Organizers, including CJP founding director John Paul��Lederach, sociology professor Vernon Jantzi, and �ᾱ���쾱������Assefa, a mediator in conflicts around the world, invited friends and colleagues to talk and think about the cutting edges of practice and theory in international peace work. Some uncertainty surrounded the launch of CJP itself, Jantzi recalls, and the organizers of the Frontiers conference didn’t have any particular plans to make it an annual event.

And they surely didn’t imagine that 20 years later it would be thriving, would have brought 2,800 people from 121 countries to 91����Ƶ’s campus and would have directly inspired the creation of at least 10 other short-term peacebuilding institutes in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific and North America. Nor could Lederach, Jantzi and Assefa have imagined that they would remain involved to varying degrees ever since, though Assefa is the only one has taught every year at the summer institute.

“There was so much energy generated,” Jantzi recalls, of the first conference. “People were so eager to share their experiences.”

Participants found that simply being together at a week-long peacebuilding conference was tremendously beneficial and inspiring for their work, and the response was enthusiastic. During the following academic year, CJP received its accreditation, had three students in the master’s program and admitted a dozen more to begin in the fall of 1995, and had hired its first full-time administrative staff member, Ruth Zimmerman. Things were heading in a good direction, and CJP organized a second Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conference in the summer of 1995.

Conference becomes “SPI”

For its third year, CJP gave its one-week peacebuilding conference a new name: the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, or SPI. Word was spreading, interest was growing, and SPI was about to begin growing quickly in size, scope and length. By 2002, SPI attracted around 150 participants from about 50 countries and offered 20 classes over a two-month period.

One of the major early emphases at SPI – and CJP more generally – was grounding the academic curriculum and classroom instruction in practical, on-the-ground application of peacebuilding and conflict resolution. Early in SPI’s history, outside funders helped bring participants from different sides of several major conflicts around the world, including groups of Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland and members of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups from Rwanda and Burundi.

This created a rich and challenging environment at SPI, adding a heavy dose of real-life experience from difficult, violent conflicts – sometimes involving opposing sides of the same conflict – to complement the theory-based aspects of the curriculum.

“In the classroom, that was pretty powerful,” says Tim Ruebke, who attended four years of SPI before earning his master’s degree from CJP in 1999.

Rich experiences outside classroom

Many report that the most powerful moments at SPI, though, occurred during informal, social times away from the classroom. Ruebke recalls an evening gathering at a home in Harrisonburg where participants from Northern Ireland shared stories, songs and dancing with each other and the rest of their classmates.

While the daily sessions focus on the cerebral, “head” aspects of peacebuilding, these informal, social times in the evenings get at its emotional “heart.” This aspect of SPI, Ruebke says, mirrors the reality of many real-life peace negotiations, where the hard work of compromise, connection and understanding between parties often occurs in relaxed, social settings before being finalized at the formal negotiating table.

“A lot of stuff that happens here is informal and relational,” says Jantzi. “We think it’s very significant.”

And as SPI participants often discover, the emotional aspects of peacebuilding aren’t always happy times of singing and dancing. One of the early SPI sessions included visitors from the former Soviet republic of Georgia as well as Abkhazia, a disputed region within Georgia over which a civil war was fought in the 1990s. One evening, an SPI professor had planned a discussion about this conflict and began by displaying a map of the region.

Ruebke was in the audience, and remembers that one of the parties was upset in some way by what was (or perhaps, what wasn’t) portrayed on the map. This immediately and badly derailed the session, and by the time things had been patched up and discussion about the conflict was able to proceed, the importance of the “felt” aspect of peacebuilding had been brought home to Ruebke in a memorable way.

“Even though we were a peacebuilding program, people brought their stuff with them,” remembers Ruth Zimmerman, who says that these sorts of conflicts would periodically flare up between participants. “We had a great learning ground for using some of those [conflict resolution] skill sets over the years.”

At the very beginning, the Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conferences and SPI were simply opportunities for professional development and learning. Before long, however, participants and graduate students in CJP began lobbying for an academic credit component to SPI. Though hesitant to accept the constraints of a pre-planned curriculum, CJP added a credit component to provide students with more flexibility in earning degrees through the program.

