No matter where you come from or which language you speak, there is a place for you in Harrisonburg and at 91����Ƶ, and Nasser Alsaadun MA ’17 (education) is living proof of that.

The Iraqi-born educator, who came to the United States in 2008, became the first refugee councilmember in the city’s history when he was elected last fall and began his in January. He says his presence on council sends a clear message that Harrisonburg is diverse and accepting and that local immigrants can feel welcome as a part of the community.

“People can all live in peace and learn from one another—your culture, my culture. We’re all in the same pot,” Alsaadun said. “I think that’s actually a unique thing about this area.”

Through his advocacy work, Alsaadun ensures that the Friendly City lives up to its name as a welcoming place for people of all backgrounds. He volunteers with , a local office of Church World Service that serves and advocates for refugees, asylum seekers, unaccompanied children, and immigrants in the Shenandoah Valley.

He is also a founder and board member of the , a community group that works to make the city more inclusive and supportive for immigrants and newcomers, addressing challenges they face, building relationships with them, and connecting them with resources.

One of those resources is 91����Ƶ’s renowned Intensive English Program (IEP). Alsaadun, who teaches Arabic courses as an at James Madison University and English Language Learner (ELL) classes for Rockingham County Public Schools, often motivates residents to enroll in IEP classes. The program, hosted in 91����Ƶ’s Roselawn Building, helps English language learners from all around the world find their voice and build a better life for themselves. In a typical semester, IEP has 60 to 80 students of varying ages and language skill levels representing 15 to 20 countries.

“91����Ƶ has one of the best English programs in the area,” Alsaadun said. “It has a great reputation with the immigrant community.”

He added that graduates of IEP are highly proficient, professional, and well-prepared to continue their education, not just at 91����Ƶ, but at any university. “From Winchester to Charlottesville, (that program) is the best there is.”

Did you know?
In Harrisonburg City Public Schools, more than 70 languages are spoken by the student population. The No. 1 spoken language isn’t English—it’s Spanish! Source: in the Daily News-Record. Learn more about IEP at .

Escaping danger

Alsaadun grew up in Iraq and graduated from the University of Basrah in 1997 with a bachelor of arts in English. When the Iraq War broke out, he served as an interpreter for the U.S. Army in 2003. Because of his help, he became a target of militia insurgents, who came looking for him. When they couldn’t find him, they kidnapped his father for two days, then tortured and killed him.

Alsaadun and his family fled to Syria and later relocated to Lebanon, where they received refugee status from the United Nations. They arrived in the United States in July 2008 and were resettled by CWS Harrisonburg.

While serving as a temporary instructor for JMU’s foreign language department, Alsaadun started working with the refugee resettlement office and other organizations to welcome newcomers and help refugees adjust to their new life. As he helped connect immigrants to 91����Ƶ’s Intensive English Program, he learned more about the university. He had heard so many success stories about its graduates and decided to enroll. And in 2017, he graduated from 91����Ƶ with a master of arts in education.

It had always been his father’s dream to see him earn a master’s degree, shared Alsaadun, and so it was especially meaningful to him. “I cried,” he said, “because I couldn’t have him there with me seeing that moment.”

‘A different touch’

Since graduating from 91����Ƶ, Alsaadun has continued his studies through courses at JMU and the University of Virginia. He said 91����Ƶ professors are unlike any others he has encountered in his education.

“I was blessed to have professors who recognized and appreciated the gifts I had,” Alsaadun said. “They knew I wasn’t a native English speaker and that I came from a different culture. Some teachers expect you to know everything, but my teachers at 91����Ƶ understood that sometimes you struggle. That kind of understanding is unique to 91����Ƶ.”

In August, while attending a city/91����Ƶ liaison committee meeting as a council representative, he received an email confirming his acceptance into the doctoral program at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. He is now in his first semester, pursuing a PhD of education in curriculum and instruction, and credited 91����Ƶ and its professors for providing the tools and skills that have helped him succeed.

