On the International Day of Peace, I spent more than three hours listening to people from around the world tell stories about how they are tending to peace in the places they call home.
There were peacebuilders and technologists, Indigenous leaders and educators, humanitarians and people working in communities shaped by war. Artificial intelligence was part of the conversation. So were systems of care, new forms of collaboration, and the possibility of connecting people and resources across borders. The gathering was called the AI for Peace Fireside Summit, and the conversation kept returning to people already practicing peace in the places they call home.
A child in Ukraine learning how to breathe before running to a bomb shelter. Children in Gaza saving part of the only hot meal they may receive that day to bring home to their families. Widows in Uganda walking into homes with running water and showers after lives spent simply trying to survive. Children in Kenya learning to grow enough food to help feed their families and pay for school. An Indigenous leader walking for two days out of the Amazon forest to join a conversation about technology, peace, and the future. A mother of 11 who once prayed to be given the jobs no one else wanted, then years later found herself walking more than 30 miles into the Amazon carrying satellite technology to communities that had asked to be connected.
Again and again, peace came down to the scale of a human life.
A School in Gaza
Dr. David Hasan was supposed to join the summit earlier in the day, but one of his patients needed emergency surgery.
David is a Palestinian American neurosurgeon and professor at Duke University and one of the founders of Gaza Children’s Village. When he eventually appeared on screen, still needing to return to his patient, he explained that the organization began with three motivations. The first was “never again for both sides.” The second was rebuilding Gaza through education and health. The third was creating a place where Israelis and Gazans could begin finding ways to rebuild relationships and communicate. “Because at the end of the day, no one is going to leave their land,” David said. “They need to figure it out and live in peace.”
The organization began by focusing on children who had lost parents and has since expanded. David said approximately 21,000 children now participate in its academies, including orphaned, injured, vulnerable, and other children whose education has been disrupted. The schools provide education and medical care, along with group psychotherapy and a curriculum designed around empathy, tolerance, critical thinking, open dialogue, and learning to encounter different narratives.
They also serve a hot meal every day. For some children, David said, it is the only meal they will eat that day. Some save part of it to take home to their families.
There are enormous political and historical realities surrounding these children, far beyond anything that can be held inside a few paragraphs. David’s attention this morning was on their lives now: whether they are fed, cared for, able to learn, and given space to heal. Humanitarian aid is necessary, he said, and he also wants their education to help them develop empathy, tolerance, critical thinking, and the ability to see the world through more than one lens. It costs about $260 to provide one child with nine months—a full academic year—of education and the support surrounding it.
“You can help us help these kids,” David said. “Give them a chance to reclaim back their childhood.”
And then he left to return to surgery.
The Children Who Keep Practicing
Barbara Leger’s story began decades before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when she was recovering from a serious injury and learning to walk again. Her son Andrew, then nine or ten, came into her room. It was the Cold War, and he had a question.
“Am I going to live long enough to go to college, or are we all going to die before then?” he asked.
Barbara remembers it as the moment that woke her up. She got out of bed, began walking better, and decided her life would have something to do with the solution.
Years later, that commitment eventually became part of the Golden Path of Peace, which began working with teachers and schools in Ukraine before the current war. Barbara described the early curriculum as an exploration of peace and possibility. When the invasion began, she said, everything changed within weeks. What had been an exploration became something children and teachers needed immediately.
Among the tools that emerged were what Barbara calls “resilience in a rucksack”—portable materials that allow learning and play to continue even when children are displaced from their classrooms or have to go into bomb shelters.
And they still do.
Barbara has a video of one little boy explaining what he has learned to do when that happens. Going into the basement is scary, he says, but someone taught him how to breathe. “Look, I’ll show you,” he says as he takes a breath. “And then you feel a little better, and then we can go.”
The children are teaching one another this technique now.
Barbara told another story from just this week, this one about a member of her staff facing a decision many families in Ukraine have faced: Does she leave to protect her children or stay with her husband and family? They were having a difficult conversation when Barbara decided to turn it into a restaurant.
There were only two things on the menu, she told the woman: losing your mind or keeping your focus.
They began laughing their way through what each choice came with. Losing your mind offered worry, fear, exhaustion, and the inability to think straight. Keeping your focus required more work. It came with breathing, practice, and returning to what remained within your reach.
The woman later wrote to thank her.
“We need to take that game to the kids,” the woman said.
