In the summer of 1994, about 40 peace and development workers gathered on the campus of 91����Ƶ for a one-week seminar called “Frontiers in International Peacebuilding.” It was the first official event held by what is now known as the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, or CJP, which was then so fledgling it had yet to be fully accredited.*

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

In late May, 2014, 35 people from 11 countries gathered on campus to discuss their ongoing work with 91����Ƶ’s Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program.

It was the first in a new series of practitioner-focused consultations and conferences that will be held each year during the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI).

“We wanted to gather the folks who have been using STAR around the world to get their feedback on who’s using it, what’s working, and why, and make adjustments as needed,” said
J. Daryl Byler, executive director of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). “We’re trying to set up a process of learning from our alumni and to update our curriculum based on what they’re learning as they put these things into practice.”

The event also helped to strengthen the network of alumni from around the world who have been trained in STAR since it was first offered in 2001.

Doing so will benefit both the university and STAR practitioners, as CJP plans to use this alumni network to implement upcoming contract work, Byler said.

One example is a USAID contract with CJP to provide STAR training to 150 staff in Juba, South Sudan. Five STAR alumni will carry out that training, along with two 91����Ƶ professors.

Byler said CJP plans to begin three-year cycles of on-campus events around several practice areas, beginning with a consultation and followed by a practitioner conference and a writing and research conference in subsequent years.

In 2015, CJP will host a STAR conference as well as restorative justice consultation, beginning a similar three-year cycle for that field. Discussions are ongoing about other potential focus areas for these events in the future.

In addition to helping CJP to improve its academic curriculum and bolster alumni networks, Byler said the conferences and consultations will encourage more writing and research in these areas where CJP has special expertise.

Holding these new events in conjunction with SPI also will add to the learning environment there, as many participants in the consultations and conferences are expected to also enroll in SPI classes, Byler said. He credited CJP program director Jayne Docherty with the vision to launch the new series of events. — Andrew Jenner

Instead of returning for 91����Ƶ’s “homecoming” celebration – always held over one weekend each October – degree-holding alumni of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) often show up for its annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI).

And those SPI alumni who aren’t aiming to earn a degree? Some of them just keep coming back year after year – almost as an educational vacation – or they send their colleagues and friends to SPI.

Of the 2,800 SPI participants over the last 19 years, more than one in five have been repeat participants, taking courses during a second year or even multiple years of SPI. In that number must be counted almost all of CJP’s 398 master’s degree alumni, plus 91 graduate certificate holders. Some of their MA classmates are now SPI instructors, plus many of their professors have taught at SPI year after year.

Detouring six hours to reconnect

Among the first drop-bys to SPI 2014 were Florina Benoit and Ashok Gladston of India, both 2004 MA grads from CJP and now PhD-holders. They made a six-hour round-trip detour from a family-related stop in Baltimore, Maryland, to say “hello” to folks at SPI.

Gladston was last at 91����Ƶ in June 2011 when he gave a heart-wrenching talk at 91����Ƶ centering on women from a minority group in southern India who were being violently victimized by mobs from the surrounding majority group.

The two, both former Fulbright Scholars married to each other, happened to arrive on May 7 when Doreen Ruto of Kenya, a 2006 MA graduate, was the featured SPI “Frontier Luncheon” speaker, along with her colleague (and son) Richy Bikko, a 2011 BA graduate who majored in justice, peace and conflict studies.

Over that day, Gladston and Benoit interacted with a dozen professors, staffers and alumni whom they recalled from their studies at CJP 10 years ago.

When the day turned to evening and their borrowed car was found to have a non-working headlight, they lingered for activities very familiar to them –��a community “potluck” meal, followed by a cultural program led by SPI participants, and informal dancing. (They huddled with this writer for much of that time answering questions about their work in India – but more on that later.)

They then accepted the impromptu invitation of Margaret Foth, a retiree who has been a long-time liaison with CJP alumni, and slept in a guest room at the Foths’ home, adjacent to 91����Ƶ.

��“It was like we recalled from our time as graduate students,” says Benoit. “We felt like we were visiting our second home.”

In 2013, Gladstone and Benoit had been scheduled to teach an SPI course on the logistics of humanitarian aid – more specifically, on how such aid intersects with peacebuilding practices, including the “do no harm” principle – but, unfortunately, that year the number of people seeking such training was insufficient to hold the course.

