Peace One Day

Life-Savers

There was an urgency in Jeremy Gilley's voice when I spoke with him this week - even more so than usual. He wanted to discuss the new section on the Peace One Day website that is devoted specifically to Life-Saving Activities. It is an area I have touched on before in my feature articles, but only as one of the many initiatives that Peace One Day pursues. As he guided me through the new section on the site, Gilley quickly convinced me that "there has to be an article here."

Gilley went on to remind me of POD's origins; soon after the launch of Peace One Day, he travelled to Somalia. He told me, "When I was in Somalia, what I saw deeply concerned me, and I started to learn that if an annual day of global ceasefire and non-violence existed, it could have an impact on the suffering I saw."

As he says in the website's short film about Life-Saving Activities, Gilley needed to prove there would be practical benefits to creating and observing 21 September as Peace Day. He began to document the movement of aid supplies, educational materials, and vaccines - in short, the Life-Saving Activities themselves. And since that transformative experience in Somalia, Gilley and Peace One Day have devoted themselves to finding and seizing the opportunities that a day of peace creates in order to reach people in need.

The short film below provides testimonials from people in the field who can attest to the efficacy of POD's actions. Marcus Thompson, who was Oxfam's South Asia Programme Director, echoes Gilley's sentiments: "If there is a cessation for a day, then it gives us an opportunity to move supplies safely through places that are otherwise difficult."

That statement has been borne out by the facts: on Peace Day 2006, the World Food Programme conducted a food drop in Sudan that successfully delivered 60 tons of food; in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Peace Day allowed UNICEF and other NGO's to provide mosquito nets for 600,000 children; and Star Syringe has used 21 September to safely immunise thousands of children in more than 20 countries around the world.

But Afghanistan has been the site of the most enduring proof of the validity of Peace Day as a catalyst for life-saving activity. Since Gilley and Jude Law travelled there together for the first time in 2007, various organisations have come together on 21 September to vaccinate more than 4 million children against polio. In this war-torn nation, Peace One Day has been instrumental in helping to secure the conditions in which these vaccinations could take place on and around Peace Day for three consecutive years, due to agreements by all parties in the region to honour the day. The UN Department for Safety and Security recorded a 70 percent reduction in violent incidents on Peace Day 2008.

While all of these statistics add up to lives bettered and lives saved, Gilley reminded me that they also point to something larger: "This day works." Roshan Khadivi, the Head of External Relations for UNICEF in Afghanistan, underscores this in Jeremy's film The Day After Peace when she says, "What happened was really significant... Everybody was on board..., and if it can happen once, it can happen again and again and again."

That, of course, is the driving force behind Peace One Day - and behind this special section on their website. Gilley allows that this part of the site is still growing, but he wants it to become "a place where people can find out about great organisations that do great things and say, ‘this day is that important.'"

For Gilley, this new development in the digital realm signifies much more than additional content for visitors to peaceoneday.org; it is a window into POD's past, present, and future. It is a "portal to inspiration, and the only way we can inspire is to show the real heroes of this story: the people who are doing something practical, life-changing and, in many cases, life-saving on Peace Day."

As we said our goodbyes, Gilley advised me to keep an eye on the site for new films, photos, and stories about the people and the organisations who will be taking desperately needed, life-saving, action on 21 September this year. And he reminded me that "none of this is about symbolism. It is about practical action. It is about commitment to peace."