“They Don’t Want Pity”
The stories moved next to a network born from another place of pain.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Antoinette Rootsdawtah and others involved in Stand Up for Justice began asking what beloved community could look like in practice. The work eventually connected with the African philosophy of Ubuntu and with communities across Africa. “I am because we are,” Antoinette explained. “I cannot exist without you, and you cannot exist without me.”
She had traveled through 10 African countries exploring what Ubuntu looked like in people’s lives and saw communities building schools, hospitals, villages, and systems of care together. The philosophy, she realized, was larger than any one place.
“Ubuntu to the world,” she began telling her team.
Then Antoinette began talking about the people she had met along the way. She spoke about girls and young people living in refugee settlements and underserved communities, and about the trauma stories that had sometimes left her unable to continue interviewing them. Then she told us what she had learned from the people whose lives others might be tempted to reduce to suffering.
“They don’t want pity,” she said. “They want dignity. They want love. They want respect.”
Look at the photographs she’s taken, she told us, and you will not see people presented as poor, sad, or helpless. You will see life and joy. You will see people building and creating.
“They’re saying, ‘I’m a human being that has valuable gifts to offer,’” she said.
That understanding is visible throughout the work. In western Uganda, Wilbroad Kiiza and others have helped build eight homes for widows and their grandchildren. These are homes with clean water, toilets, and showers. Wilbroad described watching families move into them and begin rebuilding their lives. “Sometimes a small act of love can become something much bigger than we imagined,” he said.
Antoinette remembers the women being shown how the showers worked. She remembers their faces. Before, she said, their faces carried the look of women who had worked hard their entire lives and were simply getting by. “Now it’s just joy,” she said.
In Kenya, teacher and farmer Bilha Meraba is working with children to grow their own food. She moves from school to school teaching students organic and innovative farming techniques, including ways to grow food even when they do not have much land. Some students sell what they grow to help pay school fees or buy uniforms for children who cannot afford them.
“Listen to the soil,” Bilha tells them. “Do what the soil tells you.”
At the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, Mark Ndayizeye leads a refugee-led organization supporting other refugees through education, livelihoods, digital skills, social and emotional learning, and psychosocial support. In Uganda’s Nakivale refugee settlement, other members of the network are growing food, teaching permaculture, supporting women, and creating child-safety programs.
Antoinette wants the children involved in all of these efforts to know one another.
“My kids in Uganda, talking to the kids in Gaza, talking to the kids in Ukraine,” she said. “Peer-to-peer is the best way.”
“They Are the Forest”
By the time the conversation reached the Amazon, the summit had already run long.
Then Jazz Tupinambá began to sing.
Jazz joined from Belém do Pará, at the gateway to the Brazilian Amazon, and introduced herself as an Indigenous artist, diplomat, and leader. Before talking about artificial intelligence, she wanted to talk about another intelligence first.
Ancestral intelligence.
“The world exhaustively discusses artificial intelligence,” she said, “but forgets what we, all humans, we Indigenous people, are masters of—the true and first AI, the ancestral intelligence.”
She spoke about gathering during the 30th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) with Indigenous leaders away from microphones and formal negotiations. They ate together. Listened. Sang. Looked one another in the eyes and told stories.
“Peace is not an agreement drafted on a distant, hard-to-read piece of paper,” Jazz said. “Peace grows in relationships, in the facilitation of life, and abundance among people.”
She challenged the idea that Indigenous knowledge belongs to the past while technology belongs to the future. Indigenous communities have spent thousands of years developing knowledge about living within ecosystems, she said, and technology can support that knowledge only if Indigenous people retain sovereignty over their data, knowledge, lands, and decisions.
“Technological advancement cannot be a new invasion,” she said.
Then she left us with an invitation.
“Let true listening be our first algorithm.”
Allyson Reneau followed her. She works in space exploration and space technology alongside Brazilian journalist and anthropologist Flora Dutra and Indigenous leaders, including Chief Enoque Marubo, through 4rest4all, an organization connecting Indigenous-led priorities in the Amazon with technology, resources, and global partners. But she introduced herself first as the mother of 11 biological children and grandmother of 16.
Life took her through graduate school at Harvard and to NASA headquarters. It eventually took her into war zones and deep into the Amazon.
Several years ago, Indigenous leaders contacted Allyson because communities in the Javari Valley wanted satellite internet access. She did not know how she would pay for the first 25 systems, so her grown children and friends helped. SpaceX transported the equipment to the edge of the forest.
