This week, while Declan and Alexander Morris-Schwarz participated in the Remembrance Day activities at BICS, their mom, Madeleine Schwarz, attended a training course in Italy on staying safe, and keeping your family safe when in proximity to zones of conflict.
"I've taken these courses before," she says. "I'm familiar with the material but still keen to review it."
Following the training course, Schwarz will fly to Nairobi where she will take up her post working with the UN to implement its Framework for Peace, Security and Cooperation addressing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the eleven countries which neighbour it.
Like the training course, this kind of work is not new for Schwarz. She and her husband Dave Morris worked between 2006 and 2010 with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). They lived in Arusha, Tanzania. When they arrived, Alexander had just turned three, and Declan was three months old.
"Alexander remembers friends in Arusha and going on safari, and Declan thinks he remembers driving a jeep in the safari, so, as blurry as those memories are they are pretty excited to go back," says Schwarz.
She doesn't know where the family will be based when Morris and the boys join her in December, but both her and Morris are looking forward to sinking their teeth into the challenge of this kind of work again.
Schwarz says this career just seems like a natural progression in her life.
"As a kid, I read so much on the holocaust," she says. "Child of the Holocaust, Diary of Anne Frank, and everything by Elie Wiesel."
Through school she was always involved in social justice groups, and after, in 1989, she lived in Chile where she witnessed the transition to democracy from the rule of Augusto Pinochet. She went on to do development work in Indonesia, and did an internship working with refugees from the Philippines.
Schwarz says her job can be hard to explain, especially to her kids, but she does it, ultimately because she believes it can make an impact.
"Focusing on international criminal law, I think this kind of work can help prevent future atrocities," she says. "It makes sense for us to pursue people who commit crimes internationally, we do it domestically, but there are certain crimes, like genocide and crimes against humanity that have a wider impact on peace, security and society at large. These cannot always be addressed domestically. International prosecutions do a lot to raise the awareness about crimes committed during war, and reinforces the role the international community has to play in ensuring perpetrators are held accountable."
Schwartz points to rape, used as a weapon in war, as such a crime.
"Theoretically speaking," she says, "If Bowen was invaded, and the invaders decided that instead of using guns and killing people their weapon of choice was rape, they would destroy this place more effectively than if they killed a handful of men. And they would have destroyed it for the long-term, because victims and their families would be destroyed, and the community would be divided on how to deal with it. It would be a very long, hard recovery."
Last year, Schwartz and her family moved to New York so she could take a job with a UN Team of Experts on Sexual Violence in Conflict. The team's job was, and continues to be, to help governments in post-conflict situations address impunity for sexual violence. Most of the governments Schwarz worked with during this year-long conflict were in Africa.
This experience will likely serve Schwarz well in her new position.
Former UN representative Margot Wallström said the Eastern DRC is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman, and went on to call it the "rape capital of the world." In 2011, the American Journal of Public Health published a study that said more than 1,100 women are raped in DRC every day.
Schwarz's new boss, former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, and Special Envoy to the Secretary-General for the Great Lakes Region has said that peace in DRC cannot be achieved without the participation of women and girls.
"As men take up arms, women hold communities together in times of war," writes Robinson in The Guardian. "This makes them stronger and better equipped to play a key role in securing real peace, as we have seen in Northern Ireland, Liberia and elsewhere."
Schwarz says, it is important in this work, to understand that women can be guilty of these crimes, and men and boys are often the victims, as well.
One case she worked on in Rwanda, for example, was against a woman accused not only of inciting genocide, but encouraging troops and militias to rape their victims before killing them. After a ten year trial the defendant, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, became the first ever woman to be convicted of genocide.
In her new job, Schwarz won't be working toward such clear outcomes.
"The Framework for Peace, Security and Cooperation" sets out commitments for the DRC, the governments in the Great Lakes Region and the international community to help build peace in the Region. Schwarz will be working the Special Envoy's team towards the implementation of the commitments. This will entail working with all the different members in the Region, including governments, women, religious groups, human rights organizations and civil societies, businesses in the hope that a lasting peace is possible.
On Remembrance Day, Schwarz says that as we remember all the soldiers who lost their lives and suffered in wars, we should also think about all the other people affected by war.
"I worked with a general who had done a lot in DRC and he told me, it is far more dangerous to be a woman or child in a conflict zone now than it is to be a soldier. So, I think that's something to think about.
