Yvonne Connolly took three months off her work as a nurse manager in London to work with VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) at  Angoda Hospital, Sri Lanka, where over 1000 inpatients were kept in secure accommodation. Back home in Wimbledon she has continued in an unexpected way to help improve the conditions there.

Why would an 80-year-old English grandmother keep coming to Switzerland, every year for 50 years, travelling to arrange flowers at the Initiatives of Change international centre in Caux? And why does she remember that hug from a one-armed Afghan? Barbara Down talked with Elizabeth Loy when they were both in Caux this July.

Who could be a better news analyst of the unfolding revolution in the Arab world than Dr Imad Karam? Imad is a 35-year-old Palestinian, originally from Gaza, living in the UK. He’s got a PhD on the impact of the media on Arab youth identity — a key to understanding current events. He was in Egypt when the unrest started and has been there more recently.

The Black Heritage Today 2010-2011 magazine features Kojo Jantuah walking along the slave routes of West Africa, on an epic journey to finding healing and reconciliation and discovering his identity - and his destiny.

When life isn’t working, what do you do? Nurse and life-coach Sandra Crathern from Worthing told a recent public meeting in the London centre of Initiatives of Change how a crisis in her life led her to new skills to help others:

Aftab Qayum has recently started working alongside Howard Grace with the Initiatives of Change Sixth Form programme, going in to schools to share his story. Aftab was born in Reading of Pakistani, Muslim heritage. His father was working hard in a factory, and not often around at home. He was a chain smoker, which led to Aftab trying cigarettes and stealing them from his father, at the age of eight. By the the time of starting secondary school he was on cannabis. The following year, at age twelve, he was expelled for drugs and misbehaviour.

Amina Khalid, a Somali living and working in Britain, was one of a panel at the opening of a recent IofC conference on ‘Building trust for our future’, held at Liverpool Hope University. She told her story:

Having a miscarriage was a new experience, and one I could have done without. The doctor had been kind but brisk. That was that – try again, was the gist of what he’d said. At 37? Funny that – we’d had to change to want a baby, now we had to change not to.

They say we all have a duty to forgive our parents; no parent has ever been perfect!

Andrea Cooper from London reflects on her experience of taking part in a course on ‘God’s call on your life’