Some core courses have been offered year after year, including ones dealing with conflict analysis, restorative justice and trauma healing, and others that focus on practical peacebuilding skills like negotiation and reconciliation. Yet SPI stays true to its roots by exploring the field’s frontiers and updating its course offerings to reflect emerging themes in peacebuilding. Examples of new courses in 2014 include ones on media and societal transformation, playback theater, trauma-sensitive peacebuilding, mindfulness, and architecture as a peacebuilding tool.

Things ran on the skinniest of shoestring budgets in the very first years of SPI, when CJP professors opened their homes to participants after the day’s sessions had ended, while their spouses pitched in to help with meals. Volunteers filled many support roles. This contributed to the organic, intimate atmosphere that remains an important aspect of SPI to this day. But it was an exhausting and, in the long run, unsustainable way to run the event that itself led to conflicts between overworked staff members.

“It was so much work,” recalls Zimmerman, who filled leadership roles at CJP from 1995 to 2007. “I used to put in 70-hour weeks.”

Huge logistics behind SPI

In addition to planning courses and lining up faculty to teach them, coordinating the many moving parts of the growing SPI program presented huge logistical challenges. Once, a participant booked a flight to the Dallas, Texas, airport rather than Washington, D.C.’s Dulles Airport. Another one hopped in a taxi and directed the driver to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 185 miles north of Harrisonburg, Virginia.

In 1998, just after she became one of CJP’s earliest master’s program graduates, Pat Hostetter Martin (also a participant in the very first Frontiers in International Peacemaking conference) joined SPI to help relieve the growing crisis of stress and exhaustion the workload was placing on other staff. The following year, Martin became SPI’s co-director with Patricia Spaulding, and then sole director from 2004 until 2008.

In 2000, William Goldberg – a 2001 master’s program graduate of CJP – joined the SPI staff as the transportation coordinator. He later served as an associate director, co-director and, as of 2013, the director of SPI, which now has two full-time staff members and employs about 10 temporary staff each summer. (Other SPI leaders: Gloria Rhodes in the ’90s, Sue Williams, 2008-’11; Valerie Helbert, 2011-’13.)

As the first Jewish program administrator at 91����Ƶ, Goldberg embodies one of the ways that SPI has affected 91����Ƶ as a whole by bringing such wide cultural and religious diversity to campus. From the very first Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conferences, CJP leaders wanted faculty to reflect the religious and cultural diversity of the participants – a desire at odds with 91����Ƶ’s requirement that all faculty profess a Christian faith. After some discussion, CJP was able to negotiate exceptions to 91����Ƶ’s hiring practices and hire non-Christian faculty members during the summer, which Jantzi points to as an example of the strong support SPI has generally enjoyed from university administrators since its beginning.

91����Ƶ’s hospitable community

Support from the university extended well beyond the administration, remembers Jantzi. Cafeteria staff embraced the opportunity, rather than resented the hassle, of serving participants with a variety of religious and cultural dietary preferences, while the physical plant staff went to great lengths to ensure everyone stayed comfortable during their time on campus. Together, the welcoming atmosphere the entire university created at SPI for visitors from around the world became an important part of its success.

As employees and departments outside of SPI pitched in to help it succeed, SPI also tried to build closer ties to the broader university community by making events like the opening ceremonies and the periodic SPI luncheons open to anyone on campus and in the surrounding community. And when these general open invitations didn’t attract large audiences, Martin found greater success when she started targeting specific people and departments with invitations and paying for their lunches.

SPI staff have also made similar efforts to share the diversity present on campus each summer with the broader community in and around Harrisonburg. As SPI’s community relations coordinator for about a decade, Margaret Foth worked to connect participants with families, churches and civic groups in the area. She helped form a particularly strong relationship with the Rotary Club of Rockingham County, which hosts a speaker from SPI each year and has helped underwrite an SPI trip to Washington D.C. A close relationship also developed between SPI and Park View Mennonite Church, just down the road from 91����Ƶ, which has welcomed numerous international visitors in Sunday School classes and as participants in worship services.

“We wanted [participants] to know that it was an area that was welcoming and hospitable,” says Foth. “They weren’t just coming for an academic session. They were coming for relationships in a welcoming community.”

From 2000 to 2010, vanloads of SPI participants made connections farther from campus when they attended a peacebuilding conference held each summer by a group of churches in Knoxville, Tennessee, 360 miles southwest of Harrisonburg. (The minister who organized this conference, Jim Foster, is a graduate of Eastern Mennonite Seminary.) By staying with host families, the visitors enjoyed a more immersive experience in American culture; Foth says she could always count on enthusiastic reviews the following Monday, after participants returned to campus.

