Bertha Beachy, a long-time worker in Africa and the Middle East with and , will speak at an Abraham’s Tent forum 4 p.m. Tuesday, October 12 on “Why and How We Should Carry on Dialogue With Muslims.”

Her presentation will be held in Martin Chapel of the seminary building at 91短视频 (see campus map). Light refreshments will be served starting at 3:30 p.m.

Beachy’s passion for relating to Muslims, promoting women’s issues and working for peace and justice have taken her to many different places and assignments throughout her years of service to the church.

After earning a degree in elementary education and English from EMC (now 91短视频), she moved to Somalia in 1958 to teach English and learn the ways and language of the Somali people.

She interspersed her service with educational opportunities in literacy, linguistics, Islamic studies and the Arabic language.

Now a resident of Greencroft Retirement Community in Goshen, Ind., Beachy continues to embrace opportunities to learn and serve, including a stint with a to Iraq and a peace and learning tour to Iran with MCC.

She continues to relate to many Muslim friends and is a strong proponent of interfaith dialogue.

Abraham’s Tent at 91短视频 is a center that plans and sponsors a variety of opportunities and programs for interfaith engagement.

Admission to the program is free.

Dr. Emmanuel Katongole

Emmanuel Katongole will speak 3:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 10, in 91短视频’s Campus Center room 105 (Strite Hall) on “Sacrificing Justice: Violence, Radical Forgiveness and the Future of Nation-State Politics in Africa.”

Dr. Katongole is associate professor of theology and world Christianity and co-director of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke University Divinity School, Durham, N.C. He teaches courses on The Face of Jesus in Africa, the Rwanda genocide, politics, violence and theology and on AIDS and other social challenges.

Katongole was born and grew up in the village of Malube in Uganda where he experienced the brutal regime of Idi Amin, witnessed the genocide in neighboring Rwanda and experienced first hand the dynamic and rich traditions of the African church. He attended the Catholic seminary in Uganda, where he was ordained a Catholic priest of Kampala Archdiocese. After his ordination, he taught philosophy and ethics at the Uganda National Seminary, training future priests. In 1991, he was sent to the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy.

Katongole has published widely in various journals. His latest book is A Future for Africa (Scranton 2005). In his teaching and writing, he is concerned not only with the difference Christianity can make in Africa but also with ways of bridging the distance between the West (America) and Africa.

Using the recent interest and upsurge in transitional justice mechanisms as a lens, Katongole will highlight limits in the discussions of political justice in Africa. These limitations point to an underlying issue in the imagination that shapes and drives nation-state politics in Africa. Such politics are built on a denial, indeed sacrifice, of African lives, particularly the lives of the weak. Katongole believes that these foundational visions of the political “need to be re-invented if a new future is to take shape in Africa.”

In the second lecture, he will use the story of Angelina Atyam, a human rights activist from Northern Uganda and her radical call for the forgiveness of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) as an example of what a new future beyond justice might look like. Atyam attended 91短视频’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute in 2008 and spoke during one of the institute’s “Frontiers in Peacebuilding” luncheons.

The presentations, co-sponsored by 91短视频’s Bible and religion department and the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), are open to everyone free of charge. For more information, call 432-4463.

91短视频 alum Patrick Monk was on cross-cultural in South Africa in 2007 when this picture was taken with a new friend. Photos and journals from the fall 2009 cross-cultural group in South Africa…

For years, Africa quietly summoned Patrick Monk. So quietly that, for awhile, Monk himself didn’t hear the call.

“When I was younger, I don’t think I ever saw myself going to Africa, and serving or living overseas,” said Monk, a Bridgewater native and 2000 Turner Ashby High School graduate.

Two years ago, a taste for adventure drew Monk to South Africa for a cross-cultural experience, one requirement for graduation at 91短视频.

Last year, he returned to the world’s second-largest continent for a mission in Uganda.

