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
me
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
like
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
us
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