Always more to learn

A third former Fulbright Scholar, Shoqi Abas Al-Maktary, MA ’07, took a break from his job as country director in Yemen for Search for Common Ground and spent May 15-23 taking the SPI course “Designing Peacebuilding Programs – From Conflict Assessment to Planning. ”

“I don’t think anyone in this field can afford to stop being a student,” says Al-Maktary, who holds a second master’s degree in security management from Middlesex University in the United Kingdom. “There is always more to know, more to explore with others in the field. And SPI – with its intensive courses – is a great place to do this.”

Thomas DeWolf of the United States just finished attending his fourth SPI in six years, with the course “Media for Societal Transformation.” He first came in 2008 where he explored Coming to the Table (explained in next paragraph). He returned for a restorative justice course in 2009, and then in 2012, received a scholarship to take “Healing the Wounds of History: Peacebuilding through Transformative Theater.”

DeWolf’s connection to SPI began with CJP’s sponsorship of Coming to the Table, an organization focused on addressing the enduring impact of the slavery era in the United States. DeWolf has played a leading role in this organization, which held its annual conference at 91����Ƶ this year, over a weekend between two sessions of SPI.

Seven times at SPI

A 76-year-old clinical psychologist from Argentina, Lilian Burlando, has an astonishing record of attendance at SPI, having attended about a third of all the years SPI has been held. From her home at the southern-most tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, Burlando has attended SPI seven times: in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. Often with her, also taking classes, have been members of her family of five children and 19 grandchildren. One of her daughters, Maria Karina Echazu, for instance, is a prosecuting attorney in Argentina who took a restorative justice course in 2007 and a practice course in 2011.

Burlando calls SPI “a refreshing experience,” citing interesting course topics, excellent professors and the sense of community. “To me,” she says, “SPI has been a fountain of intellectual and spiritual enrichment.”

Almost all the teachers at SPI – even those like Johonna McCants, who holds a PhD from the University of Maryland – have also been students at SPI at some point. McCants explains how she found her way to SPI:

In 2009, while finishing my doctoral dissertation, I began searching online for practical training in the issues I was writing about. I discovered CJP and SPI and quickly fell in love. I was attracted by the integration of theory and practice, the variety of courses, the diversity of participants, backgrounds of the instructors, and that the program was housed at a Christian university. I participated in Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) at SPI just a few weeks after receiving my PhD. The STAR experience, which was phenomenal, kept me coming back for more.

McCants brought along a first-timer to SPI 2014, Julian Turner. These two, who first met as teenagers, would be married in a month. But first Turner, who works at an infectious disease clinic in Washington D.C., soaked up the wisdom of Hizkias Assefa in “Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” while McCants co-taught with Carl Stauffer “Restorative Justice: The Promise, the Challenge.”

Loves the diverse people

From her base as a high school teacher in a public school in Washington D.C. – and with experience as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland – McCants says she is struck by the egalitarian learning community formed by SPI, where the instructors and participants respect and learn from each other.

Her favorite part about SPI?

Definitely, the people! I enjoy learning from people from different parts of the United States and countries all over the world, hearing their stories and developing new relationships. I also like reuniting and reconnecting with people I’ve met during previous times at SPI.

Discovering SPI on the internet, as McCants did, is not typical. More often, SPI participants are encouraged to attend by previous participants.

Libby Hoffman, president and founder of the Catalyst for Peace foundation, for example, attended SPI in 1996 and took another CJP course in 2000. This year she dispatched two rising leaders of Fambul Tok – an organization doing amazing work of promoting post-war reconciliation throughout Sierra Leone – to take two successive courses at SPI. Micheala Ashwood and Emmanuel Mansaray both took “Leading Healthy Organizations,” in addition to “Analysis – Understanding Conflict” and “Psychosocial Trauma,”
respectively.