“It’s absolutely a different taste of education,” he said. “The courses at 91����Ƶ have a different touch.”

Alsaadun, now a U.S. citizen with a wife and four children, opened Babylon, a Middle Eastern restaurant and market in Harrisonburg, in 2016. He’s been invited to the White House on two occasions. He met former President Barack Obama in July 2016, in appreciation for “serving the community and being a good role model for refugees” and attended a leadership summit on refugees at the White House that September. He received the Leader of the Year award from Church World Service in 2022.

You can always tell the difference between 91����Ƶ nursing graduates and other nurses without asking them, says Kate Clark, associate professor of nursing at 91����Ƶ. 

“It’s what we hear all the time from hospitals and other employers, that there’s something special about 91����Ƶ nurses in their approach to patients and their professionalism,” she said. “One major element is our family nursing class, which helps shape both their self-confidence and their cultural humility.”

That class, the semester-long Nursing & Family in Community course (NURS 426), partners undergraduate nursing students in pairs with refugee and immigrant families in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County. Students in the course, who are juniors and seniors midway through their clinicals, visit the families at their homes weekly to promote health education, help them navigate the U.S.’s complicated health system, and teach them basic essential skills to help them adjust to life in a new country.

These skills might include: navigating a phone tree to schedule a medical appointment, setting up taxi rides to appointments, using the bus system, enrolling in an employer-sponsored health insurance plan, and understanding the difference between primary care and the emergency room. Students have been known to ride Harrisonburg city buses with families, walk with them to a local food pantry, help read their mail, attend medical appointments with them, and connect them to community resources such as clothing closets and bicycles through the program (led by alum Ben Wyse ’99). 

Students might tell families they can expect to see people in costumes walking around the neighborhood and knocking on their door for Halloween. They also might help families from warmer climates prepare for cold weather with appropriate winter clothing. 

Students communicate with their assigned families using either their own foreign language skills or a provided interpreter. This semester, there are eight different languages spoken by families in the course’s Family Partnership Project.

Through the course, 91����Ƶ nursing students build long-term therapeutic relationships with families, learn to provide care for a family unit, and experience the barriers that marginalized groups in the community face when trying to access health care.

“Because they get to experience those things from the family’s perspective, it gives them a good understanding of how the health system is not always designed for certain types of patients and the challenges they experience,” Clark said. “Whether or not they pursue home visiting long-term, it makes them better, more compassionate nurses across the board.”

She said the course sets 91����Ƶ’s nursing program apart from others. “I’ve rarely heard of another school that has a standalone family nursing class that involves home visiting,” she said, “especially not one that focuses on refugee and immigrant families.”

A ‘win win’

Many of the families participating in the Family Partnership Project have a tenuous grasp of English, are lower income, and need additional information to be able to navigate this new country. 91����Ƶ’s nursing program partners with , a local office of Church World Service that serves and advocates for refugees, asylum seekers, unaccompanied children, and immigrants in the Shenandoah Valley. The agency identifies local families in need who can benefit from the project’s tailored support, resource referral, and health teaching. The students’ help is invaluable, especially at a time when policies enacted by the current presidential administration have led to funding and staffing constraints for the organization. 

“We’re grateful for 91����Ƶ’s nursing program,” said Susannah Lepley, Virginia director of Church World Service. “I like programs that are a win win for both the university and the families and this is definitely one of those. The students get a lot out of it, the families get a lot out of it, and I think it’s a strong selling point for 91����Ƶ.”

In the past, students have worked with families who have been in the U.S. for only one to two months. This semester, due to fewer refugees entering the country, nursing students are working with families who have been in the U.S. for a year or more. This has allowed them to focus on longer-term concerns such as nutrition, stress management, and mental health.

“You can’t overstate the friendship aspect,” Lepley said. “People often leave a pretty intense network of support back home and they come here and they don’t have that anymore. They have to recreate it from scratch and I think the nursing students are a big part of that.”