Haunted History

A turbulent past, in which the country was led in the 1970s by the cruel rule of dictator Idi Amin, left Uganda with social and economic woes that still haunt the country. Some of Uganda’s present problems stem from broad ethnic strife, Monk said, and such struggles are a huge part of what brought him to a nation of more than 33 million people, who are as varied as Uganda’s terrain, which ranges from beaches to deserts.

Monk, 27, recently finished the first year of a three-year mission in Hoima, Uganda, for Mennonite Central Committee, a non-governmental, faith-based group present in numerous developing countries throughout the world.

In Hoima, a rural town in western Uganda, Monk works as an adviser in a program called Living With Shalom, which promotes peace among Uganda’s high-school-aged residents by bringing together young people from different tribes in a Christ-centered setting. MCC created Living with Shalom to spread inter-tribal harmony, something Uganda historically has lacked.

Lasting Impression

His trip to South Africa stirred in Monk a curiosity for how other cultures practice their faith, and an earlier stint as a youth pastor prepared him for a similar role in Uganda, he said.

“Throughout my university studies, I [was] interested in Africa long term,” Monk said.

“The interaction and relationship between religion and culture in our world is a fascinating thing.”

Monk’s mother, Margaret Jones Monk, sensed her son’s excitement for Africa when he returned from his 91短视频 trip.

“The cross cultural [with 91短视频] really clinched it,” she said. “He knew he wanted to go back.”

Brother’s Legacy

Patrick Monk credits the life of younger brother Jeremy with helping to shape his own views on missions. Jeremy Monk, a UVA-Wise grad and a behavioral-management counselor with Crossroads Counseling in Harrisonburg, died on Oct. 9, 2008, at the age of 23 after a six-month bout with bone cancer.

“Jeremy’s life had, and will continue to have, an immense influence on my life,” Patrick Monk said. “Jeremy’s arms, heart, mind and soul were always open to people.”

Though personally different in many ways, Patrick and Jeremy became close in Jeremy’s final years, said their mother, Margaret Monk, 61, a retired Rockingham County teacher.

The rest of the Monk family includes two daughters and another son. Patrick’s father, Edward, 73, is a retired telephone repairman.

“Both Patrick and Jeremy were good influences on each other,” she said. “Pat has such an openness for people.”

Others outside Patrick Monk’s family foresaw his missionary path. Nancy Heisey, a professor in 91短视频’s Bible and religion department, taught Monk. Heisey recalls Monk as a good student at 91短视频 with a “deep sense of calling” to mission work.

“Even before he did his cross cultural, Patrick had a sense of where he wanted to go,” Heisey said. (In 2007, Patrick placed second in 91短视频’s Haverim Writing Award with his scholarly essay on “Reaching Across Rubbled Walls: Emerging from the Galatian Baptism with a New Identity.” Read more…)

Monk’s present path may bring him closer to home. When he returns to the U.S., Monk hopes to work with inner-city youth and possibly write children’s books. He also intends to return to his favorite place abroad.

Said Monk: “I would like to maintain some connection with Africa.”

L. to r.: Jacinta Makokha, Kenya; Alice Warigia Hinga, Kenya; and Belinda Gumbo, Zimbabwe, enjoy a free moment between SPI classes. Photo by Jim Bishop

When these women, attending their first SPI session, speak of the staggering tasks they and their colleagues have undertaken to heal lives and communities, they convey unflagging hope.

In Zimbabwe, administrator and trainer Belinda Gumbo works with the Habakkuk Trust’s Local Level Capacity Building Program, training communities in participatory citizenship. Funded by agencies including the Mennonite Central Committee, the program has helped communities in Gumbo’s area form 16 advocacy teams.

These teams work toward agreements with service providers and local governments. For example, officials might agree to collect refuse regularly, while residents agree not to litter.

Although this process is structurally modern, accompanied by position papers, it aims at restoring the strengths traditional African communities had before colonialism.

