Weeks of xenophobic attacks in spring 2015 on migrants living in South Africa deeply affected Mulanda Jimmy Juma, though he was not threatened personally. Not this time.^[1]

Juma is a migrant to South Africa from elsewhere on the continent, like many of those attacked in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra and in Durban in March and April. In the 1990s, Juma had fled thousands of miles from his violence-torn home country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to arrive in South Africa.

But this time, as a trained and experienced peacebuilder, Juma knew some methods to address the violence rather than to simply flee from it.

First, after the attacks began, Juma phoned the prime minister of the Zulu kingdom, whom Juma calls “Inyosi,” and asked him to urge the Zulu king to publicly call for an end to the attacks on foreigners. Juma had been a guest at the king’s recent wedding. Moreover, Juma was friends with Inyosi, who had participated in the 2014 session of the Africa Peacebuilding Institute alongside Juma. Being an advisor to the king, Inyosi acted upon Juma’s phone call.

Second, Juma headed to the violence-affected areas of Johannesburg to “get first-hand information and see what was going on.” He then wrote a widely disseminated opinion piece where he called for a country-wide education campaign on how South Africans have benefited from their ties to other Africans. He also called for South Africa to lead the way in addressing factors underlying huge refugee populations across the continent and the victimization of refugees.

A month after the attacks had subsided, Juma held a day-long training workshop on “practical responses to xenophobia” at St. Augustine College in Johannesburg. Juma came with his own successful response nine years earlier to xenophobia in Lusaka, Zambia.

In that year (2006), after increasingly vicious actions against migrant refugees in Lusaka, Juma and two others associated with the Dag HammarskjÖld Peace Centre at the Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation reached out to Zambians living alongside refugees and persuaded some of them to sit with representative refugees to “talk about issues affecting the community as a whole,” said Juma.

The Zambians spoke of feeling displaced and disrespected by those who had moved in. “They’re boastful, they don’t respect our culture, they’re crooks, they bring disease,” were some of the comments Juma and his co-facilitators heard.

From the refugees, they heard that Zambians “behave like whites and are not welcoming, treating us like crooks.”

The peace facilitators led the two groups to listen to each other’s stories and then, eventually, to do some activities together, such as making and sharing peanut butter. The effort was hugely successful – destructive conflicts subsided in that community. The group grew from 10 people to 20. In the group were some “ring leaders,” who went and shared what they had learned and experienced with their followers. “In an African context, when you are able to convince the leaders and when those leaders speak, people listen,” said Juma.

Peace Clubs

One Zambian, a participant in the original group, was a schoolteacher who took the idea of facilitated storytelling and shared activities into his high school, where the initiative was called the “Peace Club.”

Peace clubs have now spread to 40 schools in Lusaka and adjacent Livingstone Province and are in schools in other countries, including South Africa, South Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya, Mozambique, Botswana and Uganda. “In our experience, the peace club children grow to become the leaders in their schools,” Juma said. Funding from Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) has permitted the clubs to develop a curriculum, train adult mentors, and promote themselves.

At the 2014 session of the Africa Peacebuilding Institute (API), three peace club mentors – Issa Sadi of Zambia, Zamani Ndlovu of Zimbabwe, and Joan Alty, who works for MCC in South Africa – led a popular five-day module on how to set up and run peace clubs, including how to attract a broad spectrum of students and address bullying. It was the fourth consecutive year that API offered this module, preparing a total of 102 people to be trainers in their own contexts.

The 2015 session of API (its 15th consecutive year) is expected to attract nearly 50 participants representing nearly 20 nationalities (mostly from Africa) for intensive educational modules on seven topics, including “Introduction to Conflict Transformation,” taught explicitly from an African perspective, and “Trauma Awareness, Healing and Reconciliation,” offering skills that can be applied immediately.

Juma has led API since 2011. When Juma first attended API in 2002 (after meeting Carl Stauffer, MA ’02, then a MCC worker who led API), most of its facilitators were still coming from North America, usually from 91����Ƶ. Founded in 2000 by Stauffer and other MCC workers from the U.S. and Canada, API was initially held annually at the Mindola Ecumenical Foundation��in Kitwe, a city in northern Zambia that is not readily accessible for travelers from other countries. Zambia also required “study visas” that added to participants’ costs. As the leadership of API gradually shifted to experienced peacebuilders from various parts of Africa, they began to ponder where to locate API to make it more sustainable.

