Press Clippings 15

Acceptance speech,
Award Ceremony for the Ten Most Outstanding Young Persons of the World, World Congress of the Junior Chamber International, Matthew Albert
(Vienna International Centre, Austria, 25 October 2005)

The Sudanese Australian Integrated Learning Program began five years ago with a small note posted on an obscure university notice-board. This note was posted by a Sudanese mother on behalf of her seven children. It called for assistance with English for the most recent of refugee arrivals to Australia. As a result of that simple request, in a small, run-down hall in one of Australia’s poorest areas, the SAIL Program was born. Anna Grace Hopkins, who is here with me this evening, and I decided that we would build a small operation into something else; as they say, from little things, big things grow. Grand as it may appear on the big screen this evening, at its core, what the SAIL Program does is humble. Through tutoring, excursions, camps and mentoring, all we ultimately do is to facilitate relationships.

The volunteers who come to donate their time and energy at the SAIL Program, usually do so initially as an act of charity or an attempt to “do good”. But the moment of value in the SAIL experience is not in attending so much as it is in engaging. The Australian volunteers, one by one, see the Sudanese-ness and the refugee-ness of the person with whom they work, drop away. It is in that moment of realization, when an Australian stops seeing “beneficiary” and starts seeing “contributor”, that the SAIL experience reaches its zenith. There, in that moment, is the most basic of truths: we are human first and foremost.

My motivation comes from the people I have the honour of working with. The first SAIL mother who remains a model of composure and yet, is the survivor of the rawest in human brutality. The Ethiopian man, who has been at the United Nation’s Kakuma refugee camp for over a decade, who set up and runs a highly successful hotel and restaurant in the refugee camp. The craftsman who ran the only shop that I saw in Sudan. A shop that sells smoking pipes made from bullet shells. These people could just as easily contribute to the fields in which we are being acknowledged tonight. Without peace in their homeland and security where they seek refuge, they all too often cannot contribute. It is no small tragedy for us all that 17 million people around the world are currently socially disabled in this way.

Each one of these is a lost contributor. I say this with great confidence, although it is contrary to received wisdom. What of Nobel Peace Prize winners the Dalai Lama and Hose Ramos Horta refugees present and past respectively, or Mahatma Gandhi, once a refugee, or Albert Einstein, also a refugee? And I think too, in less renowned tones, of my own family, who fled to Australia to seek refuge just 70 years ago.

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The SAIL Program is an organisation run by young people but it is run for people of all ages. The central pillar of the SAIL Program is that we, Sudanese and Australian, are not the leaders of tomorrow. We are the leaders of today.

The same applies to those of us gathered here. We are a privileged lot. As it is often said, leadership and privilege requires one other ingredient to be palatable; responsibility.

So, how do we meet this challenge? We must work to turn ideals into modus operandi, not in magnificent settings like this but in the small acts we make and in the humble places we make them. As Eleanor Rooselvelt said “unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”

We must ensure that human rights are operative in the most clinical and antiseptic of environments.

We must, for example, ensure that peace and justice are unwritten agenda items in every corporate boardroom.

We must answer the hard questions ourselves and we must question the answers of others.

In closing, I draw on a quote from Robert Kennedy, the brother of two former honorees of this award. It explains how small gestures, like the SAIL Program, can have global implications. It explains how seemingly simple acts can shift the world towards peace. He said;
Each time a [person] stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance

We, the young leaders of today, must be the ones to say;
We cannot point the finger without first reviewing the mirror.
We cannot expect trust without first offering it
And we cannot attain peace by engaging in war

I take this honour as tacit acknowledgement that the idealism of young people around the world today can, with work, become the reality for tomorrow. And I warmly thank the Junior Chamber for the acknowledgement of just this."

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