Never forget, never repeat, begin to heal

Important lessons to be learned AT THE GATES of The United Nations, the space between community and institution, underneath the Broken Chair.

Below are photographs from an exhibition of paintings from students in Congo organised by GENOCOST, a collective of civil society organisations.

“Thirty years of armed conflicts in the DRC: a call for the recognition of genocides that are forgotten or ignored. A call for truth and justice”.

“We will never give up. We will continue our struggle for peace, and for each Congolese to live in dignity from the riches of our land. Never forget. Never repeat. Begin to heal.”


— Prime Minister Judith Suminwa Tuluka

More info: https://www.xtrafrica.com/news/genocost-congolese-genocide-commemoration-2025

NB: Apologies that I do not have the names of the individual artists. If I am able to identify the names I will add them.

Update from Chico Zubiar - from the ground in Northern Sudan, June 2023

Trigger Warning. This article includes photographic images that are shocking and devastating for the communities involved. We do not share these lightly, but have decided to honour the request from a member of our community. Finding balance in our humanKINDER communications between sharing the realities - the horrors that continue across the world - and amplifying the voices within communities who continue day to day amidst such despair, is deliberate.

Please consider contributing to our work this Refugee Week via our PayPal link HERE. We will endeavour to get a percentage of funds raised to those facing emergencies while continuing to invest in the infrastructure of our organisation so that we can continue to amplify truths from independent sources known to us.

We first met Chico in 2015 and spent many hours preparing and cooking food together in The Welcome Tent. He was one of the original members of the Happiness All Around crew. He worked with us to report back to a conference of Student Social Workers in Stockton and a Peace Conference in the city of London.

After a gruelling journey from Sudan, across Europe, he first presented himself to the authorities in the UK in 2016 after crossing the English Channel holding on to the underside of a lorry. At that point he was a minor, and was thus placed in supported accommodation in Appledore Reception centre for unaccompanied asylum seeking children in Kent, UK.

After several challenging years in the UK, first in England then Ireland, without having the permission to work and waiting for the results of his application for asylum, he was refused Refugee status. He eventually returned to Sudan to reunite with family and found employment  on the borders with Egypt.

When he got in touch a few days ago and asked for help for his family, friends and community in Northern Sudan, we knew to take him seriously. He wanted me to share this update - this Refugee Week 2023 - as an accurate account of what is happening on the ground in Northern Sudan as we speak. The following details are from his messages to me on Messenger during the last few days. I have chosen not to share certain images which may cause distress. I am also not able to give accurate sources for each photo at this point, but will add them at a later point if I can.

“In June 2023, the Janjwat - also known as the Rapid Support Forces - are burning the cities of Al Junaynah and Kutum in Northern Sudan. It is happening all around Darfur and the capital of Sudan. There are now only militia and Janjwat left in Al Junaynah because they have slaughtered all the civilians. It is worse than it was in 2003 - it is only dead people in the streets. People are escaping across the border to Chad.” [Chico Zubiar]

“This is what the corpses look like in the city of El Geneina, and they have all decomposed. And this is only in a small street, an alley in the Al Madares neighbourhood, the street from the N’Djamena mill to the police headquarters… The Sultanate of Dar Endoca must activate the Gilani Document through France and Britain with an urgent US/French military intervention to save the remaining innocent lives and stop the ethnic cleansing, displacing and emptying the civilian population from their lands.” [message from a friend, Name unknown]

There is now no internet, only cellphone. Chico describes he is in touch with his family who are now moving from Kutum to the Chad border. As an example as what we would describe at humanKINDER as a Recipe of HOPE, I end this article with a screen shot from a video shared by Chico of the welcome that greets the Sudanese communities as they arrive across the Chad border, with food, shelter and kindness.

Please consider this Refugee Week 2023 of supporting our work to amplify silenced voices for systems change here at PAYPAL.

For all other enquiries, please contact me directly at Emma@humanKINDER.UK

methodology poetry.

Is it time to share what I have been working on?

Scribbling away on my numerous notebooks,

 Without order or consistency.

 Just free-flow - free-style. 

Observations. Words, feelings, that stand out from the rest. 

I’ve flown from flower to flower, gathered the nectar, 

now homing in on the hive mind, the honey.  

We travelled. We landed. We acknowledged,

We did our best to understand.

And now is the time to imagine together again. 

That consolidation of healing, 

the twisty, wistful branches of dreams, 

imaginations intertwined, crystallised. 

I’m going to stop talking in “I thinks and I would suggests and perhaps and maybes”

I’m now old enough to say I know. 

Of course I am always learning,

 But now my own eyes tell me certain things to be true. 

These truths are known. 

They know. They know. They all definitely know. 

I’ve learned we must lean,

Lean into the complexity, together. 

I have found it is never only me, always us

who are finding things difficult, complex.

Who has a choice to stay silent?

Which words to use, 

how forward to be, 

how backwards can be accepted.

Only with honesty and forgiveness comes progress.

No more elephants in the room. 

No stone unturned. 

And only then,

as the welcome table is laid,

can the real work start.