Spotlight

During my private trip through India, I had the opportunity to meet with several activists and veterans of the Indian SCI branch in different places. In Bangalore, Valli Seshan invited me to her apartment for tea and sweets, and of course for a fruitful and interesting chat. Together with young SCI India activist Janak Gor…

It was the time before Power Point and Prezi. And it was a time when people were used to listen: “Concerning the length of the presentations, we consider the following timelines to be the most appropriate: Not shorter than 45 minutes, not longer than 90 minutes”, writes Ralph Hegnauer, then SCI International Secretary, towards the…

Amongst the propaganda brochures issued by SCI in its early years, my clear favourite is the 32-pages booklet titled “Les Sours du Service Civil” (in English “The Sisters of Voluntary Service”) – in A5 format and a dark blue cover, issued 80 years ago, in 1935, by the one and only SCI Secretariat in Bern,…

 In a box full of duplicates I found in the SCI Archives in Switzerland, there was a tiny little booklet in red and yellow entitled „Work and Sing – an International Songbook“. And on the front page, one can clearly see the name of its former owner: Ernst-Michael Lehmann, a clearly German name.Two forewords and…

This years’ Internation Comittee Meeting of Service Civil International (SCI) will be held in Greece, remembering 30 years of uninterrupted SCI activity in the country.The first SCI activists working in Greece, however, were representatives of the British IVSP who went there for doing relief and welfare work shortly after the liberation in 1944.

Isn’t it normal that many things changed in the long history of the Service Civil International? SCI branches were founded and some has been dissolved as well. Organisational structure were created, modified and dissolved. Even some ideas has changed. However I think some technical and organisational challenges stayed. If you run organisation like SCI then…

In my last spotlight I have reported the difficulties SCI encountered in authoritarian South East Asian countries when it wanted to register a new sub-office. But political contestation due to its pacifist ideology has also affected SCI under comparably liberal political circumstances.

A few weeks before the International Committee Meeting in Malaysia starts, it may be interesting to have some backgroud information about the roots of SCI presence in South East Asia.

The turmoil in Western societies around the year 1968, marked by students’ revolts andopposition against US warfare in Vietnam, also left its traces on the SCI movement.During Easter holidays in 1969, West European and the US branches organised aSeminar that took place in Uddel, The Netherlands, under the then quite fashionable motto”The Social and Political…