The epitome of 91����Ƶ nursing

Clark, who has taught the family nursing class for the past 13 years, graduated from 91����Ƶ with a BSN in 2007. She took the course as a student under longtime professor and mentor Ann Graber Hershberger ’76. During her semester in the course, Clark was paired with a Spanish-speaking single mom in Timberville. 

Up until that course, Clark had questioned whether she actually wanted to become a nurse. She felt like there was never enough time during her clinicals at the hospital and that she was just checking boxes. 

“I knew I wanted to do something with a bigger impact, and when I took that class, I felt like I could finally let out the breath I had been holding since I started the nursing program,” she said. “I don’t know if I would’ve stayed in nursing had it not been for my experiences in that class.”

Another alumna from that year, Rebekah Good Charles ’07, said the class prepared her well for the work she now does as a community health nurse serving families around Lancaster, Pennsylvania. During her semester in the course, she visited with an immigrant family from Mexico and helped them sort through medical bills, contact financial aid, and fill out paperwork. 

“It was interesting to see the health care system from that side,” Charles said. “You can do all these things for your patients when they’re at the hospital, but when they get home, they’re left with all these loose ends to tie up. It was eye-opening to see that and help someone work through that, and it made me realize just how complicated the health system can be.”

Lydia Tissue Harnish ’17, MSN ’23, uses the same skills she acquired from the family nursing class in her job as a maternity educator for the Lancaster Nurse-Family Partnership. During her senior year at 91����Ƶ, she was paired with a refugee family in Bridgewater expecting a second child. Harnish spent the semester preparing the family for what the birthing experience in the U.S. would be like.

“It’s really the epitome of 91����Ƶ nursing,” she said. “We’re in the patients’ home setting, assessing the whole person, their environment, and their family as a whole.”

‘Begin to thrive’

When senior nursing major Joshua Stucky and another 91����Ƶ nursing student met with a Syrian refugee family for the first time in January, only a month after they had arrived in the U.S., he felt overwhelmed at the prospect of helping with their cultural transition.

“They didn’t know how to use their phones or get their kids to school and didn’t have a way to get around,” he said. “And so I walked out of that first meeting thinking, How are we ever going to help this family? … You eventually have to set an expectation that you’re not going to solve all their problems.”

Over the course of the semester together, the pair of students was able to solve some of them. Through a connection he had with Bikes for Neighbors, they were able to provide the family with bicycles. They were also able to ensure the children received the vaccines they needed and that the family had access to a neighbor’s car.

During one of their final home visits with the family, while talking to the parents, he remembers seeing the two younger children bound into the home with their backpacks. “They had been going to school and, even though we didn’t play a huge role in that, it was just the most rewarding thing to watch them begin to thrive,” Stucky said.

Learn more about 91����Ƶ’s nursing program at .

Subsequent legs in her journey:

• Three years with in Kenya, where she did STAR work with Doreen Ruto, a from 91����Ƶ (91����Ƶ).
• Four years with the for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she studied under and then apprenticed with John Paul Lederach, founding director of .
• Beginning a PhD in expressive arts and conflict transformation from the .

It began here

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Mansfield was on the 18th floor of an office building in lower Manhattan when she noticed scraps of paper floating by her window. She and her colleagues evacuated the building and began walking rapidly northward to get away. She heard and then saw the collapse of the twin towers. Dozens of people from her home suburb of Garden City died in the attack.

“For over a year I couldn’t plan more than five days out,” Mansfield recalls. “A Somali friend later told me, ‘Now you know how we feel every day.’” Ultimately she quit her job at Goldman Sachs, traveled for a year, and found her way to teachers and mentors working in peace education and conflict transformation.

One of these teachers was , who co-facilitated Mansfield’s STAR cohort in 2010. Now they are working as a team, together with program associate and trainer . Zook Barge’s focus is on curriculum development and training; Mansfield’s is on administering the program, developing the STAR network (“learning community”), and producing communications.

