Patience Kamau ’02, MA ’17 (conflict transformation), stands outside the post office in Nyahururu, central Kenya, and holds a letter. Its mailing address is written to her in blue ink, while the return address lists an “91����Ƶ” in Harrisonburg, Virginia, of the United States. The high school senior tears open the envelope and starts reading. The letter inside tells her that 50% of her tuition costs at 91����Ƶ will be covered through the university’s International Grant.

Though that moment occurred nearly three decades ago, Kamau remembers it like it was yesterday. “That was among the greatest blessings I ever received,” she said, looking back.

She didn’t know much about the U.S. at the time, and even less about 91����Ƶ, but her decision to cross an ocean and enroll at the university would forever shape her future. “It was very clear it was shifting the trajectory of my life,” she said.

Soon after receiving that first letter, she received another from 91����Ƶ with an invitation. “Bring an open heart,” Kamau recalled reading, “because here you will make friendships and relationships that you will maintain for the rest of your life.”

“And that was true,” she said. “Many of the relationships I formed at 91����Ƶ remain meaningful in my life.”

She admitted that she didn’t choose 91����Ƶ; her father chose it for her. He had heard through family friends about “a little college in Harrisonburg” with a strong pre-med program. “He started looking into it, reading and studying it, and he liked it,” Kamau said. 

She arrived as a pre-med major in the fall of 1998. Her parents were physicians, and they encouraged her to follow in their footsteps. Kamau enjoyed biology classes during her first year at 91����Ƶ, but once she started taking organic chemistry her sophomore year, she realized it was not for her. She quickly switched majors to computer information systems.

She became close with the handful of other international students on campus and got involved with the university’s multicultural and international programs, where she came under the wing of Delores “Delo” Blough ’80, former director of international student and scholar services. “Delo was a huge part of making all of us feel at home,” she said.

After graduating in 2002, Kamau worked in a variety of campus departments, including the alumni and parent relations office, the seminary, and the Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness. She eventually landed a position at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, serving as assistant to the executive director while a student at CJP. As a perk of her job, she said, she could take eight credit hours a year at no charge.

Six years ago, as chair of CJP’s 25th anniversary committee, she began producing a series of Peacebuilder podcast episodes featuring the program’s faculty and staff to capture CJP’s oral history. According to an 91����Ƶ News article from 2022, the podcast had logged more than 11,500 listeners in 119 countries and territories around the globe.

Since 2022, Kamau has served as program director for . The online course and connection platform offers activists, innovators, and others seeking knowledge and tools a space to “manifest solutions for people and planet,” according to its website.

Kamau said she categorizes her life as “100% lucky.” Half of that luck comes from the random happenstances she had nothing to do with. The other 50% is the kind of serendipitous luck when “preparation meets opportunity,” she said, borrowing a favorite phrase from Oprah.

“You try and live a certain way and prepare, and then when the opportunity arises, you hopefully take advantage of it,” she said. “I couldn’t have been more grateful to have ended up at 91����Ƶ as a young adult who didn’t fully know who I was or what I wanted from life.”

Your support helps students pursue a quality college education without financial barriers. Join us for the 10th annual Lov91����Ƶ Giving Day and contribute to the scholarships that empower future 91����Ƶ students. On April 1, let’s show that our generosity knows no bounds…for the record!

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����Ƶ’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.

They turned to greet neighbors, each invited to speak in his or her native language. Many said “Hello”; a few, “Hola!” or “Bonjour.” Sebastian Bukenya, a young Roman Catholic priest from Uganda, asked, “Oli otya!” (in the Luganda language, “How are you?”).

The mood among these 84 visitors from 35 nations seemed undampened either by chilly, wet weather or slightly reduced attendance as the 14th annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute opened May 4 at 91����Ƶ.

Samuel Waihenya Njoroge from Kenya introduces himself in the opening session of the 2009 Summer Peacebuilding Institute. The first SPI session, May 4-12, drew 84 people from 35 countries.

“As I look at your faces and listen to your voices, I feel the presence of the whole world here,” SPI’s new executive director Sue Williams told the gathering in Martin Chapel.

Learners at SPI – a program operated by 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding – work in humanitarian, conflict resolution and other peace-related areas in their home countries. Ninety-six had been expected for the opening session, but attendance has been deterred by visa restrictions combined with the global economic downturn and swine flu outbreak, Williams said.

Students combine faith and social issues with trauma healing

Bukenya, attending for the first time, had learned of SPI through his service on a peacebuilding team in Kampala. His parishioners, having endured prolonged hardships in their country’s 23-year-long civil war, face challenges that he characterized in part as “trauma healing and forgiveness.” Hoping to gain theoretical knowledge to strengthen skills he has been acquiring by practice, Bukenya has enrolled in two classes: “Faith-Based Peacebuilding” and “Philosophy and Praxis of Forgiveness and Reconciliation.”