“We wanted to ensure API’s future stability, ideally housed in an institution that would ‘own’ it,” said Juma. “We needed access to conference rooms, housing and catering [food].” The organizers also hoped to attract some participants who could pay for their own studies, instead of almost all participants being subsidized by MCC, limiting API’s potential size and reach.

Shifting to Johannesburg

South Africa’s relatively stable economy, inspiring history of overturning the apartheid regime, and extensive airline, train and bus services – plus the strong interest of St. Augustine College in Johannesburg to host API – all factored into API’s move from Kitwe to Johannesburg in 2013. The cost of API remained modest in 2014 – $400 (U.S.) for five days of training, all meals and six nights’ accommodation.

“API is really a no-brainer for us,” said Nicholas Rowe, St. Augustine’s academic dean and acting president, who taught at API when it was in Zambia in 2006 and 2007. “API is the perfect fit for St. Augustine.” As a Catholic-founded college (the only one in South Africa), its mission is to promote “ethical leadership, dignity of the human person and the common good.”

At St. Augustine, Rowe and Juma started a BA (honors) program in peace studies in 2014-15, with view of adding degree programs in peace studies that will eventually go through the doctoral level. Rowe said they hope to retain the practice-based ethos of API.

API has close links with a number of other peacebuilding institutes in Africa. The Great Lakes Peacebuilding Institute in Burundi was started in 2004 by alumni of API, as was the Reconcile Peace Institute in South Sudan in 2009.^[2] Juma shaped the curricula for both institutes.

Violence against migrants

Looking at the South African context in the spring of 2015, overt violence erupted in areas where unemployment is particularly high (up to 80% unemployed or underemployed, according to some statisticians) and street-crime is rampant. As Juma knows from experience, it doesn’t take much for frustrated people (particularly male young adults) to seek scapegoats, especially if someone in a leadership position gives them an excuse to do so. On March 20, the Zulu monarch in South Africa, Goodwill Zwelithini, criticized foreign workers, using these words, according to Al Jazeera: “Let us pop our head lice,” he said. “We must remove ticks and place them outside in the sun. We ask foreign nationals to pack their belongings and be sent back.”

Zwelithini later said his words were taken out of context and mistranslated, but within days South Africans in impoverished communities were attacking stores and street stands owned by those they perceived as foreigners, accusing them of taking jobs away from South Africans and engaging in criminal activities.

Sandra Ngwanya, a chicken seller from Zimbabwe living in Alexandra, said her neighbors told her (as reported on the Pan-African News Wire): ‘’We are going to go door to door, taking your stuff and beating you. So we want you to go back to your country.’’ Though she was married to a South African miner, away on a job site outside Johannesburg, and had lived in South Africa since 2006, she fled with thousands of others to one of a half-dozen camps run by a disaster-response NGO.

This violence echoed a similar period in 2008, when anti-immigrant riots in South Africa took the lives of about 60 people. In both situations, church and government leaders pleaded for restraint and tolerance.

Lessons to be drawn

Pondering the reasons for the violence, Juma pointed to structural problems in South Africa. “The big gap between the rich and the poor doesn’t really allow South Africa to heal from the past. Poverty is one of the major sources of violence in this country. The concept of reconciliation needs to be stretched to cover the empowerment of the weak and the poor, especially with improved education.”

Juma’s pastor – who is also an API advisor and an alumnus of SPI 2010 – is Simon Lerefolo, whose “His People Church” has grown from 25 people a decade ago to 3,000 people in his mixed-race, mixed-income congregation in Johannesburg.

Lerefolo, Juma and Stauffer all firmly believe and teach that if personal relationships are formed, if people from all walks of life come to view each other as brothers and sisters under God – or at least as something other than enemies – they will naturally turn their attention to mutually solving destructive structural issues. This is API’s underlying philosophy.