Ten CJP master’s degree alumni had teaching roles at SPI 2014: Dr. Sam Gbaydee Doe, MA ’98; Dr. Barb Toews, �� MA ’00; Dr. Carl Stauffer, MA ’02; Elaine Zook Barge, MA ’03; Roxy Allen Kioko, MA ’07 (PhD candidate);��Paulette Moore, MA ’09 (PhD candidate); Jacqueline Roebuck Sakho, MA ’09 (PhD candidate); Caroline Borden, MA ’12; Soula Pefkaros, MA ’10 (PhD candidate); and Danielle Taylor, MA ’13. < — Bonnie Price Lofton

In recent years, the citizens of Sierra Leone have gathered in village compounds around bonfires, spoken openly of brutalities inflicted on them during their 11 years of civil war, and heard apologies by some of those who did the brutalizing.

To the amazement of growing numbers of observers from around the world,��the result has been forgiveness and reconciliation and rebuilding, village by village, on a scale never before achieved.

These heartfelt conversations have been nurtured under a program called Fambul Tok (Krio for “family talk”), led by John Caulker, a human rights activist in Sierra Leone.

Fambul Tok began in the summer and fall of 2007, when John Caulker received the backing of Libby Hoffman and her Maine-based foundation Catalyst for Peace to develop a grassroots answer to the high-level, highly expensive UN-backed Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone.

Caulker, who had lobbied for the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was deeply disappointed in how little it accomplished, after it spent more than $300 million on highly publicized trials of nine men. In contrast, Caulker wanted to help heal the lives of the average person in often-rural communities where neighbors looked suspiciously at neighbors, and even family members were divided by what some had done during wartime.

Hoffman caught the spirit of Caulker’s vision and worked with him – and with a few people at 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, where she had attended SPI 1996 and returned for a course in 2000 – to design core elements, objectives and operating principles for Fambul Tok. Amy Potter Czajkowski, MA ’02, and Robert Roche, MA ’08, were program officers for Fambul Tok during its formative stages.

On June 11, 2013, Caulker was the Frontier Luncheon speaker at SPI. He treated his audience to an inspiring account of how a small ripple can, when patiently fanned, grow into a rising tide across the nation.

At SPI 2014, two rising leaders in Fambul Tok – women’s leader Michaela Ashwood and former pastor Emmanuel Mansaray – studied conflict analysis, psychosocial trauma, and organizational leadership. They are being prepared to step up as Caulker transitions from leading Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone to playing a wider peacebuilding role under the auspices of the African Union.

“From the very word go, we’ve made Fambul Tok a community-owned and community-led process,” said Ashwood, who has worked with Caulker for seven years. “We only support. They’ve heard about Fambul Tok on the radio, so they already know something about us. We may provide a bag of rice [for the community gathering], but they provide the goat or fish and fresh vegetables.”

Mansarary added, “We work at the level of the man in the village whose neighbor might have been the one who burned down his house, amputated his son and raped his wife.”

Everyone is longing for the opportunity to tell their stories, said Mansaray. “The victims have stories they want to tell, and so do the perpetrators,” who often talk of being drugged or otherwise forced to do horrible things when they ask for forgiveness.

Fambul Tok now has groups of women, called Peace Mothers (led by Ashwood), who are active in election campaigns and in schools, doing education and dousing sparks of conflicts before they become raging fires. This represents a change in Sierra Leone’s culture, where traditionally women had no voice.

Future plans include spreading peacebuilding principles through Sierra Leone’s schools to address violence that seems to be growing among the young – who lack a memory of the horrific civil war endured by their elders – and to lay the groundwork for enduring cooperation in future generations.

In 2013-14 Fambul Tok was operating in six out of the country’s 14 districts. In each of the six districts they have an office staffed by four, plus a security person. At its national headquarters there are 18 staffers. Catalyst for Peace remains the main funder for Fambul Tok, including funding Ashwood’s and Mansaray’s studies at SPI 2014. ��

When volunteers were solicited, nobody immediately stepped forward. It was a tough request: tell a painful personal story before an audience of maybe 40, many of them strangers to each other, and watch seven people trained in playback theater re-tell it through an impromptu performance.

Yet Muhammad Afdillah – a visiting scholar with 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding –��chose this moment, just a week before he returned to his home in Indonesia, to begin to heal himself. He recounted a story involving physical and psychological injury.

Then he watched as Inside Out, 91����Ƶ’s resident playback theater troupe, improvised a tense narrative of violence, friendship, loss, physical and emotional scarring, and finally, hope of reconciliation. Afdillah wasn’t the only watcher who had wet eyes by the end.