Then Chief Enoque Marubo asked whether she would come with them.
Allyson, Flora, Enoque, and others walked more than 30 miles through difficult rainforest terrain carrying what they needed, drinking from rivers along the way. When they finally reached the village, more than 20 chiefs were waiting for the satellite systems their communities had requested.
Over the next three years, Allyson and Flora watched connectivity support telemedicine, education, communication, and territorial protection. When communities recently requested another 82 satellite systems, Allyson contacted SpaceX intending to buy them. She said the company offered to donate all 82, along with a year of service.
Summit host Jon Ramer called her a legend.
“No,” Allyson said. “I’m a human.”
Enoque, an Indigenous leader and president of the Kapyvanaway Association in Brazil’s Vale do Javari, had made his own long journey to attend the summit. Flora explained that he had just come out of the forest after walking for two days and had arrived in the city in time to join the summit. Enoque spoke in Portuguese, with Flora translating. The world is accustomed to hearing that we need to save the Amazon, he said, but the Amazon is often imagined only as forest—a great green expanse on a map.
There are people beneath those trees.
“More than saving the forest, saving the Amazon, we need to save the people who are inside the forest,” he said. Indigenous people are its guardians, and caring for their lives is inseparable from keeping the forest standing. “They do not live in the forest. They are the forest.”
Later, near the end of the summit and the culmination of 11 Days to Prove Peace is Possible, Enoque was asked what he most wanted the rest of us to know.
Technology is advancing rapidly, he said, and he sees its possibilities. But when we build a better world with technology, Flora translated, “we must go through our heart.” Heart, human intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, and technology can work together for the generations to come. The world they build, Enoque said, cannot be built simply through data and information. It has to be built through people, communities, and territories.
Then he invited everyone to come. Come to the Amazon. See the work. Be with the communities. Understand their reality.
Enoque said enormous amounts of money are directed toward the Amazon while communities living inside the forest often never see it. He wanted people who wished to help to come close enough to understand what communities themselves are already doing and what they say they need.
What Was Already There
The summit was called AI for Peace, and artificial intelligence ran through much of the conversation. People explored ways it might help identify needs, connect organizations doing complementary work, translate languages, support education, surface patterns, and make existing efforts easier to find. There were also cautions about privacy, sovereignty, community control, and the difference between technological capability and human responsibility.
Jon Ramer described the hope behind the summit as making good work more visible, connected, consequential, and generative. He had begun asking how people doing extraordinary work around the world might find one another, and what could become possible if the people serving communities could see the wider ecosystem of people and resources already available to help.
And for all the conversation about something as new as AI, I kept hearing things human beings have known how to do for a very long time: Feed a child. Build a home. Grow food. Breathe with someone who is afraid. Listen to the people who know their own communities. Share what you have. Find one another.
The technology may help us see where those connections are possible. The people are still the ones who have to make them.
During the summit, they began to. Offers appeared in real time. Someone could help with funding. Someone knew another organization. Someone had technical expertise. Someone could make an introduction. Someone wanted to donate. People in one part of the world began imagining relationships with people they had only just met in another.
Flora imagined children in the Amazon connecting with children in Gaza, Uganda, and Ukraine. Indigenous children who had already begun connecting with children in Brazilian cities might someday meet children in other countries.
There was nothing finished about any of it. There are children still running to bomb shelters and children carrying food home from school. Communities in the Amazon have donated satellite systems they are unable to turn on without solar panels. Young people are living with the consequences of violence they did not create. People need resources, partnerships, expertise, attention.
Today is the International Day of Peace. We could honor it by imagining the world we hope someday to inhabit. For more than three hours today, I listened to people who are already building pieces of it.
A surgeon made it into the Zoom room between caring for patients. A boy practiced breathing before going into a bomb shelter. Widows walked into homes of their own. Children learned to grow food and feed their families. A woman walked more than 30 miles through the rainforest because Indigenous communities had asked for technology. An Indigenous leader walked back out of that forest and arrived in time to tell a room full of people around the world that technology still has to pass through our hearts.
And a woman doing things extraordinary enough that someone called her a legend answered with three words.
“No, I’m a human.”
This is enough to leave with you today.
Not what extraordinary people somewhere else might do to build peace.
What humans can–and already do–right here, right now.
Let true listening be our first algorithm. -Jazz Tupinambá
Read more from Stephanie Regalado here.