These men point to the long, mostly unknown history of quiet meetings that helped end the apartheid regime.^[3] The famous talks are those involving Nelson Mandela in his final year as a prisoner in 1989-90. But, actually, church and other civil society organizations had been facilitating meetings since the early 1980s between representatives of Mandela’s African National Congress (labeled by the United States and Britain as a terrorist group in those days) and leading Afrikaners (including those in the white-supremacy ruling party, the National Party). These meetings were often held outside of South Africa. By the count of one historian, there were 167 meetings held in foreign venues from 1983 to 2000.^[4]

H.W. van der Merwe, an Afrikaner raised in the Dutch Reformed Church who became a Quaker as an adult, is an excellent example of someone in civil society who worked assiduously, largely behind-the-scenes, to end apartheid. In 1968, he founded what became known as The Centre for Conflict Resolution at the University of Cape Town.^[5] By the 1980s, van der Merwe was traveling regularly to Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Sweden and England to meet in-exile African National Congress (ANC) leaders to assess their openness to talking with those opposing them.

In 1984, for example, van der Merwe began meeting with members of the ANC executive committee in Lusaka, Zambia, leading to meetings between them and Afrikaner newspaper editors, according to his memoir, Peacemaking in South Africa: A Life in Conflict Resolution. Van der Merwe also met Mandela in prison that year, four years before secret talks began between Mandela and representatives of the ruling regime.

“Well over 1,200 diverse South Africans…went on an outward mission to enter dialogue with the ANC in exile in a search to overcome the escalating conflict inside South Africa,” wrote Michael Savage in his online chronology of the meetings.^[6]

These “diverse South Africans” included business people, students and academics from universities, lawyers, women’s and writers’ groups, soccer and rugby associations, and charitable foundations.

In those meetings on foreign soil, South Africans of all shades came to know each other as humans – seeking to put aside differences, fears and bitterness in order to find ways to make peace with each other. In some cases, they engaged in a kind of dress rehearsal for the future formal negotiations.

Inside the country, “church leaders quietly facilitated retreat gatherings for the three years of national peace talks [1991-94], bringing together public leaders from all political parties,” said Carl Stauffer. “These interactions were strictly for the purposes of personal storytelling and relationship-building across all political divides.

“Kept out of the glaring lights of the media, many of us believe these behind-the-scenes encounters had a powerful staying effect in keeping the otherwise divisive peace negotiations from splintering into civil war,” he added.

Now that API is in South Africa, Juma hopes to gather these lessons into a practical pedagogy that can be applied more widely. In essence, API is trying to live out Nelson Mandela’s well-known saying, “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”

Juma’s journey to peacebuilding

Mulanda Jimmy Juma knows what it’s like to be attacked, to hide and to flee, as have hundreds of thousands of fellow migrants in the face of possible death across Africa.

Juma’s father, Juma Lubambo M’smbya III, was a respected, enlightened chief of a Congolese village within a region that was a colony of Belgium until independence in 1960. The region then became part of the “République du Congo,” renamed “Zaire” (1971 to 1997), and now named the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

For generations – long, long before Juma’s birth in 1973 – armed militias, rebels and soldiers of various stripes have swept through his family’s home region on the eastern border of Congo near Burundi. Sometimes these troops belonged to whatever entity was functioning as a government at the time, usually a dictatorship. Oftentimes, the militias and rebels were proxies of neighboring countries – Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Angola – seeking to control Congo’s rich resources.

Juma recalls three brushes with genocide at the hands of one of these armed groups in his home country.

His first was when he was 4 years old, walking with his 6-year-old sister to visit an uncle in a neighboring village. “We reached a place where rebels used to kill people, and we saw government soldiers coming on a big military vehicle.

“When the vehicle stopped, we ran toward the lake and hid under a rock. They came looking for us. They walked all over the rocks calling us ‘insects’ in Lingala and saying, ‘If we see them, we’ll kill them.’

“We were hunched over with our arms crossed, and we tried to stop breathing. They looked for almost an hour, but there were many rocks.

“We heard their vehicle going away, but we waited and waited and waited almost another hour, until it was getting dark. Then we ran back home.

“As children, it was really tough. There were many other smaller events when the rebels came and we’d go hide in the bush and they would take our chickens and cattle. Whether rebels or government soldiers, they took whatever they wanted. That’s the kind of environment we grew up in.”

The violence rendered Juma unable to start school until age 9, and then he did so as a child sponsored by a U.S. nonprofit, International Compassion.

In 1996, when Juma was a university student doing a development internship in a small town, he was coming out of his aunt’s house on a Sunday when he saw armed men on foot. (Later Juma realized these were Tutsi rebels backed by Burundi and Rwanda on a quest to overthrow the Mobutu regime.)