It may have helped that other storytellers had shared before – some with halting speech and others interspersing laughter with words – of surviving cancer, of stitching a wedding dress for a beloved stepdaughter, of making friends and enduring goodbyes.

It may have helped that he knew some of the actors – all 91����Ƶ students, faculty or graduates –��and even some of the audience, most of whom were participating in SPI 2014, often in the Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience (STAR) training.

“That might have helped,” Afdillah said later. “But it was for me. It was the right time. I was trembling, but my heart was telling me this.”

Though Inside Out has “played back” stories from a variety of audiences, including sexual abuse survivors and college students recently returned from cross-cultural experiences, the May 21, 2014, event was the first time the troupe hosted a storytelling session for this particular group.

Playback theater helps its participants understand and reflect upon their experiences, says theater professor Heidi Winters Vogel, who co-founded Inside Out in 2011 with Roger Foster, MA ’12. “That simple act of sharing stories and seeing them played back, seeing it out there, allows processing. It is harder to work for healing when it’s all in your head. In addition, there’s a tremendous connection between people in the audience who see that story and have a similar experience to share.”

Making those connections is the role of an actor called the conductor, who facilitates the storytelling of a volunteer audience member, gathers more information through questions, and then helps to “shape” the story before turning it over to the actors with the invitation, “Let’s watch.”

��“This is applied theater,” Vogel said, “not theater for entertainment. It’s theater for social justice and understanding. A lot of people don’t understand playback theater until they attend a storytelling session. When they see it, they realize the possibilities.”

Afdillah had no idea of its life-changing potential when he was invited by a fellow SPI participant to attend the performance. “I don’t really like theater,” he said with a laugh later.

A faculty member at Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Sunan Ampel in Indonesia, Afdillah researches and lectures on socio-religious conflict and politics. He collects data, supervises graduate students, collaborates with other peacebuilders and policy-makers, and admits that, like many others in his field, he rarely takes the time for himself.

For the last six months on campus, during spring semester classes and courses at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, Afdillah began to “meditate and think about my life,” he said. “In my work, I tell people to deal with their trauma, to let it go. But I have my own trauma, my own problems. At the end, watching the story was almost the same as what I experienced, the tragedy. I feel the pain. I don’t know how this story ends, but this is starting to be ready for an ending.”

Program director Jayne Docherty says SPI is committed to the growing use and exploration of applied theater tools like playback theater to situations of conflict, violence and trauma. Classes in playback theater have been offered at several sessions of SPI.
— Lauren Jefferson

Among the 184 people who studied at SPI 2014 were eight Kenyan women in the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program (WPLP). Ranging in age from 23 to 51, the women work for a variety of NGOs or in academia across Kenya. Now in its third year, the WPLP admits students in cohorts from specific areas of the world to develop peacebuilding and leadership skills over an 18-month period, culminating in a graduate certificate from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. CJP works with partner organizations to identify candidates, and matches students with mentors. Previous cohorts have come from Somaliland, Liberia and the South Pacific. This is the story of one of the eight women in the current cohort.

Though it sits just outside Waji, a major town in Kenya’s North Eastern Province, the small village of Leheley has yet to join the electrical grid. The people who live there are poor and therefore marginalized. Running power lines there simply isn’t a priority to those in charge.

“My people support the leaders 100%, but their support is not reciprocated with any kind of development in the village,” says Shamsa Omar, who grew up in Leheley.

Education was Omar’s springboard out of Leheley and on to bigger ambitions. After earning top-notch grades at Wajir Girls Secondary School, she won a scholarship from a Kenyan bank to study at Moi University. And while still finishing up a BA in sociology, Omar launched a campaign to represent the Lagboghol South ward on the Wajir County Council, determined to let Leheley be ignored no longer.

She ran an enthusiastic campaign and says she’d drummed up widespread support until, just days before the March 2013 election, things came to a screeching halt. The elders in the community decided that Omar shouldn’t run, and that was that. What the elders say goes, even when you’re a young, status quo-bucking political candidate like Omar.

“I was very discouraged because I had the support of the people,” says Omar, now 23 years old.

