Living Courage Tour Delegates

KAIROS Women of Courage blog

Download the Tour PDF

Women's Rights: Instruments for Lasting Peace (Collaborative Research & Analysis)

Recommendations to the Canadian Government: Canada’s responsibility in advancing women’s roles in peacebuilding and defending human rights

Recommendations to the Canadian Government: Democratic Republic of the Congo

Recommendations to the Canadian Government: Philippines

Recommendations to the Canadian Government: Sudan

Slideshow of the Living Courage Tour 2011

Slideshow of the Women of Courage 2010 Colombia Tour

“How are we going to feed our children? This is the question of an ordinary mother in the Cordillera region.” So writes Vernie Yocogan-Diano of the Philippines. She is Chair of the Indigenous women’s collective, Innabuyog, the Indigenous word for the practice of helping one another through collective action. She works with women whose daily challenges are not only hunger, but the pervasive violence that occurs in the Philippines when anyone confronts the powers that impose this economic hardship.

The Republic of South Sudan is the world’s newest country. And yet, for all of the optimism created by its founding, it is also a country where 90 percent of women can neither read nor write and where women, in shocking numbers, die in childbirth. Rebecca Nyagai Kafi’s work is dedicated to emerging from Sudan’s persistent conflict with a better situation for women and their families.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, women’s daily challenges of poverty and hunger are multiplied by an epidemic of rape – a common weapon in the ongoing resource war. Chantal Bilulu works to restore dignity and livelihoods to women who have endured such indescribable agony.

Together, these women defend human rights and build hope in the face of multiple crises: militarization, climate change, unethical mining practices and war.

You can meet these courageous women in Winnipeg, Penelakut, Kitchener, Montreal – or in one of the dozen Canadian stops on the KAIROS LIVING COURAGE tour. They will share their wisdom with Canadian women – including migrant and Indigenous women who have their own stories of persistence in the face of hardship and violence. Each stop on the tour will be a unique opportunity to strengthen alliances across borders and between generations.

LIVING COURAGE will make connections between gender-based violence in areas of conflict, whether the result of civil wars in Sudan or the Congo, or the mistreatment of Indigenous people in the Cordillera region of the Philippines or on the ancestral lands of Canada’s First Nations. Indigenous women everywhere, women who are migrant workers here, all of us – women and men – can share experiences as human rights defenders and peace-builders in our communities.

The tour is part of the KAIROS Women of Courage program. Participants will identify opportunities for advocacy to end violence against women in Canada and in the global South, while promoting respect for women’s rights pledged in national and international human rights law.

For more information, contact Anne Herteis at aherteis@kairoscanada.org or 1-877-403-8933 ext. 243.

Women of Courage
(Click on your city for event details)

October 12-13 – Penelakut, BC
October 14 – Victoria, BC
October 15-16 – Vancouver, BC
October 18-19 – Montreal Lake, SK
October 20 – Regina, SK
October 21-23 – Winnipeg, MB
October 24-25 – Ottawa, ON
October 26 – Kitchener, ON
October 27 – Montreal, QC

 

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