“They started shooting randomly. I ran behind the house into the coffee trees, toward the lake. I found two uncles and one of my brothers and was going away with them, when I met a child I knew. His siblings were already killed. I picked him up and took him with me to where my uncles were hiding.

“When it was dark, we got into a small boat to cross to the other side of the lake. There were about 15 of us, two uncles, my brother, wives, kids. It was windy and we nearly drowned. We had to throw a lot of things into the water.”

Juma was not entirely successful at avoiding the rebels. Two of them found him and pointed their guns, ready to shoot. One screamed, “Who are you?”

Juma, who had the tall, slim appearance of a Tutsi, replied: “I’m the son of the chief of I’amba-Makobola Village.”

The rebels lowered their guns and said, “We know your family.”

Meanwhile (though Juma didn’t know this until later), both the government forces and rebels were decimating his home village – bombing, shooting, burning houses, and killing children by drowning them in rivers, cutting them, and disposing of them in toilets. Juma’s father and mother hid and survived, as did three of his brothers and two of his sisters. His youngest brother, age 6, was caught in the village and killed.

Two years after this, his elderly father was arrested – on charges of having a gun hidden in his toilet (it was planted, as explained later) – and was imprisoned and subjected to prolonged torture, along with other traditional chiefs. One of Juma’s sisters was raped, which caused her husband to reject her and their two children. She’s never since functioned normally.

Sponsored by MCC

This is the background to Juma’s desperate 2,500-mile journey in 1998 from the eastern border of the Congo south to Zambia. Going further, he arrived in South Africa in 1999 at age 26 and applied for refugee status. “I didn’t know where my father and mother were,” he said. “I was told by some people, ‘Your father was killed.’ I lived with that thought for almost four years.”

By 2000, Juma had landed IT work with a Catholic diocese and had helped the diocese develop a program for assisting a refugee community in Durban. That work led him to cross paths with MCC representative Suzanne Lind, who offered to help Juma study peace. Juma began writing to Carl Stauffer, then MCC’s regional peace advisor for southern Africa. Stauffer replied, “Yes, we will give you a scholarship to go to Zambia and you can join API in 2002.”

In those days, API’s trainings lasted two months, which meant Juma needed to stop working with the Catholic diocese in order to do the API trainings. It also meant he needed to ride in an airplane for the first time. After much prayer, Juma decided to accept the MCC scholarship to API.

The API trainings led to work with the Great Lakes Peacebuilding Institute in Burundi (which led to meeting the woman he would marry) and to this wonderful discovery: his father had survived the torture (though it had claimed the lives of other chiefs) and was living again with his mother in their home village.

In 2004, Juma had another miraculous experience: a cousin invited him to meet the soldier who had planted the gun in the toilet to frame his father. “He was from my tribe, but he was acting as a kind of spy when he did this. He apologized for what he did. He said he was misled.”

Juma forgave him. He could not do otherwise, after all the trainings and teachings he had done on reconciliation and on reintegrating ex-soldiers into their home communities.

“Our culture has resources that we don’t value enough. We have love and support from our family members and from the community in general. Despite all the bad things that have happened, there is always something positive that remains. People capitalize on the little that remains. That is how they cope. There is usually hope within them. They say, ‘I have to live because tomorrow will come, and it will be better.’”

