Living Ubuntu we rise by lifting others

[Music]

in my native language i would say to you

masikati

which literally translated means good

afternoon

how has been your day

and you would say back tasquera ka

namaskurau

thank you which means we’ve had a

fantastic day if you’ve had a fantastic

day

my full name is gertrude marche

carnitsky and when this picture was

taken

it was the day of my birthday on the

31st of

may 2017 i’d gone back home to zimbabwe

to celebrate with my parents

i just recovered from heart failure and

missed my dad’s 80th birthday

and i got to celebrate my birthday with

him i just turned 51.

little did i know that this was going to

be the last birthday i would share with

him

because he died 10 days later of a heart

attack

and i remember reading the eulogy at his

funeral

and thinking of all the amazing things

my father taught me

i thanked him for giving me an education

i thanked him for giving me shelter for

keeping me

safe my whole life

i thanked him for giving me this vision

to dream

big and to travel and see the world

but most importantly i thank my father

for my humanity

which means my very being as a human

being

ubuntu is not just the linux operating

system

ubuntu literally translated means

a person is only a person through other

people

i am because you are

ubuntu is not something that i was

taught

but something that i experienced

growing up and living in zimbabwe and in

africa

i learned it by observation watching the

people around me

and i remember my parents always used to

say

that do a little something every day

to help out at home to help out in the

community

because it accumulates into very big

things

and so that became a way of living for

sometimes it would mean that when i went

back to zimbabwe

and started this small little project to

support the orphaned children in my

immediate family

there could be a child in the school

who’s crying and i’ll pick her up and

put them on my lap and calm them down

it could mean just smiling at a stranger

in a supermarket

i went back home a year later

after my dad died and looked around at

our environment

and i realized how lucky i was to come

from africa

how we are one of the only continents

that have virgin soil

because we’re so poor in some places

there’s no fertilizers there’s no

pesticides

and i grew up eating organic my whole

life and i didn’t know what organic

meant

until i left africa

i was shocked this time when i went back

home

at the plastic waste in our environment

the government is not picking up any of

people’s trash

in their homes and there is plastic

everywhere

so i came up with an idea to get the

children in my community

to pick up all the plastic waste they

all got a big 50 kg bag

and if they filled it up i would give

them five dollars

that could go towards paying for their

school fees this project has taken

off it only costs five

dollars to send a child to school one

term of education

15 zimbabwean dollars a year which is

about

10 u.s but most children are not going

to school

zimbabwe is a country without a currency

we had the highest inflation in the

world

so i had to go back home and do a little

something

and i’ll share with you some of my

little somethings today

my parents taught me that everything i

had to do had to be sustainable

i took over a small primary school in

our village and started fundraising for

money for school fees

for food for pencils stationary books

we installed electricity and i found i

had a bill to pay from new zealand every

month

so i got the community together and i

learned that i don’t have all of the

solutions

the people that i serve have the

solutions to all their problems

so i show up in our village with a white

pen and a board

or a white board and a black pen and we

brainstorm

ideas one of my aunts came up with the

solution

she said to me get rid we’re traveling

to the next village 10 kilometers away

with 50 kg sacks of corn on our heads

the women are the mules

to get the corn ground she said why

don’t you buy a grinding mill

that belongs to the school and we’ll all

come here instead

the problem was sold it cost me 500 us

dollars to buy that grinding mill

they now can pay their own electricity

bill and they’re making more than they

actually needed

and the extra money pays for school fees

for the children who can’t afford

we sunk a borehole and now we’re trying

to find

what’s called a play pump and with a

play pump

the water source is in the middle of the

school ground

and on top of it you put a

merry-go-round

and as the children are playing during

break time they’re pumping the water

into a tank

and then we have a plumbing system so

i’m trying to raise money for one of

these playtex

this container is one of my latest

ventures

just before i got ill i’m recovering

from heart failure

i had an idea to go back to zimbabwe

and build a library and a clinic i gave

speeches all over wellington

i’d go to a primary school and tell the

principal to tell the kids to bring any

books they don’t want

in 90 days i collected 65 000 books

my rotary club filled the container with

computers people in business

i have 200 computers and they bought the

container for me

so it’s being shipped to zimbabwe and

when the

container gets to the village we empty

out the books for the library

and the container becomes the first

clinic in my community

the arv drugs for aids are available 40

kilometers away