STAR’s birth

In late 2001, STAR was born as a partnership between CJP-91����Ƶ and to provide resources for responding to trauma in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

“What began as a program to provide tools to pastors working with traumatized congregations in New York City and Washington,” says CJP executive director , “has blossomed into a valuable resource for peacebuilders from East Africa to the Middle East to Central America.”

STAR has trained over 5,000 people from 62 countries on five continents. The program has been a springboard for: , which deals with the wounds of racism; , addressing veterans’ re-entry; and , emerging from post-Hurricane Katrina work with teenagers.

“STAR is proof that even out of the most dreadful violence it is possible to grow life-giving and peace-supporting responses,” says , CJP’s program director.

Becoming the director

Mansfield was named director of STAR in early 2015, a position she will hold while continuing to pursue her doctoral studies focused on dance-based and movement-based healing, restorative justice and transforming the wounds of trauma. She succeeded Zook Barge, who had led the program as both its top administrator and chief instructor for eight years, until her requests for splitting the duties bore fruit.

Mansfield’s first job after earning a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1996 was at Goldman Sachs. She started as an analyst, then became an associate and finally a vice president in the investment management division. She spent four years in New York City and four years in London.

In STAR trainings, participants create a drawing called the “river of life.” Reflecting on the flow of her river, Mansfield says the powerlessness she experienced immediately after 9/11 set her on the path – and helped prepare her – for her new role with STAR.

When she goes home, her angry stomach demands dinner, and she obliges.

Her lack of lunch isn’t an oversight or a necessary negligence due to work overload. The empty plate mid-day is a statement.

Hershberger, the chair of the ‘s U.S. board, has committed to fasting while praying for immigration reform, along with three other committee leaders.

That includes J. Ron Byler, executive director, Saulo Padilla, immigration education coordinator, and Luke Schrock-Hurst, the locally-based Virginia representative, who is fasting one meal five days per week. Hershberger is fasting one meal every day.

Thousands of people across the nation have dedicated themselves to fasting while praying for immigration reform.

“We believe that comprehensive immigration reform is the only thing that’s really going to deal with the crisis,” Schrock-Hurst said.

The fast is symbolically lasting for 40 days, from Sept. 9 – the date Congress last reconvened – to Oct. 14.

“I am basically praying that our legislators … would limit the harsh, unreasonable responses [to undocumented workers],” Hershberger said.

“I come at this from both a personal interest in immigration and also my board chair role.”

Along with her husband, Jim, the director of the in Harrisonburg, she spent a decade in mission work in Central America.

There, she saw the struggle for immigration from the other side.

“I have seen the … factors of war and poverty that drive people to try to make life possible for their children,” she said.

She’s specifically against House Bill 2278, the so-called SAFE Act co-sponsored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, which she says would “basically encourage profiling.”

It would also overcrowd prisons, she added, and subject anyone who assists illegal immigrants to the wrath of the law.

Comprehensive immigration reform appears to be dead in the water this year, “with everything else that’s happening in Washington,” Hershberger said. Many families try to cross the border illegally for financial reasons, she says.

“Mexican farmers who have raised corn for generations no longer can afford to grow corn,” she said, adding that their crops are undersold by U.S. corn due to the .

“Many of them come to the U.S.,” she said. “If the U.S. would put as much money into job creation in Mexico or Central America as we do in patrolling the borders, or even half, it seems to me that the reasons for coming to the U.S. would be much fewer.”

She hopes that all people – especially those of faith – will look past illegal immigrants’ status.

“Whether I agree or not with someone coming across the border, it seems that – as a Christian – I need to at least hear their story and try to understand what their life is like,” she said.

Courtesy Daily News Record, Oct. 5, 2013

“When personal trauma is not healed, aggression and increased violence may be the result,” says Virginia Foley, the widow of a U.S. government official who was assassinated in Jordan in 2002. “This is true of societies as well as individuals.”