Omar returned to the university to finish her degree and, since September 2013, has been working for the Center for Victims of Torture, an American NGO based in St. Paul, Minnesota. She now works as a psychosocial counselor in northeastern Kenya’s Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, home to hundreds of thousands who have fled conflicts in countries all over East Africa. In the camp, Omar leads individual and group therapy for victims of torture and gender-based violence – intense and sometimes distressing work that has caused nightmares.

It has also exposed her to an inspiring resilience that she sees in some of her clients. Before she began working as a counselor, Omar wasn’t convinced that sitting around and talking would do any good solving people’s problems. Now, she’s a believer.

She’s applying a resilience of her own to her goals for her home. After her run for office was cut disappointingly short, Omar realized that there are “many other ways” to lead. Accordingly, she founded the Wajir Young Women’s Association, through which she hopes to work with like-minded young women to improve the lives of women throughout the region. She also serves as a mentor to current recipients of the same scholarship that allowed her to get her undergraduate degree.

Omar says her experience so far in the WPLP has opened her mind, inspired and energized her – through the things she’s learned and her peers in the program.

“I cannot walk alone on this journey. I need so many people to help me out,” she says. “I have so many things in my mind. I have big dreams for my community.” — Andrew Jenner

Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, move over. Ditto for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. CJP has its own version of a “power couple” – but the two truly represent “power for suffering people.”

The man is 38-year-old Ashok Gladston, dean of 23 departments comprising 350 teachers at one of the most prestigious universities in India, Loyola College in Chennai. Based on assessments by India’s national accrediting agency and the media outlet India Today, Loyola-Chennai – founded in 1925 by the Jesuits (just eight years after 91����Ƶ opened) – ranks among the top three of 35,000 liberal arts colleges in India.

In a normal day, running 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Gladston says he meets with about 70 people, always maintaining an open-door policy. He supervises 160 post-graduate students, plus seven full-time doctoral students. His egalitarian philosophy: “There’s no time to hate, no time to hurt, only time to work and love.” He also believes in practicing what one teaches – in getting his hands dirty, as he puts it.

The woman is Florina Benoit, chief zonal officer (CZO) for Churches Auxiliary for Social Action (CASA), for which she oversees CASA’s work in the four southern states of India, comprising 50 staffers in 10 offices addressing needs in 1,000 villages, encompassing 7 to 10 million people. At age 40, she is the youngest CZO ever employed by CASA.

“CASA’s focus is on poverty alleviation and political awareness and empowerment of the oppressed classes, particularly the dalits, tribals, women and backward castes,” Benoit says. She is on the road about two-thirds of the month. CASA also organizes emergency and disaster responses, often being the first organization to step in after crises like major floods and landslides.

Gladston and Benoit knew each other before coming to CJP, but they were not married and had no marriage plans when each applied separately for a Fulbright scholarship to study conflict transformation at CJP. That each beat countless competitors to be Fulbright Scholars testifies to their respective abilities and accomplishments. Just before arriving at CJP in the fall of 2002, they married and became a couple of dynamos for the next two years in Harrisonburg.

They presented street theater to CJP and embraced additional techniques offered by playback theater. They were in the first group to do fundraising field trips on behalf of CJP to Pennsylvania, where they helped cook an Indian banquet and where they posed in Amish garb borrowed at an Amish-themed museum. They could be counted on to attend any peace-themed talks or conferences on 91����Ƶ’s schedule. They did everything required for academic excellence, and then more.

As soon as they returned to southern India, they plunged into advocating for, and doing trainings with, suffering minority groups in their own region around Chennai as well as in nearby Sri Lanka. Applying themselves seven days a week, sunup to bedtime, they both also managed to earn PhDs – he in social work from Loyola and she in social work from Osmania University in Hyderabad, India.

Ten highlights from their lives since 2004:

1. Benoit and Gladston arrived back in southern India on January 1, 2005, soon after an undersea earthquake that precipitated a tsunami that ranks as one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. By the following day, Gladston was organizing a state-level survey to be conducted by 1,500 social work students of the affected areas.

2. Over the next several years, both Gladston and Benoit worked frequently in devastated regions of Sri Lanka and in refugee camps in India among people who had fled from both the tsunami and civil war in Sri Lanka. They published results of studies of social needs gleaned from 178 sites, while simultaneously doing hands-on trainings, usually under the auspices of Organization for Eelam Refugee Rehabilitation.