One year, a Vietnamese-American lawyer from California made the 12-hour round trip to Knoxville, and ended up staying in the home of a Mennonite pastor who, decades earlier, had fought in the Vietnam War. After they stayed up one night talking about their experience of that conflict, the lawyer returned to SPI and told Foth it had been a moment of great healing.

“I can still see him running across campus to give me a hug and say it was the best thing to have happened to him,” she recalls.

��

Akin to heaven on earth?

In 2014, a total of 184 people from 36 countries attended SPI – about the size that SPI has been for the past five years, Goldberg says. As its third decade begins, SPI is as strong and as thriving as ever – planning for 2015 began before the books had even been closed on this year’s session.

Those who have been involved with SPI in some way over the past 20 years treasure the many memories and friendships they’ve formed along the way.

“I think it’s one of the best things that’s happened for 91����Ƶ,” says Jantzi. “It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve been involved with here …. It’s just a really, really energizing time.”

One year, Jantzi and an Iranian seminary student who came to SPI struck up an intriguing, weeks-long conversation about whether converting other people to their respective religions could be done in a nonviolent, non-coercive way. This man later became a high-ranking diplomat who, years later, returned to the United States as part of an Iranian delegation to the United Nations. He contacted Jantzi and invited himself back to Harrisonburg to give a guest lecture in one of Jantzi’s sociology classes – an encouraging indication, Jantzi says, of the high regard this former SPI participant still had for 91����Ƶ.

Goldberg says he’s often inspired by the great lengths that people will go to so they can attend SPI. In 2014, a group of Syrian participants traveled at least 12 hours each way, through difficult and unsafe conditions, to Lebanon to get their visas to travel to the United States. Then they did it again to catch their flights – an illustration, he says, of “the need that people have for this training.”

And he’s similarly inspired by the eagerness with which people return to very difficult circumstances in their homes to put that training and learning into practice.

“No matter how difficult the conflict someone comes from, they want to go back and make it better with the new skills they’ve learned here,” Goldberg says.

More generally, Martin, as well as others interviewed for this story, says one of the most important enduring memories of SPI is “the rich diversity of the whole thing. Oftentimes, that came out so well in the opening ceremonies. That just humbled you.

“You want heaven to be like this,” she says.

— Andrew Jenner

An aunt of Khamseng “Seng” Homdouangxay lost a leg while hoeing a beanfield, and his uncle suffered permanent, severe brain damage

Shuk shunkulla (only one heart).
Shuk makilla (only one struggle).
Shuk yuyailla (only one voice).

At the May 8 opening of 91����Ƶ

How often does one modest-sized auditorium in a small Virginia city hold people from Rwanda, Brazil, Italy, Syria, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bombay, Burundi, Egypt, Nigeria, Israel, Palestine, Pakistan, the Congo, Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Nepal, Australia, Indonesia, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and the United States?

In all, 35 nations were represented among the 98 participants arriving on May 9 at 91����Ƶ, for the tenth annual gathering that brings such diversity to the Harrisonburg, Va., campus.

SPI learners, from all continents and faith traditions, have experience in peacebuilding work, including human rights and relief. Most are sponsored by home organizations. Living on campus during four sessions spread over six weeks, they will complete workshops such as “Analysis: Understanding Conflict” and “Peacebuilding for Traumatized Societies,” while sharing food, music and games as friendships form.

The opening session addressed cross-cultural communication issues with a humorous skit:

“We don

(MCC), Akron, Pa., announced that Dr. Robert William Davis has been appointed the next executive director of the 85-year-old relief, development and peace agency.

Dr. Davis, who is currently senior vice-president of program services for Freedom from Hunger in Davis, Calif., will begin his assignment on June 1, 2005. During the month of June he will work closely with the outgoing executive director, Ronald J.R. Mathies, and will assume full responsibilities at the end of the month. Mathies, who announced his retirement in September 2003, has served as executive director for nine years.

Davis said he is motivated by a strong vision for Christian ministry and a desire “to serve and seek to be an agent of reconciliation, a faithful servant and a community builder.” He has taught in the (SPI) at 91����Ƶ. In May 2005, he will be teaching the course, “Designing learner-centered training for conflict transformation.”