Virginia and Larry Foley in Jordan in 2001. Foley was on assignment for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) when he became the victim of a terrorist attack on Oct. 28, 2002. Virginia Foley credits her STAR experience in 2006 as a major step in a long-term healing process. Read more …

Foley credits STAR

Kirk L. Shisler, vice president for , reported that contributions of $1,764,000 to the set a new record, surpassing the 2006 annual fund total of $1,733,000 by nearly two percent. The University Fund supports student financial aid, funds for and other program budgets as well as the (CJP), Shisler noted.

Support for 91����Ƶ’s undergraduate and graduate programs included $751,000 in endowment contributions and $2,599,210 in restricted grants and contributions. Included in the above totals was $220,000 in bequests and deferred gifts, Shisler noted.

“With the exception of 2006 in which several rather large endowment gifts were received, this was one of our strongest years in terms of endowment giving,” Shisler added.

CJP and Seminary Generate Large Gifts

Several of the larger gifts 91����Ƶ received in 2006-07 were designated for The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and for Eastern Mennonite Seminary.

The Fulbright Program and Church World Service provided grants of $357,000 and $251,000, respectively, for scholarships and special projects of CJP.

Meanwhile, 91����Ƶ’s seminary benefited from a gift of $208,000 from an individual donor to provide scholarship support to seminary students.

Alumni Continue to Give

According to Shisler, an area of continued emphasis is alumni giving.

“For several years now, the average total giving of alumni to the University Fund has increased quite steadily,” he noted. “In 2006-07, for example, average giving rose from $413 to $473, an increase of 14.5.

“However, we continue to address overall alumni participation in giving, which is currently around 30%,” Shisler said, adding: “We believe that participation will increase as we engage alumni more actively in the life of the institution.”

Included in the giving totals are contributions of $121,000 from 165 91����Ƶ faculty and staff who supported the university’s annual fund and other programs during the year.

“91����Ƶ is blessed with the support of many alumni and friends who care deeply about our mission,” said President Loren Swartzendruber. “Our intent is to be good stewards of the investments donors make toward the education of our students. In addition to significant financial support, we value the prayers of God’s people on our behalf.”

Dr. Alharith Abdulhameed Hassan, 56-year-old professor of psychiatry at the University of Baghdad, was shot while traveling to work on Dec. 6, according to an e-mail sent in mid-January by his bereaved widow, Maysa Hussam Jaber, to friends at 91����Ƶ.

Both Alharith and Maysa attended trainings under 91����Ƶ

Lou Furman costumed himself as “Truth” by piling several hats atop his head, explaining “There are many truths.”

He and three colleagues

Stella Tamang

Stella Tamang of Nepal completed a five-day workshop on “trauma awareness and resilience” at 91����Ƶ on Oct. 7, the day that the Nobel Peace Prize was announced. She and 10 others among the “1000 PeaceWomen” have links to 91����Ƶ.

Tamang was among the women nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a Switzerland-based committee. The committee combed the world to find 1,000 women to represent the millions of women who have devoted themselves to a future free of violence, according to the committee�s website, .

The committee spent almost three years seeking the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize for representative women peacebuilders from more than 150 countries. That effort ended when the peace prize was awarded to the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Egyptian director general, Mohamed ElBaradei.

From Oct. 14 to 23, a Zurich museum will feature the women with their photographs and stories. On Nov. 21, a 2200-page book with more than 800 photos on the women will be available for $45 through the committee�s website.

“I see this as an honor not for me – I don�t feel I deserve it for myself- but as a special recognition of the peace work being done by women around the world,” Tamang said at 91����Ƶ.

Tamang is a powerful advocate for women’s rights and minority groups as a result of facing discrimination in Nepal on two fronts: she is from the indigenous Lama community and a Buddhist in the world’s only Hindu kingdom. The name of her organization, Milijuli Nepal, means “together.” Her message is that diverse groups in society can work together for their respective rights, with mutual toleration, without violence.

Eight of the 11 91����Ƶ-linked nominees have received training through one of 91����Ƶ�s three flagship programs: (1) its two-year masters program in , (2) its six-week , or (3) its five-day session called “,” underwritten by Church World Service.