3. Their trainings covered conflict transformation, dialogue for peacebuilding, trauma resiliency, community development, relief and rehabilitation, advocacy for justice, and women’s empowerment. Their system was to train trainers – dozens at a time – to prepare the trainers to go further into the field and cover as many regions as possible, training hundreds of field staff. The field staff then extended the trainings to the grassroots. Thus Gladston and Benoit were able to reach tens of thousands of affected people with information and skills helpful for improving their situations. (Part of this work was funded by Mennonite Central Committee.)

4. Meanwhile both held “day jobs” –��Gladston as a senior faculty member in social work at Loyola College-Chennai, Benoit as the associate director in charge of practice at the Henry Martyn Institute: International Center for Research, Interfaith Relations and Reconciliation.

5. For three years, they were based at institutions 400 miles apart, until Benoit finished her PhD in 2008 in Hyderabad and resigned from the Henry Martyn Institute to return to Chennai. (At the time, both posted online remarks about missing each other when apart and relishing being in the same location again as a happily married couple.)

6. In early 2009, as the Sri Lankan government grimly and bloodily brought the rebel force known as LTTE to its knees, Gladston and Benoit were alarmed at the situation of 250,000 people trapped with the LTTE. “The government in the name of surgical strikes is shelling the civilians,” wrote Gladston. “There are no words to describe the situation of the civilians,” adding: “We keep crying out loud so that the world’s attention will be attracted.”

7. When the war was officially over, the suffering was not. For the last five years the twosome has devoted their weekends and vacations to volunteer work among the displaced peoples. Early in their work, Gladston wrote:

I am filled with a lot of uncertainties and concerns: All the materials are in English and the training is in Tamil. How do I contextualize what I learned? How do I adapt the training methods to this situation? How do I include the indigenous ideas and methods of conflict transformation? I am braving the effort of going ahead with the workshop and will learn lessons from it. I hope to consider this as an extension of CJP.

8. In addition to the manuals and printed training materials typical of peacebuilding workshops, Benoit and Gladston frequently organize experiential activities designed to reduce conflict – interactive dramas, sports across conflict lines, cooperatively run preschools, and shared activities like basketmaking and gardening. In one mixed Tamil-Sinhalese village in Sri Lanka where the couple had been working, says Gladston, Sinhalese families hid their newly made Tamil friends when government forces came searching for Tamils to arrest.

9. Responding to widespread requests for help – especially by fellow CJP alumni – both Benoit and Gladston have done consultations in three dozen other countries in the last 10 years.

10. In the spirit of SPI, Benoit used to run an annual peacebuilding workshop at the end of October and beginning of November at the Henry Martyn Institute.
— Bonnie Price Lofton

Professor Hizkias Assefa responds here to questions about his successful efforts as a mediator to bring peace in early May 2014 to a large swath of South Sudan. This is an abridged version of an interview published by 91����Ƶ News Service (emu.edu/news) on June 17, 2014.

91����Ƶ: In brief, what was the result of the seven months of mediations you just finished facilitating between representatives of the Government of the Republic of South Sudan and the South Sudan Democratic Movement/Army?

Assefa: The two parties signed a comprehensive peace accord on May 9, 2014. This means that the war that has involved thousands of armed combatants and has killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians over the past four years has come to an end.

91����Ƶ: But I keep reading about continued warfare, with massive numbers of displaced peoples, in South Sudan.

Assefa: There have been two wars going on simultaneously in South Sudan lately. One is the outburst of violence that started on December 15, 2013, between the followers of President Salva Kirr of South Sudan and the followers of his former vice-president, Riek Machar. The conflict started over disagreement on governance issues but degenerated into a war between the two majority ethnic groups, the Dinka and Nuer.

91����Ƶ: I believe that is the one I have been hearing about in the U.S. media. Could you say more about the other [less-known] war?

Assefa: The central Government of South Sudan has been fighting an insurgency group called the South Sudan Democratic Movement/Army. The SSDM/A fighters are based in the largest state of South Sudan, Jonglei, and are primarily composed of the Murle, Anuak and other small ethnic groups. . . Their grievances have revolved around ethnic marginalization and discrimination, as well as massive underdevelopment of their area. In other words, they have not benefited from the fruits of independence like some other major ethnic groups.

