After All We Are All Humans

There is a moment I have witnessed many times in community settings across Northern Ireland. Two people who have never spoken to each other, who perhaps assumed they had nothing in common, who may have arrived in the same room carrying everything the news cycle has told them to feel about someone who looks or sounds or prays differently from them, and then something shifts. A story is told. A question is asked and actually answered. A piece of food is shared, or a word in another language, or a memory of somewhere neither of them has been but both of them somehow recognise.

The room changes. The people in it change. Not dramatically, not permanently in a single moment, but something opens that was closed before.

That moment is what I have spent my career trying to create conditions for. And on the 23rd of June, in partnership with Beyond Skin in Coleraine, we are going to spend six weeks creating it deliberately.

The workshop series is called After All We Are All Humans. It runs every Tuesday evening from the 23rd of June to the 28th of July at Infuse Tea Bar in Coleraine, from 7pm to 8:30pm. And it is, at its heart, an invitation.

An invitation to come and sit in a room with people whose stories are different from yours. To listen before you conclude. To bring your own story and discover that it is more connected to the stories around you than you expected. To leave with something you did not arrive with: not a certificate, not a set of facts, but a different way of seeing the person beside you.

I want to tell you how this came to exist.

I am from Venezuela. I arrived in Ireland at 20. I have raised five children between Venezuelan, Afro Caribbean and Dutch culture on the north coast of Northern Ireland. I have spent my adult life navigating the space between cultures, learning the invisible languages of belonging, building the bridges that do not appear on any map but that people cross every single day when they choose curiosity over fear.

I founded The Humanitas Initiative because I believe that the most powerful tool for integration is not policy. It is encounter. Real, human, unhurried encounter between people who are willing to be changed by what they hear.

Beyond Skin understood this before I met them. They have been doing this work in Northern Ireland for years, using music and art and creative practice to create the exact kind of encounter I am describing. When we decided to build this series together, it felt less like a partnership and more like a recognition. Two organisations that had been working toward the same thing from different directions, finally in the same room.

The six weeks will not follow a lecture format. There is no expert at the front dispensing correct opinions about culture. There is a facilitated space where every person in the room is both teacher and student. We will explore what cultural identity actually means, how it is formed and how it shifts. We will look at the stories we carry about people who are different from us and ask where those stories came from and whether they still serve us. We will share food and language and music and memory, because those are the things that cross borders most easily. We will sit with discomfort when it arrives, because it will arrive, and we will discover that discomfort shared is discomfort halved.

What I hope you leave with is not a changed opinion, exactly. Opinions are brittle things. They break under pressure and reassemble themselves in the old shape. What I hope you leave with is something more durable: a face. A name. A story that belongs to a real person you have now actually met. Because once you have that, the headline about migrants or asylum seekers or the people not from here has to compete with the memory of someone who sat across from you and told you something true about their life.

That competition, in my experience, is not even close.

The workshops run every Tuesday evening from the 23rd of June to the 28th of July at Infuse Tea Bar on Bridge Street in Coleraine, from 7pm to 8:30pm, in partnership with Beyond Skin. They are open to everyone. You do not need to arrive with any particular opinion or any prior knowledge. You need only to be willing to show up and pay attention.

That is enough. That has always been enough.

After all, we are all humans. And most of us, given the chance, are far better at recognising each other than the world gives us credit for.

📍 Infuse Tea Bar, 21 Bridge Street, Coleraine 📅 Every Tuesday, 23rd June to 28th July, 7pm to 8:30pm 🔗 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/after-all-we-are-all-humans-tickets-1990970082111

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