These eight hail from six countries � two from Kenya, two from the Philippines, and one each from Nepal, Russia, Rwanda, and Somalia. The two women from Kenya are one-quarter of those on the Kenyan list. The Somalia woman is one of two from her country.

Three others on the 1000 PeaceWomen list belong to 91����Ƶ�s peace network. One of the American women who won, Elise Marie Biorn-Hansen Boulding, is a Quaker who helped guide 91����Ƶ�s in its early years by serving on its first board from 1995 through 1998. Two other nominees have collaborated in Eastern Europe and the Philippines with persons holding 91����Ƶ masters degree in conflict transformation.

“When 91����Ƶ started its graduate peace program 10 years ago, we hardly dared dream of being a major player in the world peace arena,” said , co-director of 91����Ƶ�s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP).

“Now we are running into our graduates everywhere, and we are learning about the impact they have on others. It�s a huge ripple effect,” she said.

Over the last 10 years, 91����Ƶ has seen nearly 3,000 people from more than 80 countries come through one of its peacebuilding programs.

The Nobel peace nominees linked to 91����Ƶ tend to be in their 40s or 50s. They came to 91����Ƶ for additional training after many years of working in the field of justice and peacebuilding. Along with the other nominees, “they rebuild what has been destroyed, they mediate in conflicts between enemies, and they fight poverty,” said the nominating committee. �They step in for access to land and clean water, they defend human rights and denounce every sort of child abuse. They create alternative sources of income, they care for HIV patients and take care of their children. They organize vigils and they document the atrocities of war.”

Tecla Wanjala

Tecla Wanjala of Kenya, for example, came to 91����Ƶ after having worked in refugee camps. She earned her masters in conflict transformation from 91����Ƶ in 2002 and then returned home to focus on post-conflict reconstruction as part of the Coalition for Peace in Africa.

After attending 91����Ƶ�s Summer Peacebuilding Institute in 2001, Miriam “Dedet” Suacito returned to her native Philippines and offered trauma-healing sessions for war widows and for former hostages of a radical kidnap-for-ransom group. She also runs community-based anti-poverty programs and inter-religious dialogue.

**

In Darfur, a roughly 200,000-square-mile region of western Sudan, as many as two million remain displaced in camps, while another 200,000 Sudanese refugees are in eastern Chad. Most are traumatized – terrified and demoralized by the war and violence they have witnessed or experienced.

While the world has not done nearly enough in Darfur, humanitarian assistance is making a difference.

Part of that difference has come about because of support Church World Service has provided to partners and fellow members of the Action by Churches Together alliance – the Sudan Council of Churches; Norwegian Church Aid; and Caritas Internationalis, a confederation of 162 Catholic relief, development, and social service organizations.

Food, medicines, water and sanitation projects, education, agricultural inputs and tools, and counseling programs for the most vulnerable in the Darfur region have been underway since July 2004, and they continue.

Meanwhile, southern Sudan is preparing for major changes in the coming year. There are some four million people internally displaced by a generation of civil war in Sudan – three million of them, southern Sudanese living in northern Sudan. Some 500,000 southern Sudanese are refugees in seven neighboring countries.

With the January signing of a comprehensive peace agreement that ended a 21-year-long war in southern Sudan, so-called “spontaneous” returnees are starting to come back – but the situation for them is extremely difficult because organized returns by respective governmental authorities, the United Nations, and non-governmental organizations have not yet begun. As a result, returnees are in a precarious situation – hoping that help will come from somewhere. They are seeking support for food, medicine, and shelter.

Working with several partners, Church World Service is rehabilitating refugee centers in the region to assist the returnees. That program includes a component of CWS’s widely-praised Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) seminars – efforts to ease trauma and promote reconciliation.

In addition to those efforts, CWS is supporting programs by several partners in Sudan working in areas where “spontaneous” returnees are already arriving. This assistance includes post-war reconstruction work and peacebuilding activities.

In these and other efforts, Church World Service continues to accompany the people of Sudan on their journey for a better life.

Story by Chris Herlinger/CWS