Restoring communities hard work

Conditions entail tough compromises. In regions hardest-hit by AIDS, with many households headed by children, Gumbo’s agency is working with Zimbabwe’s Minister of Social Welfare for compromises on child labor: “We try to find that balance of what is work and what is abuse.” They want to eliminate the practice of children selling cigarettes late into the night, while desiring that child-farmworkers have time for school and play.

In the wake of Zimbabwe’s disputed 2008 election, Gumbo says, “We feel powerless.” Yet she notes a small community such as hers, working for clean water in a dry area, may find its struggles not unique, and join with nearby villages to get a pipeline built. Such grass-roots empowerment may plant seeds for better governance.

At SPI, Gumbo studied with fellow-peacebuilders from around the world in the courses “Conflict Sensitive Development,” “Restorative Justice” and “STAR: Breaking Cycles of Violence, Building Healthy Communities.”

“For me it’s exciting because of the transitions we are in,” she says.

Peacebuilding in Africa’s Great Lakes region

Jacinta Makokha works for the Nairobi-based Change Agents for Peace International. CAPI works with churches to transform conflict in the Africa’s Great Lakes region (including Congo, Rwanda and Burundi); with a women’s organization in Southern Sudan; and with the Hope for Kenya Forum.

Here is how Makokha (also an administrator and trainer) explains the underlying approach: “I talk to Belinda. We talk to Alice. Then we all go together and talk to you.” Eventually, all may find “We no longer need revenge.”

In Rwanda, women widowed by the 1994 genocide dialogue with others whose husbands are serving prison time for the killings – sharing “common widowhood issues,” Makokha points out.

The Quaker-based Ministry for Peace and Reconciliation serves Great Lakes communities and neighbors arriving home after war, mediating such crises as a husband bringing home a new wife or a family returning to find strangers occupying its home.

Discussion and creativity important tools

Makokha tells of a women’s group comprising participants from different tribes. They work half a day in a cooperative tailoring business and spend the other half discussing peacebuilding. She cites an organization that has created jobs for more than 200 former child soldiers, while encouraging them to exchange weapons for bicycles. Another, the American Jewish World Service, supports Congolese war survivors in creative expressions such as theater.

SPI’s 2009 session had many Kenyan guests. Makokha – whose high-school classmates included President Obama’s Kenyan half-sister, Auma – observed that among her countrymen, “People had lost trust in democracy.” Following America’s historic election, she began hearing Kenyans say, “See? Democracy can work.”

Alice Warigia Hinga, also from Kenya, hopes to return for future SPI sessions and earn a master’s from 91短视频’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

In 1999, when she and her husband, a Pentecostal pastor, were starting a church for coffee-plantation workers in the Kiambu District, they discovered the workers’ children lacked educational opportunities, often worked, and sometimes went hungry. They opened a church “comprised of the children” – a school.

“We had 60 children within three months,” Warigia recalls. The school serves meals, and has added a grade each year. The first children are now starting high school.

The school has supplied food to families willing to take in orphaned children, and started a day-care unit. Babies had been dying because mothers had to carry them to the coffee fields where they inhaled pesticides, or leave them home with siblings.

Warigia has helped bring the school’s mothers together. These women – often single teenagers – meet to learn about family planning and HIV and receive testing and counseling.

Warigia, who also works as program officer for the UK Department for International Development, finds inspiration for children’s education in Luke 2:52: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man.”

Chris Edwards is a freelance writer living in Harrisonburg.

That training occurred as Don Tatlock, CWS ERP international response staff, and Elaine Zook- Barge, Mennonite Central Committee-91短视频, recently completed a series of listening/dialogue sessions as part of an assessment mission. The team met with partners in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala to determine the need for STAR workshops in the Central America region. After the assessment, Martin
Coria, CWS Social and Economic Development Program Associate, joined Tatlock on a site-visit to a CWS/Foods Resource Bank project in Guatemala.