��

Footnotes

1. Dr. Mulanda Jimmy Juma coordinates the Peace Studies Programme at St. Augustine College in Johannesburg, South Africa, and directs the Africa Peacebuilding Institute, an SPI-like initiative based at St. Augustine and funded by Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). Juma holds a PhD in politics, human rights and sustainability from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy and a master of commerce in peace studies and conflict resolution from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Previously, he coor- dinated the Dag Hammarskjöld Centre for Peace, Good Governance and Human Rights in Zambia. He also worked for MCC as its regional peace advisor for southern Africa from 2009 through 2012. In this last role, he followed Dr. Carl Stauffer, currently on the faculty of CJP and co-director��of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice, who was MCC’s regional peace advisor from 2000 to 2009. Juma and Stauffer are co-teaching “Justice in Transition: Restorative and Indigenous Applications in Post-war Contexts”��at SPI 2015.
2. These institutes receive funding from MCC, as well as from other faith-based��organizations. These institutes, plus the Nairobi Peace Institute (also��a beneficiary of MCC support), often use the same instructors rotationally.��CJP faculty who have taught or consulted at more than one peacebuilding��center in Africa are Barry Hart, Vernon Jantzi, Lisa Schirch and Carl��Stauffer. CJP alumni who have taught at more than one include: Babu��Ayindo of Kenya, MA ’98; Alfiado Zunguza of Mozambique, MA ’99;��Fidele Lumeya of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, MA ’00; Krista��Rigalo, MA ’00, of the United States; Gopar Tapkida of Nigeria, MA ’01;��Emmanuel Bombande of Ghana, MA ’02; and John Katunga Murhula of��Kenya, MA ’05. Two SPI alumni work with Reconcile, which is under the��New Sudan Council of Churches: Milcah Lalam and Dele Emmanuel.
3. Other factors that contributed to ending apartheid included international boycotts of South Africa that worsened its economy, and threats and fears of worsening internal violence leading to a nationwide bloodbath.
4. From .
5. Ron Kraybill, a founding faculty member of CJP, was the director of training at the Centre for Conflict Resolution from 1989 to 1995 (called the Centre for Intergroup Studies until 1991) in a supportive role to H.W. van der Merwe until the latter stepped down as executive director in 1992, fully��retiring in 1994.
6. See footnote #4.

Much of Sarajevo still looks battered by the sniper fire and artillery shelling of a quarter century ago, with gashes in the gray concrete of the multi-story apartment buildings and half-demolished homes behind some garden fences.

Yet the setting is stunning. Heavily forested hills, with five big mountaintops, hug the valley where Sarajevo nestles along the placid Miljacka River. This 600-year-old city, now the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), must have been a breathtaking location for the 1984 Winter Olympics.

For a first-time visitor from 91����Ƶ, it’s startling to realize that the hills lining Sarajevo – from which Bosnian-Serbian snipers and artillery terrorized Sarajevo for nearly four years in the early 1990s – are about as close to Sarajevo’s main street as 91����Ƶ’s hill is to Harrisonburg’s Main Street. The constant barrage from the nearby hills killed 11,500 and wounded 50,000, almost all trapped civilians, many of them children.

In less than four years, Sarajevo was pummeled from being a multi-ethnic European city – with a mosque, Catholic church, Orthodox church and synagogue sometimes within blocks of each other – to being a rubble-strewn place where much of the population had lost their homes.

Today, 20 years after the U.S-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement ended open warfare, Saravejo is again a gracious-feeling city where Bosnians emerge in the evenings and on weekends for korzo – taking a walk, stopping to chat with friends, lingering in a kafana, or coffeehouse. In the oldest part of the city – where most Ottoman-era homes and buildings have been restored – restaurants and bars are full. New hotels have opened.

In the words of the Lonely Planet, “In the 1990s Sarajevo was on the edge of annihilation. Today it’s a vibrant yet very human city, notable for its attractive contours and East-meets-West ambience.” Yet underneath the loveliness savored by a growing trickle of tourists is this reality:

“The trauma of survival [has] shifted from running away from guns during the war to the present situation of not having enough money to feed the family and send children to school,” wrote Amela Puljek-Shank, MA ’04, in a Peacebuilder Online article posted May 20, 2012.

Amela said that the underlying tensions in the region were not being addressed. They were smoldering. In her 2012 article, Amela added:

In the former Yugoslavia, with the exception of Slovenia, we live under the constant threat of potential armed conflict.^[1] This or that group wants to separate from this or that country. We justify the crimes committed in the region in the name of defense and out of fear. The politicians use this reality to get elected, stay in power and keep fear present, which increases mistrust and the inability to live together.

Through it all, I see the trans-generational transfer of trauma. My generation grew up hearing the stories of World War II’s horrors, and elements of these stories have been played in front of our eyes in these last wars in former Yugoslavia. As a society, we have successfully given a new generation our reservoirs of trauma and told them to carry it.

Little has changed in the years since Amela wrote this article, based on Peacebuilder interviews with a half-dozen people in Sarajevo in November 2014 including: Amela and her husband, Randy Puljek-Shank, MA ’99; a colleague of Amela’s, Tamara Šmidling; and human rights lawyer Nedim Kulenović. The four shared links with the Post-Yugoslav Peace Academy, which offered an annual 10-day training program modeled after 91����Ƶ’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute, from 2007 through the summer of 2012.