“For two years, Robb Davis has taught the course, ‘Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach: Popular Education for Peace’ in 91����Ƶ’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute and is scheduled to teach again this summer,” said Pat Hostetter Martin, SPI director. “He is a dynamic instructor. SPI has been blessed to have his expertise in the design of training as well as his positive spirit in the educational process.”

A native of Lancaster County, Pa., Davis brings extensive international development, poverty alleviation and public health experience to the job. He holds a master’s degree in public health and a Ph.D. in population dynamics, both from John Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, Baltimore, Md. He also holds a bachelor of science in theology from Lancaster (PA) Bible College.

Early in his career Davis served as a health technical advisor and administrator for World Vision in the west African country of Mauritania. He has served as an independent consultant to various development agencies such as the International Assistance Mission, Catholic Relief Services, the World Bank, Peace Corps and the International Catholic Migration Committee.

Davis is also the chair of the Child Survival Collaborations and Resources Group (CORE), a 38-member professional consortium of U.S. nongovernmental organizations (NGO) engaged in maternal and child health work around the world.

Davis and his wife, Nancy, are parents of two children. Their eldest child is a student at Bethel College, North Newton, Kan., and their youngest remains at home. The couple is founding members of a Mennonite house fellowship in Davis, Calif. While living in Lancaster they attended East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church.

AKRON, Pa.- Earl and Pat Hostetter Martin grew up in Mennonite homes where politics remained separate from their parents’ lives, where voting was not considered a duty and where existence was grounded in the kingdom of God, not of the world.

But the suffering and death they encountered as (MCC) workers in Vietnam in the 1960s convinced them that the faith they had been taught – combined with the atrocities they were witnessing – forced them to speak to their government.

“When you see the effects of government policies, it doesn’t make sense to say, ‘I will be silent in the face of this destruction,'” Earl Martin said.

Since then, the couple has continued to speak to the “principalities and powers.” They will join a selection of scholars, theologians and pastors exploring the intersection of faith and politics at a Sept. 23-25 conference, “,” in Harrisonburg, Va., and Bridgewater, Va.

Held at 91����Ƶ and , conference sessions will explore how Christians in the “Believers Church” tradition understand their witness for God and their relationship to political authority in light of living in a democracy that is the world’s dominant power.

Churches usually associated with the Believers Church tradition include Adventists, Baptists, Brethren, Disciples of Christ, Mennonites, Methodists, Pentecostals, Plymouth Brethren and Quakers.

The conference focuses on the meaning of citizenship in the United States, said Steve Longenecker, professor of history at Bridgewater College and planning committee member: “The planners observed that the United States currently possesses and exercises unprecedented influence on a global scale. The conference is designed to clarify what it means to be both citizens of the state and members of the body of Christ.”

Sessions approach the topic from biblical, historical and theological perspectives, with speakers from academic circles and the broader church. Presentations will range from biblical sermons to academic papers to autobiographical narratives. Critical analysis will be interspersed with reflective worship, integrating scholarly, pastoral and activist perspectives.

The Martins will present their autobiographical reflections in “Believers’ Journeys and Politics.” Other conference sessions include “Believers as Sisters and Brothers in the Church Worldwide,” “Theological Perspectives on Political Authority,” “Believers and Political Authority in History” and “Believers and Political Authority in the Bible.”

Robert W. Edgar, general secretary of the , will address the conference Friday night. Edgar served eight years in the U.S. House of Representatives, followed by a 12-year tenure as president of Claremont School of Theology. An ordained United Methodist elder, Edgar has also been pastor of several congregations, a college chaplain and a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

The conference, the 15th in a series that addresses Believers Church issues, is sponsored by 91����Ƶ, Bridgewater, the MCC U.S. Washington Office, the Baptist Joint Committee Washington, D.C., and Church of the Brethren Witness/Washington Office.

To register or to learn more, see . Early fees must be postmarked by Aug. 27.

Marla Pierson Lester is a writer/editor for MCC Communications.

As religious pacifists, we have grieved deeply – with the rest of the world – over the images of dehumanization that have emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison. We want to avert our eyes from those images and tell ourselves that these horrendous abuses did not really happen.