91����Ƶ: How did you come to be involved in the peace talks?

Assefa: On different occasions the insurgents, led by General David Yau Yau, called for mediation by the African Union, UN and USA. But, in the end, it was the Church Leaders Peace Initiative in South Sudan, with the support of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and a Dutch organization called Pax, that contacted me to act as mediator.

91����Ƶ: When did talks formally begin?

Assefa: Contacts with the leadership of both sides had started in October 2013 and aimed at developing trust, softening the ground, and developing a shared understanding for the mediation process. . .�� After very intensive negotiations, the first phase of the mediation culminated in the signature of a Cease Fire and Cessation of Hostilities Agreement on January 30, 2014.

91����Ƶ: You referred to an agreement signed on May 9. How is it different from the earlier agreement signed in January?

Assefa: Since February, I’ve been working with the negotiating teams of both parties to address the underlying political, economic, socio-cultural as well as military and security issues underlying the conflict so that the ceasefire can be transformed into durable peace. The comprehensive peace accord signed on May 9, 2014, includes . . . six provisions [aiming to remedy the root causes of the conflict].

Hizkias Assefa’s role in this peace process was highlighted by Bishop Paride Taban, chair of the Church Leaders Peace Initiative in South Sudan, in a June 2, 2014, letter to the Dutch organization that funded the mediation process. “I would also like to express my deep gratitude for the mediation services of Professor Hizkias Assefa,” wrote Taban. “It was a privilege and honor for us to work with a man of his professional caliber and personal integrity – and indeed he was instrumental in ensuring the success of these negotiations, and thus the successful conclusion to this conflict. We would not have succeeded without him.”

Joseph Luciani, MA ’13, has spent the last year leading a restorative justice pilot program in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school system in the United States.

Luciani coaches all the teachers at one Los Angeles school, Augustus Hawkins High School (AHHS), enabling them to run community-building circles with their students at least once per week. He also facilitates circle processes to address disciplinary matters at the school, providing an alternative to traditional methods like suspension. In a low-income neighborhood in South Los Angeles, AHHS students – about 70% Latino and 30% African American – are often dealing with the effects of domestic violence, gangs and poverty in their lives. (Luciani is employed by the California Conference for Equality and Justice, which runs the pilot program at AHHS.)

One goal for the restorative justice program at the school is to interrupt the “school-to-prison” pipeline. Luciani points to data showing that students who are suspended are more likely to drop out of school and become involved with crime. By using restorative justice principles as an alternative method to deal with disciplinary problems, Luciani and his colleagues aim to keep students in school as much as possible, heading off the long-term negative consequences that suspension can set in motion.

According to a preliminary analysis of the program, 124 circle processes involving 1,144 participants were held at the school between September 2013 and March 2014. That total includes 48 community-building circles and 76 conflict and healing circles. Anecdotal evidence from teachers, Luciani says, shows that the community-building circle processes have helped create better learning environments for students.

“Everybody really bought into the process because they saw the transformation that restorative justice was bringing,” said Luciani.

Circles are also becoming a part of the school’s culture, and have even been initiated by students who become aware of conflict.

“The great thing is that it becomes natural,” says Luciani. “If something is happening, it becomes the response: ‘Let’s have a circle.’”

The restorative justice pilot program at AHHS is an early step toward an ambitious goal set by the Los Angeles Unified School District: to implement restorative justice programs across the district by 2020.

Deborah Brandy, school operations coordinator for the district, said that implementation will begin with restorative justice training at all the division’s hundreds of schools. Central office staff will then provide ongoing support to teachers using circle processes and other restorative practices now being put to use by Luciani and his colleagues at AHHS. Several other schools have also begun similar pilot programs.

“The schools that have begun implementing the restorative practices … have seen a difference in the behavior of the students, in terms of feeling more comfortable communicating with peers and with adults,” Brandy said. “If there is a need or an issue, they feel comfortable coming to an adult to discuss it prior to taking action on their own.

“Those skills are critical for helping students become more successful in schools, as well as in society,” she added.

Luciani applauds the district’s commitment to restorative justice, but cautions that it will need significant investment to succeed. Suspending a student is an easy, five-minute process, he says. Facilitating a circle process can take hours, and requires having qualified facilitators already in place. ��— Andrew Jenner