“We are still a deeply divided society,” said Kulenović, who was one of 60 participants in the 2012 Peace Academy, the most recent one held. The mix of ethnicities in the classroom – Bošniaks with Muslim roots, Croats with Roman Catholic roots, and Serbs with Orthodox Christian roots – surfaced tensions, but the Peace Academy provided safe space to wrestle healthily with the tensions, he said.

Too many schools in BiH are sharply separated along ethnic lines, Kulenović explained. Children from the same neighborhood may walk to different schools, or even different ends of the same divided building. They’ll study different historical narratives, which extoll their own ethnicity and degrade others. The same neighborhood may have multiple fire brigades, one for each ethnicity.

Discrimination of one group against another (the group in the majority shifts from district to district, or even town to town) is rampant, says Kulenović, who works for Vaša Prava BiH, a network of 30 human rights lawyers in nine offices, supported heavily by grants from funders outside of BiH, including the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the European Commission, and Open Society.^[2]

Kulenović and his fellow lawyers can and do file suits to address injustices. But he would like to see more being done to shift the underlying culture, the prevailing social attitudes, that give rise to injustices. And this is where the Peace Academy was positioned when it operated for those five years – preparing people to return to their home settings to do a conflict analysis and determine partnerships and pathways for detoxifying their society.

Donor issues

“Donor policies, I don’t understand them” – Tamara Šmidling was expressing her frustration at the end of a long Thursday on the heels of an exhausting trip to assess the needs of refugees in camps in the Middle East.^[3]

But Šmidling’s six words were ones her listener, a reporter with Peacebuilder magazine, had heard (and would hear) in many forms, many times, during six weeks at the close of 2014 while interviewing peace-committed people in nine countries, including Bosnia and Herzogovina.

These people were all intent on sweeping up the embers of violence in their societies and replacing these red-hot embers with skills and materials for building peace. Yet almost all the interviewees felt frustrated that they were more likely to see an infusion of donor dollars if their regions were hit suddenly with flooding and mudslides than if peacebuilders were making slow but steady progress toward enabling people to live cooperatively.

And that is what Šmidling was wearily referring to.

In mid-May 2014, for example, her country had declared a state of emergency when rain poured down so heavily in three days, it exceeded what would normally fall in three months. Dozens died, hundreds were injured, and hundreds of thousands had to evacuate their homes. Potable water ran short, electricity failed. Landslides exposed live landmines from the 1990s war.

Bosnian governmental systems were (and remain) largely non-functional, so families, neighbors and citizens helped each other to the best of their ability. But with half of the country unemployed, local resources were limited. Some disaster relief came from outside the country, including some provided by Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in North America.

Being an MCC staffer, Šmidling obviously is not opposed to disaster relief. Šmidling just wishes donor dollars flowed as readily and more steadily toward long-term projects, like the Peace Academy in Sarajevo that she helped launch in 2007.

The Peace Academy

MCC provided the seed money for this Peace Academy, which enabled it to run for 10 days, two summers in a row. Then the Balkan Trust for Democracy added some funding to MCC’s, and the Peace Academy functioned for another three summers (current CJP academic dean Jayne Docherty taught there in 2012). The Peace Academy averaged more than 150 applicants for the 60 seats available each session.

Participants contributed toward the cost of their classes, each running five full days at a time, based on their ability to pay, from 50 to 350 Euros per class, including room and board. In a region where unemployment runs at about 50% – and those lucky enough to have jobs earn low wages – some participants struggled to pay the minimum 50 Euros. The actual cost was 600 to 700 Euros per participant, so heavy subsidies were needed for each.

“We explored nationalism, mass violence, crimes, collective identities and their connection with past war crimes, nonviolent movements and gender issues,” said Šmidling, who previously was a trainer for the nonprofit Center for Nonviolent Action in BiH. “We were the one place in the region where scholars and activists could meet and find common ground.”

These topics drew heavily on the coursework that Šmidling did at 91����Ƶ’s 2005 Summer Peacebuilding Institute, where she studied the legacy of violence and addressing this legacy through transitional restorative justice; navigating cross-cultural differences; and the roles of ritual and the arts in peacebuilding.

In addition to Šmidling, two of the other six organizers of the Peace Academy were alumni of CJP – Amela and Randy Puljek-Shank both had master’s degrees in conflict transformation from CJP and were serving as co-representatives for Southeast Europe with Mennonite Central Committee from 2002 to 2011. (Amela’s home city is Jajce in western BiH, from which she fled when it came under siege in the early 1990s. See the following article titled “From war survivor to MCC administrator.”)