But they did happen. And, anguished as we are, we must face those realities. And what shall be our response?

The powers that be are preparing to investigate and mete out punishments to individuals deemed to have been involved. And indeed, individuals must be called upon to take responsibility for their own actions – even in war. The Nuremberg Principles and others have established that. At the same time, many signs suggest that a whole system up the chain of command not only permitted, but encouraged harsh treatment of Iraqi and Afghan prisoners.

Take, for example, Pfc. Lynndie England, the young woman whose face has appeared on some of these photos of abuse. She will be prosecuted and most likely punished for her offensive behavior.

But does this behavior make Private England an evil person? From all reports, she was a fun loving, adventuresome young person not much different from all of our daughters and sisters. As people of faith, we choose to believe that within Lynndie England, as within all persons, resides the spark of the divine.

The same goes for each of the Iraqi prisoners in those photos. Regardless of their histories – and reports suggest at least some were just innocents scooped up during military sweeps – we choose to believe that the divine presence lives within each of them, too. Have some of them done evil things? Perhaps so. Given the absence of fair trials, we don’t really know. But even if they have, we cannot think of them as evil persons any more than we can think of Lynndie England as an evil person.

And that’s where the logic of war becomes so grievous.

We label each other as “terrorist” or “infidel,” or “good guy” and “bad guy,” with the assumption that it is appropriate to kill the “bad guy.” If we arrogate the right to kill, it is inevitable that many other dehumanizing abuses will ensue.

Before the United States launched “the optional war” in Iraq, practitioners of nonviolence were advocating concrete alternatives that would have sought to depose Saddam Hussein without war. One plan called for a massive humanitarian assistance program to the Iraqi people while launching a campaign to declare Hussein a war criminal and to carry out even more rigorous arms inspections throughout the country. Of course, many of us nonviolent activists were dismissed as being hopelessly naive.

But is the logic of warfare and occupation really wise? Does it really make sense that we can bomb neighborhoods, storm into people’s homes at night, imprison thousands in degrading conditions without charge, and then assume that these people will love us? Where does the greater naivete lie? Do we really believe that we have created a safer and more stable world because we launched a war in Iraq?

We worked with a relief agency among farmer refugees in Vietnam for five years during the war there. Our home was just five miles from the village of My Lai, where more than 400 villagers were slaughtered on a March morning in 1968. My Lai was that war’s Abu Ghraib. Unhappily, we learned that the massacre in My Lai, while possibly the largest of its kind in that war, was far from an isolated case.

Do we blame the individual soldiers who participated in those war crimes? Again, there must be personal accountability and responsibility. But those soldiers were forced to serve among a people whose language and customs they barely knew. Without intimate knowledge of the society, they could not know who was friend and who was enemy. So many became fearful, if not contemptuous, of all Vietnamese people. Little wonder that atrocities took place. It is the logic of war. It is naive to think it will be otherwise.

Today, most US officials and commentators, while condemning the abuses revealed in the Abu Ghraib prison, speak in terms of finding ways to fix the system so these abuses will not happen again.

The need is deeper. We need to understand that if we choose the option of war, abuses will inevitably follow. It is the very nature of war. Indeed, war itself is abuse.

Earl Martin and Pat Hostetter Martin worked with the Mennonite Central Committee in peace and development programs for 25 years. Ms. Martin is now codirector the Summer Peacebuilding Institute of the 91����Ƶ in Harrisonburg, Va.

Fifteen leaders of regional peace-building groups gathered for the first time during the at 91����Ƶ.

Their May 30-June 4 conference launched a network between existing institutes in Zambia, Ghana, the Philippines and the United States and groups planning peacebuilding institutes in South Asia, the South Pacific and Jamaica. Funding came from a United States Institute of Peace grant written by SPI co-director .

“The peer relationship is important,” said Jon Rudy, who works with the Philippines’ Mindanao Peacebuilding Institute. The Summer Peacebuilding Institute at 91����Ƶ, at 10 years, is the oldest among these nonhierarchical, nonviolence-based institutes, having 1,500 alumni around the world, but MPI has graduated 650 in its five years, while several hundred have completed the newer Philippine and African institutes.

Conference topics included fundraising, burnout, organizational evaluation, theory in relationship to practice, and generalized versus regional skills, noted facilitator Bill Goldberg, a special projects assistant with 91����Ƶ

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.