“I’m fighting for the rights of women in Pakistan,” said Razia Joseph, president of the Women Shelter Organization in Faisalabad, a city in her nation’s Punjab region. Her organization promotes women’s education and health care, assists women in prison and provides shelter for victims of domestic violence. In contacts with fellow-peacebuilders in SPI, she hopes to call attention to the plight of the women in her country.

SPI global network now in the thousands

More than 2,200 alumni from all parts of the world have attended SPI. During four sessions spread over six weeks, SPI learners form cross-cultural friendships and working partnerships while studying many aspects of solving conflict.

New courses and instructors this year include “Faith-Based Peacebuilding,” offered by Roy Hange, co-pastor of Charlottesville Mennonite Church and Harrisonburg District overseer for the Virginia Mennonite Conference; and “Human Rights, Governance, and Peacebuilding,” taught by Dan Wessner, 91����Ƶ professor of international and political studies. SPI training sessions will include mediation and facilitating crime victim/offender dialogue.

(L. to r.): Mary Beth Spinelli, Krista Johnson and Pam Welsh, students in the MA in conflict transformation program and SPI participants, place symbols representing various cultural and faith traditions at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute on a table during a welcoming gathering.

“The ideal global learning experience would be for each of us to spend a year working alongside every person here,” said Williams. Although that is not possible, she noted, “We have SPI.” Williams replaced former SPI director Pat Hostetter Martin following her retirement last year.

Williams’ work includes healing in Northern Ireland

Before arriving on campus in Fall 2008, Williams had lived and worked in Northern Ireland, Uganda, Kenya and Botswana, and had served as a consultant on political mediation and dialogue in a training program for the Mediation Support Unit of the United Nation’s Department of Political Affairs.

Read more about William’s work in Ireland in the spring/summer issue of Peacebuilder. The magazine also details the work of other CJP professors and 91����Ƶ community members long involved in the peace process there.

“We are here to be learners and teachers. We are not here to have a vacation,” Williams noted. However, shared meals, sports, music and local sightseeing enrich the cultural learning.

The opening ceremony by CJP students featured symbols of diversity – small flags from many lands, colorful fabrics and religious symbols. A round loaf of bread served to symbolize unity. “If you are not familiar with the term, ‘potluck,’ you will be during your time at SPI,” an announcer promised. Read more about the opening ceremony and Koila Costello-Olsson from Fiji…

Masters in conflict transformation at CJP

Some SPI participants earn credit toward a masters’ from the CJP program, which has awarded degrees to about 300 graduates now working in more than 50 nations, said CJP executive director Lynn Roth.

A standby in SPI opening ceremonies is the introduction of each guest by home country. Nations represented this year included Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Kenya, Palestine, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Sri Lanka, the Ukraine, the UK, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Denmark, Canada and Honduras.

Following prayers from several languages and faith traditions, the class work began.

The SPI program, with six intensive classes in each of the four sessions, will run through June 12.

Chris Edwards is a free-lance writer living in Harrisonburg.

Read more…

“Rocks in the Road,” a presentation with discussion on the recent post-election crisis and peace efforts in the east African nation of Kenya will be held 4-5:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 28, in room 123 of the seminary building.

Janice M. (Jan) Jenner, director of the Practice Institute in the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) at 91����Ƶ, will introduce the topic and moderate the session. She will be assisted by 91����Ƶ students from Kenya and CJP Kenyan graduates.

The presentation will examine events in Kenya following the Dec. 29 election, resulting in violence that has caused at least 1,000 deaths, 350,000 internally displaced people and tremendous infrastructure and economic damage.

A poster created for the “Rocks in the Road” presentation at 91����Ƶ.

Several current and past 91����Ƶ students will provide relevant Kenyan history and analysis of the current situation, including the Kofi-Annan brokered peace talks, civil society peacebuilding efforts and the effect on Mennonites in Kenya. There will be time for audience questions.

Prior to joining the 91����Ƶ faculty, Jenner was co-country representative for seven years with Mennonite Central Committee in Kenya. She holds a masters in conflict transformation from 91����Ƶ.

Refreshments will be served. Admission is free.

The program is sponsored by the provost office and the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. For more information, call 432-4490.

by Jeff Mellott, Daily News-Record

Securing a student visa to study in the United States already was getting harder by the time foreign terrorists flew jet airliners into the World Trade Center in September 2001.

The now-even-tougher visa stance by the U.S. government is contributing to a decline in foreign students studying in this country.

Anne Nyambura, 35, of Kenya and Andile Dube, 21, of Zimbabwe have both noticed the trend.

They both reported little trouble in getting visas to study at 91����Ƶ, but the pair knew of others who were not as fortunate. “For most, it is not easy at all to get all the paperwork that you need to get into this country,” Dube said.

Some of Nyambura

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����Ƶ’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����Ƶ’s conflict resolution programs during a conference with bombing survivors in Oklahoma City. In 2002, she participated in 91����Ƶ’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.

By Rob Longley, Daily News-Record

Before last week, most of Geoffrey Sakuda