That morning, as a conga line danced, singing, into the crowded Martin chapel on the Harrisonburg, Va., campus, volcanic ash storm-related travel delays kept one participant behind in Italy. Lack of funds and/or visas barred others. Yet attendance had jumped back significantly from the recession- and epidemic-driven drop, to 84, a year ago.

Now, those assembled laughed as SPI Director Sue Williams noted, “We have only seven days of class, and we will try to fit too much into them.”

Thousands of alumni worldwide

Since the institute’s 1994 founding, about 2,500 international workers in humanitarian, conflict transformation and other peacebuilding endeavors have taken part. During four week-long sessions – this year, until June 18 – they investigate many aspects of peace and conflict while forming cross-cultural friendships and working partnerships.

Vera Giantari from Indonesia introduces herself during the opening SPI gathering. Photo by Lindsey Kolb

Williams expects enrollment to total more than 200 over all sessions. She adds, “One new thing this year was a one-week intensive English class, before SPI began, for those who wanted to spend some time getting comfortable speaking English.”

“We are people of many colors, and we represent so many ministries and activities around the world,” said 91短视频 President Loren Swartzendruber. Learners’ home countries, ranging from Afghanistan to Zambia, include Haiti, Israel and Palestine as well as the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Building networks

Valerie Helbert, a staff member with 91短视频’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding – which sponsors SPI – encouraged learners to “educate others” if misunderstandings arise. “Assume that they mean well,” she suggested.

Richard Higginson from Northern Ireland introduces himself during the opening SPI gathering while fellow participants post “footprints” with their names on their home countries on a world map. Photo by Lindsey Kolb

Participant introductions were accompanied by the beat of CJP student Mashuri’s djembe drum. Another CJP student, Richard Higginson, strummed a guitar for a sing-along of his “Colors Song”:

“We are many colors . . .a portrait of perfection.”

CJP master’s student Abdinasir Nur, attending his first SPI, says, “In CJP we talk about social capital.” He hopes that in SPI, “We’ll be making a lot of social capital: networks.”

He wants to be a peacebuilder in his country, Somalia. “I like to work with communities,” he says, and may do so either in professional work with an NGO or as a volunteer. He’s taking the course, “Conflict-Sensitive Development and Peacebuilding,”

Clan rivalries and religious discord – even among people of the same faith – drive conflict in Somalia, Nur explains. “I want to see a world where people live together in peace and harmony without any form of conflict. This is a naive hope, but we can at least try.”

Memphis team works with youth

Although this is the first trip to SPI for Vickie O’Neal, her husband, Michael, and their colleagues with the Memphis, Tenn., conflict-resolution team, Turning Point Partners, attended in 2009.

O’Neal, a Turning Point coordinator, is happy that after years of volunteering in Memphis schools, the team has been hired to do similar work. Members lead empathy-training and “peace-making circles,” working with children involved in juvenile courts.

Having enrolled in the courses, “Introduction to Conflict Resolution” and “Restorative Justice,” O’Neal says, “Violence is not only physical. I’m sure I’m going to find that conflict is on many levels.”

The opening ceremony featured two Irish blessings. An American CJP student with Irish ancestry led the recital of one in a brogue. Williams shared another: “If God sends you down a stony path, may he give you strong shoes.”

Learn more about conflict resolution at 91短视频

• Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP)
• Graduate Program in Conflict Transformation
• Summer Peace Institute (SPI)
• Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience (STAR)
• CJP Faculty and Staff

Chris Edwards is a free-lance writer from Harrisonburg, Va. Contact 91短视频’s marketing and communications office for more information on this article.

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.

91短视频 is offering a series of seven seminars designed to help persons sharpen their leadership and conflict management skills.

91短视频’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), MA in business administration program and the Adult Degree Completion Program (ADCP) have teamed up with the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Chamber of Commerce and the Shenandoah Valley Small Business Development Center to focus on topics ranging from negotiation skills for a “win-win outcome” to dealing with various personality types in the office.

The seminars will begin late January, meeting 9 a.m. for noon on seven Fridays in classroom 211/212 of the University Commons. (See campus map.)

‘People-Handling Skills’

“In my 30 years in business, I’ve noted that the vast majority of middle and senior managers are highly competent in their fields of expertise, but some lack the people-handling skills they need to be fully successful,” said Allon Lefever, director of 91短视频’s MBA program and entrepreneur. “This seminar series will offer practical help in this arena.”

“It’s been a wonderful opportunity for 91短视频 to work more closely with organizations like the Chamber and SBDC to add the element of the ‘people-side’ of business to their existing and excellent array of services,” said Susan Landes Beck, a CJP administrator and initiator of the series. “With these joint efforts, the Valley has a practical package of training opportunities for local persons who want to grow in all areas of their leadership, business, entrepreneurship and management skills,” she added.

