in 1990.
And the lower green one shows that, by 2015,
that rate of children dying across the world had almost halved.
So it is possible to do something about that scandalous situation,
and our charity, the Ideas Partnership, decided that we would try to do that,
and to work with those families
to see what we could do to support their babies
in their first year of life.
We knew that we would need money.
And thanks to the British embassy, the American embassy,
the Austrian Development Corporation
from Terre des hommes,
lots and lots of private donors,
we were able to get the money to bring together a team
who could support early child and mother health.
And this midwife who comes to the communities where we work.
At the moment, she's working with about 50 mothers a week.
She gives them advice on breastfeeding, on smoking,
she makes sure they have vitamins during their pregnancy,
she supports them with blood tests and blood pressure,
but she also makes sure there is transport to take them
to hospital when the time comes for them to give birth.
When we started our project,
one in three babies in this community were being born at home.
And that means being born often without running water,
certainly without access to medical personnel.
It means that there's much less chance of those babies being vaccinated
or registered.
And now the babies born through our project,
only three percent have been born at home.
So we can really see that we have made a difference.
We have contributed something to tackling those scary statistics.
But we also knew that it wasn’t enough
to bring that external expertise into the community.
We needed to be building the local skills and knowledge,
and building on what was already there.
And this is Bajramsha who is our community health assistant
from the Roma, Ashkali, Egyptian community in Fushë Kosovë.
And she works alongside the midwife,
but she also goes and visits mothers at home.
She visits all of the new born babies.
And it was Bajramsha that told us
what was the first thing that we needed to clothe a child.
She said that she needed to take with her on those visits a baby pack
that would have with it a blanket and some baby clothes and some nappies
and things to make sure that the first weeks of those children's lives
were clean and warm.
And so we put out a call for those things amongst our friends,
and we discovered the huge generosity that there is
that it also takes to clothe a child.
All over England, people were contributing their own children's clothes.
They were going out and buying new clothes to give to us.
And I go back to the UK about once a month.
I had friends in Cornwall and in London
stockpiling these things for me to take back with me.
Whenever Rob and I traveled from England to Kosovo,
we had our rucksacks and our bags stuffed full.
In fact, we've calculated that on our backs
we have brought more than a ton of baby clothes to Kosovo.
(Applause)
And of course those clothes went immediately
to the wriggling newest citizens of Kosovo.
And we made sure that there was a photograph
and some information about the recipients
that went to the people who have been so kind as to give in the UK.
And that was the next ingredient
that I learned was so important in clothing a child.
It wasn't enough just to have that generosity,
that outpouring of offers,
but it was important that those people knew where the clothes ended up,
they knew where their investment of love was going.
And we made sure that we always sent a photograph
with a name and a story of this baby.
Drawing on what we'd done with that little girl Gjelane
when we were trying to get children to school -
96% of a community not in school is a really overwhelming statistic,
and it was too much for us to think about how we could tackle that,
but getting one girl to school, a named child, we could all do that.
And that was motivating for me, and it was motivating for our other volunteers,
and for our donors.
And we knew that the same thing was true about our babies that we were supporting.
So this business of naming the child was our next magic ingredient
in ensuring that those babies were clothed.
Bajramsha would then take those packages,
and they became not just a way of clothing the children,
but in fact a ticket for her into having conversations with the mothers
about how the first few weeks were going,
making sure they could read the information
that had been given to them by the hospital about their check-ups,
things that if you're illiterate prove a real problem for your child's health.
And we could see that we were starting to really make an impact,
but then somebody came up with a way
that we could even better clothe these children,
and, in fact, even better join the world up.
And that was when somebody suggested
that they didn't just want to donate some clothes,
they wanted to create some clothes with some knitting.
And so we now have an army of knitters.
We have people in the UK; we have people donating in Kosovo itself.
We even have people in the community who've now seen
that they can pass on their skills and their love in this way.
And so the children are looking increasingly handsome.
(Laughter)
And we have also begun to realize
that this has brought about another ingredient in that relationship
and that effort to clothe the poorest children of Kosovo.
And that's the element of reciprocity - of it being a two-way process.
So when I was back in England last month,
there was a box of blankets waiting for me,
and it had come in the post with a letter, and it said,
"My friend's husband has just died,
and we, as a group of friends, got together with her
to start knitting for the children in Kosovo.
We hope that these blankets help the children
as much as knitting them helped my friend."
And then I was at a fundraising event in the UK,
and a woman came up with this blanket, and she said,
"My husband has a degenerative disease, he needs watching 24/7,
and the carer who comes in at night to look after him
knitted these things for you while she was watching over him."
And it was clear that for that woman,
there was an enormous emotional investment,
not just for the children of Kosovo,
but also, of course, in her love for her husband.
And I realize that these children have been offering a kind of comfort
that I could never have imagined to lonely and sad people
on the other side of Europe,
and that this was not just a one-way process,
that this reciprocity was a really important part of what we were now about.
That became even more evident when the inspirational Remzije Sherifi
got involved in our project.
Remzije is a Kosovar who came to the UK in 1999 as a refugee,
and she has now set up a refugee group in Glasgow.
And these people from Syria, from Somalia, from Congo,
all over the world come together to share their love and their skills
in knitting things for the children of the world that need them,
in our case, for Kosovo.
The idea of these people who have escaped such trauma
and have lived through such need themselves
now offering their love and their time to other people in need
made a real impression on me and has made me realize
that the receivers of yesterday can become the givers of today,
and that transformation is essential for the human dignity,
for the sustainability of us all helping.
And it's something that we've now contributed to our own project
of giving clothes to the babies.
Those clothes have come on a cycle. They may have been knitted by somebody.
They may have been knitted in fact with yarns
that in their own turn have been donated.
We had some lovely people at "loveknitting.com"
who gave us boxes and boxes of wool,
so that things were produced out of donations to start with.
And then when we pass them on to the beneficiaries,
although those are now blurred with our donors,
we put with them this little note,
and it says - and it also has a little diagram with it -
that "Please don't thank us, but when you have the opportunity,
please help someone like this in your turn."
(Applause)
That means that the receivers of today become the givers of tomorrow.
And we can see how this process is becoming a circular one
and is something we're very proud of.
I'm going to give you one last example of how that works
by introducing you to Jack.
Jack is a volunteer with the Ideas Partnership.
He's from London,
and a couple of years ago, he was working in a bar,
and he was trying to work out what to do with his life,
and he decided to come and volunteer in Kosovo for a week.
At the end of the week he came to me, and he said, "I'm going to come back,
but I want to come back with skills
that are useful to the families you support."
So that meant he had to do some very hard things.
He had to go back to college to get the qualification,
so that he could apply to university
and now, this very week, he starts his training as a paramedic.
He's been out twice since then,
and you can see him in this photograph,
thinking that he is giving a baby a blanket.
In fact, of course, what he is getting in return is a new career.
(Applause)