Nurturing Diplomacy

How Everyday Acts of Care Can Bridge Divides and Build Peace

[Karen and I, at our recent high school reunion]

In the Everyday Ambassadors project, we’re exploring the contributions that ordinary people make toward addressing global issues as they unfold at the local level. We’re looking at actions that each of us can take to overcome divides and further peace and global sustainability in chaotic times—whether these are formal matters like bringing lawsuits or pursuing treaty negotiations, or more everyday issues, such as improving the treatment of migrants in our communities or resolving conflicts with neighbors. We’re also equipping ourselves with the skills necessary to lead from below.

You might not see yourself as an ambassador. If so, you’re not alone. I frequently hear from people who are inspired by the stories they read here, but don’t feel their own lives are all that significant. We don’t always recognize the global importance of the small acts of peace-building we engage in every day. Interestingly, many of the people I’ve profiled have themselves been surprised when I suggested their work was worth sharing. As we talk, however, they begin to realize that what they do is precisely what the world needs most.

So, if you’re unsure whether you have a role to play you’re not alone. Maybe you think diplomacy is for extroverts—the networkers, the organizers, the ones who give impassioned speeches or lead community projects. What if you’re not one of those people? Is there a job for you as an Everyday Ambassador?

Karen Sisca, today’s featured Everyday Ambassador, offers a resounding yes.

From Stay-at-Home Mom to Nursing Assistant

Karen and I met in high school in a middle-class community in Oregon. I had just moved to the U.S. from abroad, and I felt out of place. I didn’t dress right, listen to the right music, or use the right slang. But Karen, a quiet person who didn’t seek attention, made me feel seen and welcomed in a simple, genuine way. Despite our differences, we became close friends.

Karen’s sister was something of a celebrity at school—gifted, beautiful, and admired by everyone. Karen, however, was more reserved. “I’m an introvert,” she says now, “and my mom told me from a young age that I was shy. It’s always been a challenge to overcome that.”

After college, Karen got married. “I was scared to death to have kids,” she says. “I thought, I am not sure I can do this.” Nevertheless, when she was 27 she had a baby boy, and a daughter soon followed. Her husband, a traveling salesman, was away for long stretches at a time, so Karen stayed home with the kids. In her fifties, faced with a need for health insurance, she took a job for the first time, as a nursing assistant at an assisted living facility near her home.

The facility was a project of religious nuns with a long history of social justice in Oregon, working on issues like access to education, the environment, and gun violence. Karen’s job is to assist the residents, many of whom are retired nuns, with the activities of daily living—helping them shower, dress, and get to meals.

Diplomacy Across Divides of Religion and Generations

At first, Karen wasn’t sure about working with elderly nuns. “I’m not Catholic,” she says, “and I thought they would be distant and unapproachable.” She worried about how she’d connect with people so different from herself. “They had been living a life I have never been involved in. They had certainly lived a life of service, but it’s not a kind of service I am familiar with.”

Karen also admits that whether she fully recognized it or not, she was unconsciously a little frightened of old people back then. “It was my first exposure. I wondered, is the hallway going to smell really bad?”

Still, something about the work was appealing. “I wanted to boost their spirits, just to make them smile. I thought I would enjoy that.”

To do this work, Karen dug deep into her experience as a parent—serving little people across a different generational divide. In particular, she thought back to the day when she gained her confidence as a mom.

Her children were babies, and one day while her husband was on the road, there was a terrible storm. It was scary for her and the kids. “And it dawned on me—if we could just play, we could get through this. So I got down on the floor with the kids and I made a connection.”

Her approach with the nuns was equally simple: Ask them questions about their lives and share lighthearted moments. “I might be tying someone’s shoes and I’ll say, hey sister, have you ever been to Rome? Because I hope to go there too. Or, sister, what was it actually like to wear a habit?”

And as she interacted more with the nuns, she realized they just wanted to be treated as human beings. They could be open, even funny.

Accompanying these remarkable women as they face the end of their lives has turned out to be its own education in life. She recalls one nun who passed away recently: “Before I would go for the day I would wheel her to the dining room, and I would see all of her incredibly loving interactions with the other sisters. She was never critical of anyone, never saying anything negative of anyone. Just being around that, you soak that up.”

The other caregivers at the facility, Gen Z women many years her junior, from diverse backgrounds, were initially another diplomatic challenge for Karen. But she used the same approach: emotional check-ins and light-hearted but authentic connection. After a while it wasn’t a strategy anymore. “They’re just kids. I found that just showering them with some love actually brought me some joy,” she says.

Nurturing as Diplomacy

Karen’s self-identified “shyness” has turned out to be her diplomatic superpower. It gives her the ability to nurture and connect with people in a way that brings out the best in them. Whether she is helping the nuns or her younger colleagues, she embraces their vulnerabilities. As she says, “Everyone is messed up or insecure in some way. Everybody needs connection. Even someone like President Obama, I’m sure, needs his ‘warm fuzzies.’”

Karen’s simple acts of nurturing, whether it’s a joke, a question or a smile, have the demonstrated power to bridge divides of race, culture, religion and generations. That’s some impressive diplomacy.

Some Takeaways From Karen’s Experience

• It’s all about relationships: Karen’s first goal in every situation, before fixing a problem or delivering a service, is to make a human connection. “It’s all about relationships. There is always a starting place.” And she allows the relationship to unfold in its own time.

• Don’t over-complicate it: Having learned not to take herself too seriously as she overcame her shyness, Karen doesn’t overdramatize other people’s problems or needs either. “I just work on what is here and now. I will say, ‘let’s get these compression socks on and then let’s talk about something silly and giggle about it.’”

• Let other people nurture you too: Karen notes that it is sometimes hard for the residents to see the contribution they are making to her life in turn, but it’s real. Their gift, she insists, is to model for her and the other care givers how to live their stage of life with courage, dignity and kindness.

• Implications for formal diplomacy: The dominant framework for understanding diplomacy is transactional—it is about strategic calculations and power plays. It’s about fear, not hope. But the best diplomacy is actually rooted in connections. From Kennedy and Kruschev to Churchill and FDR, relationships of trust and even care lie at its heart.

What would diplomacy look like if we reimagined it as supporting one another through our weaknesses and vulnerabilities on a global scale, and being supported in turn? It’s one way to make sense of the principles of international law and why we obey them.