Costs, Schedule and Registration

The cost is $59 per seminar or $349 for the entire series, with a 10 percent discount for Chamber members.

Instructors are seasoned faculty members from 91短视频’s CJP, ADCP and STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilence) programs as well as from James Madison University and the Wharton, Aldhizer and Weaver law firm.

The schedule follows:

• Jan. 25: Leading Healthy Organizations in a Changing Environment;
• Feb. 1: Building Your Business and Your Integrity;
• Feb. 22, Cultural Awareness Matters: Effective Communication in Today’ s Diverse Workplace;
• Feb. 29: Personality and Communication Styles at Work;
• Mar. 28, Practical Leadership: Using Your Style to Effectively Lead;
• Apr. 11: Transforming Conflict Among Team Members;
• Apr. 25: Negotiation Skills for Leaders.

Persons attending the entire series will receive a certificate in organizational leadership.

To register or for more information, visit http://www.emu.edu/seminarseries or call 540-432-4651 or e-mail pi@emu.edu.

Ten adults were given clay, blocks and pipe-cleaners. During a March retreat at the Mountain Valley center near Harrisonburg, these ten

As her husband dressed for work the morning of Aug. 7, 1998, Doreen Ruto suggested he change shirts. She found one that matched his suit better.

Several days later, that shirt helped her locate his body on the floor of the city morgue in Nairobi, Kenya.

“Beyond the Rubble” was the title that Ruto – a diminutive, lively woman in a lavender dress and head-scarf – gave to the account of grief and healing that she shared at a recent Summer Peacebuilding Institute luncheon. Ruto is a beginning student at 91短视频’s Conflict Transformation Program, which has brought 170 people from all continents together for the annual institute, May 3-June 15.

Many have powerful stories to tell, SPI co-director Pat Hostetter Martin noted.

Ruto, a former secondary school teacher, and her husband, Wilson Mutai — both from rural Nandi families – had moved to Nairobi for careers with the Teachers Service Commission, where she still works in teacher training and management. She was on leave that August morning, at home with the couples two then-young sons and recovering from a miscarriage two weeks earlier.

She heard “a shattering noise” and suspected a transformer had blown. Moments later, her nine-year-old saw the first TV report of the bombing five miles away that targeted the U.S. Embassy and destroyed all but the shell of the commission high-rise where Mutai had worked on the fourth floor. “I panicked,” Ruto says. Her husband was among 224 killed.

Her year-old baby kept asking for his dad: “One of my greatest discomforts was how do I explain to him where this person is?” After she returned to work, Ruto and surviving colleagues had to go through bloodstained files littered with glass shards. She found her husband’s imprint on a blasted door.

“I asked myself what is it that I had not done. Was it a curse? What did God expect of me?” says Ruto, a Pentecostalist. She read the entire Bible in six months. Additionally, “I wrote a long letter to Wilson because I needed to talk to someone about my pain.” Having finished the 15-page letter, she observed a mourning tradition: “I packed his clothes, put them in a suitcase and apologized to him for evicting him from his house.”

As permitted by Nandi custom. Mutai’s family of origin insisted on pocketing his entire inheritance, causing a painful estrangement common among Kenyan widows.

She found healing in assisting fellow-mourners, becoming vice-chair of a survivors’ group. She learned of 91短视频’s conflict resolution programs during a conference with bombing survivors in Oklahoma City. In 2002, she participated in 91短视频’s STAR program for trauma healing. She hopes to obtain her masters in conflict transformation degree in 2006 and use the skills gained to help other survivors of terrorism.

“Terrorism takes all forms,” she says. “For me, poverty and starvation are other forms of terrorism.”

When U.S. customs officials asked Ruto the purpose of her visit, she replied, “to study peacebuilding.” An official inquired, “Peacebuilding between whom?” Ruto recalls, “I wanted to say ‘between you and me.'”

She says many Kenyans fear U.S. “anti-terrorist” policies will hurt their country. “We now have ‘are you with us or against us?’ This continues to drift us apart.”

Aaron Wright, attending SPI from Liberia, said Ruto works so hard helping other terrorism survivors that she often lacks time to rest. “I’m going back with her story,” said a man from Nepal, where widows are also struggling.

Watching news of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Ruto unconsciously searched the crowds for friends’ faces. That year in New York, she gave a victim-impact statement at proceedings where four men received life sentences for the Nairobi bombing. Her testimony was not legally relevant, however, because the men were only tried for the 12 American deaths – not those of more than 200 Africans. Ruto notes the average compensation for Nairobi bombing widows was $10,000, compared to a $1.6-million average for World Trade Center families.

Most Kenyans did not want the Nairobi terrorists executed, however. Recalling that Oklahoma City murderer Timothy McVeigh went to his death expressing no remorse, Ruto says a life sentence allows more time for regret.

Chris Edwards is a free-lance writer from Harrisonburg.