This week I am teaching community, civil and family mediation theory and skills to a group of police officers in St. Lucia. My colleagues Heather Swartz of Agree Inc., and fellow mediate393 mediators Akbar Ibrahim and Caroline Felstiner, are also on the teaching team.
The training is a part of an ambitious five-year access to justice project called IMPACT Justice in the Caribbean. Funded by the Government of Canada, the project aims to strengthen legal frameworks, improve legal services and education and facilitate increased knowledge and use of ADR processes to resolve disputes out of court whenever possible.
This is the third training Riverdale Mediation has provided as part of this project, with the other two being in Grenada and St. Kitts.
Today, our first day here, we covered the essential elements of conflict: its sources and drivers. We looked at the factors that cause people to name grievances, attribute blame for those upsets and seek remedies. We learned that the kinds of things people name, blame and claim about here in St. Lucia are different.
For example, our original case study about a barking dog upsetting the neighbours had little meaning here where dogs are routinely kept outdoors. And that the rules for defining property boundaries are often dependant on trees that may die, resulting in neighbourly disputes about whose house or goat is encroaching on whose land.
We learned that disputes are affected by things beyond anyone’s control here as everywhere. For example, we learned that with the creation the EU came a much smaller European market for St. Lucian bananas, formerly the country’s major export, leading to economic pressures that fuelled conflicts of many kinds.
But the emotions that go with the experience of conflict are largely the same. The needs we have as humans— for respect, acknowledgement and recognition are the same. As are the needs we all have to communicate our needs and concerns clearly and mutually to minimize escalation of conflict.
Which brings me to “bakes.”
I arrived to breakfast Sunday morning to an unbelievable array of delicious things to eat. Baked beans, salt cod stew, fresh fruit, tamarind juice… it was all so good that I had no room to try a “bake”. So I decided to try a bake the next day instead.
Monday morning, I arrived to claim my bake…….. to find French toast instead!
I used this example to illustrate how a “perceived injurious experience” (the absence of my anticipated bake) can escalate if the injured person chooses to blame someone for that injury and to seek a remedy. We discussed the choices I could make in attributing blame— was the hotel deliberately depriving me of my bake or had the pastry chef called in sick that morning? Perhaps they had run out of flour, or someone came first and ate them all.
The participants found this very amusing. After letting us go on about the many possible attributions a person might make when choosing to escalate a perceived injury into a dispute— someone finally informed me:
“Or you could just have learned that they only have bakes on Sunday”.
International training is wonderful, rewarding, fun, informative— and humbling!
Hilary Linton is a Toronto lawyer whose practice is restricted to providing mediation, arbitration, teaching and consulting services. She litigated family and civil disputes for 14 years and then obtained an LL.M. in ADR at Osgoode Hall Law School. She used that experience to launch her ADR business, Riverdale Mediation, which specializes in family mediation and arbitration, teaching mediation and negotiation theory and skills, and private training and consulting for corporations, government and individuals.