Online surveys of former participants found that the Peace Academy approach worked well. They ranked all of the classes highly. They appreciated coming to one place where people of all types – all ethnicities, both genders, a range of ages, urban and rural, scholars and laborers – could learn together and from each other, sharing meals and socializing outside of classes.

Learning occurred interactively, using the “elicitive” approach popularized by CJP’s founding director John Paul Lederach, said Amela. It was peace education with a clear purpose – to prepare people from all walks of life to work for lasting change. “Bringing practitioners from across the Balkans to learn theories of peacebuilding, alongside academics learning about practice – this brought fresh air to both groups,” she said.

By Year 3 of the Peace Academy, however, MCC was realizing it did not have the resources to indefinitely support the academy without other donor partners. And the Balkan Trust also said its support was short-term.

“For a year and a half, we sent out proposals – I don’t know how many – to dozens of addresses worldwide,” said Šmidling. But no foundation or international agency seemed interested in investing in long-term, grassroots peace trainings in the Balkans. The area was no longer making news with a civil war, as it was in the early 1990s. It was out of view in the global media, end of concern.

Then, in February 2014, thousands went into the streets of Bosnia-Herzogovina to protest the rocket-high unemployment rate, unpaid wages (from bankrupt factories), and grinding poverty. They burned dozens of government buildings, expressing fury at the political inertia in the country following the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995. The riots left about 300 injured.

Soon thereafter Šmidling heard donor agencies talk about the need to focus on social justice issues in her country. A few months later came the torrential rains and flooding, and donors helped with that crisis.

“Crises are what keeps them [foreign funders] alive and brings in their money,” Šmidling noted. “Instead of preventing crises– or equipping ourselves to better handle them peaceably – we have to wait for them to happen to get the world’s attention. It’s a vicious circle.”

Bottom up peacebuilding

The toxicity in the Balkans is understandable, given the recentness of brutal warfare affecting almost everyone in horrible ways.

The world is familiar with the Nazis’ genocidal acts in World War II, including in BiH (then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). But many may not realize that such acts occurred again when Serbs led by Slobodan Milošević began to systematically eliminate Bosnian Muslims.

Milošević’s militias forced repopulation of entire towns, putting men and boys in make-shift concentration camps. In some locations, Muslim males were killed en masse, with hundreds at a time buried in unmarked trenches. Between 20,000 and 50,000 women, mainly Muslim, were raped, according to some estimates.

The United States was roused to initiate military intervention when a Serb-launched mortar shell hit the Sarajevo marketplace, killing 68 and wounding nearly 200 on February 6, 1994.

By the time a U.S.-brokered peace accord was signed on December 14, 1995, over 104,000 people had been killed, according to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. More than 20,000 were missing and feared dead, while 2 million had become refugees and displaced.

The Dayton Agreement set up a multi-layered, confusingly diffuse array of governmental jurisdictions across the country, based on ethnicity. The result, by all accounts, is permanent paralysis. No government agency, for example, can organize a conference to develop a school curriculum that would cease the vilification of different ethnicities. No such country-wide agency exists.

To change the functioning of the various governmental bodies would require changing the constitution emerging from the Dayton Agreement, and the Parliament of the Federation Bosnia-Herzogovina is far too divided for such a task. So the country is frozen from the top down.

The Peace Academy was trying to work the other way – from the bottom up in building a viable, truly democratic state. Nedim Kulenović, the human rights lawyer, notes that a federal system can work in a multi-ethnic society (pointing to Switzerland’s multi-lingual nationhood), but it has to rest on a foundation of fiscal equalization and social harmony.

“We prefer to view religion as a resource for peace, not just a dividing factor,” says Randy Puljek-Shank, who is a PhD candidate at Radboud University in the Netherlands, researching “legitimacy and civic agency of civil society actors in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

Living in the region since the 1990s war (Randy was a Mennonite relief worker when he met Amela), Randy notes that peacebuilding needs to begin with where people are currently clustered, which is largely not in secular, multi-ethnic organizations. “Unfortunately, many international donors come with a strong bias – they are anti-religious and anti-ethnic, which is a problem getting funding for working here,” he says. “The organizations with the most local legitimacy are not organized along the lines that the donors would like to see.”