but people do not have the two dollars

to get on the bus at the end of each

month

to get the free medication so people are

dying of aids in zimbabwe because of

poverty and politics

so we’re going to hire a private nurse

who mans this container

we will stock it with generic drugs buy

her a car and once a month

she will go and pick up the world health

workers who distribute the drugs and

bring them to the community

and cut out the transport costs for my

community as well

so my dad used to say that in every

problem

there is an opportunity and boy have i

found opportunities

my latest opportunity came through the

metoo movement

i started watching women worldwide

coming together marching holding their

placards and

using their voices and i thought what

else could we do with all of this

feminine energy

and i came up with an idea to start the

her story circle

it came like a vision of women sitting

in silos of

10 and there were spikes that went out

and there was another 10 and another 10

and another 10.

and it was like a spider’s web and i put

on facebook in february

if i was to host a meeting or a

gathering or a conference

with a hundred speakers in a thousand

locations

and every woman had to bring ten friends

a thousand times a thousand is a million

i could connect a million women

in one year and in 48 hours

i had 280 locations locked in

a database with 3500 people

and we launched our first conference and

these women stepped up to share

their stories one by one from australia

to the uk to japan

india every corner of the globe has

responded and

all these women are sharing their

stories

because i somehow managed to communicate

the vision of what we could do with the

metoo movement

how women could get together how we

could collaborate

how through the sharing of our stories

we not only heal ourselves from our

wounds

we heal the past and we heal the future

and we hold a safe space for us to be

heard

we are inviting men to speak as well 25

percent

because there’s no point for us to come

together

it’s like talking to yourself men have

been affected by the metoo movement as

well

they need to be heard and if anything is

going to change in this world

it’s when we come together with our men

folk and they can hear us telling our

stories

and we can hear them sharing theirs

so my grandmother used to say that for a

tree to survive

it has to scatter its seed as far away

from it as possible

i believe that i am one of africa’s

seeds

and my call to action today is to people

me is there anybody here from africa

today

can i have a show of hands

we need to go home

i believe that we are time travelers

we left the continent for a reason to

get the knowledge and the skills the

missing piece for africa

is education

and we have to go home and do a little

something

we had a drought in 2007.

i got to the school and i observed all

the kids within the first 5-10 minutes

they would all fall asleep when they sat

at their desks and i asked the

teachers what was going on and they told

me that most kids were eating two or

three times a week if they were lucky

they were just hungry and i’m a mother

of three

and anything to do with children really

affects me

so i started this little feeding program

it cost 15 cents to feed a child in

zimbabwe

but what happened when the feeding

program started

all the villagers started sending the

under five-year-olds to the school for

food every morning

how do you send away an under

five-year-old child

so i started a preschool

[Applause]

and those women who used to toil in the

field with babies on their backs

now had a safe place to leave the kids

and the kids got an education

which was a double whammy for me and i

love this picture because this little

girl followed me around the school this

day

she had a little friend and as i knelt

at her feet

i realized that the difference between

her and me

is a few years of education and i knew

that she was going to go back to her

village

and do the same thing these little girls

followed me the whole day and they were

chatting behind me and

i stopped because i wanted to listen to

what they were saying

and one of them said oh my gosh

she’s so beautiful

and then the other one said and you know

what

she’s driving the car women don’t drive

in my community

and i realized that day that the little

something i had done

was just to show up as me

to show up as the possibility

so they could see themselves through me

and dream to be me

so even if i don’t do anything else for

these kids

i just have to show up and sometimes

that’s all you need to do

so if africa is the cradle of humanity

it means that all human beings on this

planet

are african people

my call to action today is please join

join this amazing movement

come and listen come and be a speaker

come and share your story because what

we are doing is we are creating a bridge

between women in the developed world and

women in the developing world so we can

pull our sisters up

one woman at a time one story at a time

and i’ve got to thank my father for

everything that he gave me

which means he gave me my humanity

he made me feel for people around me

empathy compassion and connection

are the super powers that every single

human being

possesses but it starts at home

where you put your family first your

community next

then if you have something to spare do

something somewhere else in the world

thank you

you