Cuisine sans frontières (Csf) calls people to the table to resolve conflicts and promote a sense of community – by building community kitchens like that found in the San Josecito Peace Community in Colombia, for instance. Several volunteers assisted Csf with the build, including David Höner, founder of Csf. He had the following to say about these efforts:

“As Csf employees, we were in close contact with the local people for weeks or months and had to figure out our own place in the community’s social processes. As part of this project, we also tried to positively influence the conditions of a violent environment. This means getting close to the fears, the despair, the anger, and the resilience of those who are forced to always live (or rather survive) under these threatening circumstances. This proximity also brings fear. The fact that the Peace Community of San José de Apartadò in Colombia must face the constant threat of being massacred in a nighttime attack – a perfectly justified fear – also makes us project team members afraid to spend the night there. The idea of a paramilitary assassin sneaking up on you, face obscured, makes you listen, with a pounding heart, for any sound coming from the darkness. In the evening, the fear in the exhausted faces of the village’s inhabitants is clear to see, as is the relief when morning comes. I also had to battle with my own self-centered fears while I was there. But the ever-present sinking feeling in my gut faded away with time. Even more so as we ourselves became a part of the village through the construction of the school kitchen and skill-sharing with the members of the village community. This is how friendships came about. In order to make a change, the first step is sharing in the fears and the uncertainty that the people involved in the projects live with.”

In addition to the direct work on the ground, other work is being carried at the political level, where the conflict parties and international mediators, rarely women, are trying to initiate peace processes. Here, political and economic interests play a greater role than emotions. During this process, it is often the case that insufficient attention is given to the voices and needs of those directly affected or that decisions are even made without consulting them. The result is that central causes of conflict remain unresolved, because the restoration of a civil society free from fear and functioning communities are key foundations for peace. This is why grassroots-level peace work is absolutely essential. There is a need for empathetic solidarity to be practiced at grassroots level and for this work to be more comprehensively integrated into the official peace processes.