To mark the International Day of Peace, we feature the stories of three - Crispin Kulimushi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ahmed Alsadeq from Palestine and Anah¨ª Sol Medina from Argentina - who are working in their communities to support peace efforts from the ground up.
Anah¨ª Sol Medina is the Zonal Youth Assistant and Ticket to Life volunteer of the Scouts of Argentina.
Here¡¯s her peace.
For a long time, I thought that talking about peace meant talking about wars, conflicts, or violence. Through Scouting, I learned that peace is also built in places where almost no one looks."
- Anah¨ª Sol Medina
When we are able to listen
As a volunteer with Ticket to Life, I have spent the past two years working alongside more than 100 people across four cities in Argentina, supporting more than 300 children and young people from vulnerable communities. Together, we help create opportunities for learning, belonging, and personal development for those affected by poverty and a lack of resources and opportunities, but also by something that is often much harder to see: a lack of hope.
My contribution to this process has been to study what is happening in the different units, identify patterns, find tools that can help improve our work, and support the development of a model that can be replicated in more communities.
Above all, I learned that our work does not begin when we think we have an answer. It begins when we are able to listen.
- Anah¨ª Sol Medina
Imagining a future
I have met children who grew up too quickly because they had to take care of their siblings; children who learned to respond with violence because it was the only way they knew how to express their feelings; children exposed to drugs and crime, or forced to work rather than go to school.
I met a boy from the coastal city of Mar del Plata who had never seen the sea. Watching his amazement as he stood on the shore made me realise that something many of us take for granted can represent a whole world of possibilities to someone else.
Another boy decided to return to school because he wanted to be able to travel places with the Scouts. It may seem like a small reason, but for us it meant so much: he had found something that motivated him to imagine a future and work towards achieving it.
There was another moment I will never forget. A child from the community passed away after an illness. In their grief, his friends called the Scouts, and as they said goodbye to him, they placed over him the Scout scarf he had been waiting so eagerly to receive. At that moment, I understood that we were no longer visitors. We had become part of his community.
These changes do not show up in statistics. Instead, you see them when a child returns to school, learns to express what they feel in words, asks for help, cares about the person beside them, or welcomes us with a hug. They are small transformations that build something much greater: belonging, trust, and hope.
As Scouts, we believe that young people are not only passive beneficiaries of change. We are agents capable of building the conditions for people to feel safe enough to imagine a different future.
- Anah¨ª Sol Medina
In the service of others
That is why my call to young Scouts is this: go out into the world, get to know your communities, listen to their needs, and use everything you have learned in service of others. We have tools, values, and skills that can transform lives when we choose to share them. And I ask governments, organisations, and companies to support and strengthen these initiatives so that they can reach more communities.
Peace also means having opportunities, feeling part of a community, and being able to imagine a different future. Perhaps our role as young people is to help others imagine that future too, and give them the support and confidence to build it for themselves.
Building peace does not always mean stopping a war. Sometimes it means a child seeing the sea for the first time. Young people returning to school because they have a dream. Or a child discovering that someone believes in them."
- Anah¨ª Sol Medina