Story By Jason Keyser

A simple breakfast of rice porridge shook loose an amusing memory for the ​freedom fighter turned peacebuilder.

While he had been living rough in the jungle with little to eat during the years of ​civil conflict in Cambodia, a compatriot was hiding a stash of sugar, secretly ​sweetening just a corner of his porridge in case the others got suspicious and ​asked to taste.

For Tania Miletic, an Australian peacebuilder then working in Cambodia, hearing ​the story of a light-hearted moment among brothers in arms revealed a side of ​her colleague she hadn’t known. “He’s a very private person… until then he’d ​never talked about that earlier part of his life,” she says. “And there it was, this ​peppering slowly of small stories that were both insightful and delightful.”

These intimate conversations, she noticed, tended to happen over a meal.

In the two decades since, Miletic, a 2002-04 Rotary Peace Fellow, has been tapping ​into the power of food to evoke memories, build connection, and foster an ​appreciation of one another’s shared struggles. In 2005 Miletic started working on ​what became a non-profit called Peace-Meal Peacebuilding based in her home ​city of Melbourne, facilitating storytelling and reflection among community ​leaders from the likes of Afghanistan and Myanmar.

Often participants share stories of the food they ate during times of hardship, ​revealing struggles, their resilience, and a shared humanity.

“Food enables these moments.” Miletic says.

Miletic’s journey to peacebuilding is rooted in her own family’s hardships. Her mother came to Australia from Italy in the 1950s as an economic migrant. Her dad grew up in present-day Croatia, where his father was killed by German soldiers during World War II.

Those memories resurfaced during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s when her father became transfixed by the wars in his homeland. “He didn’t speak about his past,” Miletic says. “But as he began suffering from dementia, my sisters and I started to see him have flashbacks to his traumatic past.”

At the time, Miletic was a psychologist working to make mental health services more accessible to immigrants in Australia. But she wanted to understand the conflict in the Balkans and the tensions that extended a world away to second- and third-generation Croatian and Serbian Australians.

“I didn’t know what the professional pathway to doing peace work was,” she says. “But I went back to university and did postgraduate studies, researching identity and conflict with those communities here in Melbourne.”

Coincidentally, Rotary’s work in creating that pathway through its peace centres programme was just coming to fruition. Miletic was selected to join the first cohort at the Rotary Peace Centre at International Christian University in Tokyo in 2002. “[The programme] allowed me to pivot to take seriously my focus on peacebuilding, which has been all my work’s focus for the last 20 years.”

It was during a break in the programme that she travelled to a remote part of Cambodia to do volunteer work and met the onetime freedom fighter, who by then had helped start a local nongovernmental organisation dedicated to conflict transformation. After completing her master’s, she returned to Cambodia to volunteer with the organisation.

Today, Miletic is assistant director of the Initiative for Peacebuilding at the University of Melbourne, focusing on strengthening the role of conflict prevention and peacebuilding in Australian foreign policy. But Peace-Meal remains her passion project.

Miletic has compiled recipes and the stories behind them — painful, touching, and sometimes humorous — from more than 30 peacebuilders and plans to publish them in a book.

In a chapter titled “Peace begins at home,” Miletic shares memories of her mother’s kitchen. Preparing dough for bread, her mother smelled of yeast. By itself, Miletic writes, yeast does nothing, but when mixed with flour and water it takes on the capacity for growth and nourishment. So it is with peacebuilders, she concludes, who create the conditions for social growth and binding.

This story was first published in Rotary Magazine, December 2023.