Randy also bemoans the short timeline of most big-time donors. “International donors tend to operate on a two-year time frame. This leads to formalism – to the appearance of doing something significant, such as holding a big conference. But if the conference makes no difference – maybe even occurs in a time frame when everything gets worse – the donors just shrug and say, ‘That’s not my problem.’”

Randy is of two minds. On one hand, he would love for some major donations, committed for at least five years, to ensure that the Peace Academy is on solid footing with a professional staff. On the other hand, he wonders if it would be better to forget about putting the Peace Academy on a professional basis and to “go back to our roots” and run it informally as activists, making it into a movement that strengthens ties among networked activists.

Amela didn’t agree that this second approach was doable. Interviewed on the heels of a draining 14-day trip to MCC programs in Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan with Šmidling, Amela reminded Randy that the two of them and Šmidling had exhausted themselves for more than five years, often working 14-hour days, trying to do their regular work, while trying to get the Peace Academy up and keep it running.

When the academy stopped functioning after the summer of 2012, “we lost continuity, we lost rapport with previous participants,” said Amela. “It is difficult to build a good reputation in peacebuilding – people [in the Balkans] are feeling disillusioned with the whole concept. We needed to keep it running for at least a decade – you just cannot stop.”

But how do you run something for a decade on volunteer labor in a country where everyone is scrambling to survive financially, where nobody has the time to step up and be the one in charge?

Randy conceded, “It’s hard to direct things collaboratively – ownership of the project becomes diffused. We [the six volunteer organizers, representing four organizations] divided up tasks among ourselves, and things weren’t getting done. We needed to step back and be a board and hire a director and a staff.”

But even doing that requires a major investment at the front end – as other peacebuilding institutes covered in this issue of Peacebuilder demonstrate – before an organization can find a way to be self-supporting.

Ongoing trauma

Everyone interviewed by Peacebuilder in BiH saw the need for widespread trauma healing of the type provided by CJP’s Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR), plus an understanding of identity issues. Amela summed up the situation in her 2012 article thus:

The longer we are here, the more we understand the significance of trauma education in the Balkans. We continue to take parts of STAR and adjust and adapt it for different aspects of our work. STAR is a cutting-edge approach to trauma across the world. It covers not only how you deal with it on a psychological level, but how it affects your entire being, including physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

Seeking better grounding in addressing the aftermath of war, the successors of Amela and Randy as MCC representatives for East Europe, Ruth Plett and Krystan Pawlikowski,^[4] did coursework at the 2014 Canadian School of Peacebuilding.^[5] Plett took STAR, instructed by CJP staffers Elaine Zook Barge and Vernon Janzti, while Pawlikowski took “Arts-Based Approaches to Community Peacebuilding.”

Interviewed in their MCC office in Sarajevo, Plett and Pawlikowski were backed by wall-mounted photos of about 20 projects and organizations that MCC has long supported in BiH, Croatia, Serbia, Kosova/o, Ukraine and Russia – ranging from a Muslim organization that runs soup kitchens, to a number of orphanages, to an interfaith choir that sings music from all of the singers’ religions.^[6]

Amela and Randy translated STAR materials from English and used them for trauma trainings in 2005 and 2006. They were partly motivated by “Franciscans [who] came to us and said that people were coming to their priests, feeling suicidal,” said Randy.

Today there is a trauma center that evolved from those trainings, located at the Bread of Saint Anthony, a Franciscan charity. These trauma materials and approaches also radiated out to MCC-supported partners, like a center that works with veterans from Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia.

“They offer a basic training where the veterans come from different sides of the conflict,” explained Amela in her 2012 article. “During these week-long trainings, they share about their experiences with war. It is very intense, but it offers a space to listen, empathize and break down prejudices.

“The organization stays in touch with these veterans and gives them the opportunity to be involved in peacebuilding activities, such as developing videos about the consequences of war, visiting each other’s front lines, and seeing each other’s memorials.”

Amela says she hopes the Peace Academy, which will reopen on a limited basis in 2015 and resume fully functioning in 2016 (if funding works out, as Šmidling fervently hopes), will focus on “developing resilience in our society” through understanding the multi-generational impact of trauma and how to break cycles of trauma. “Trauma can be not only a curse,” she says, “but a gift.”

Footnotes

1. Wars raged in Slovenia in 1991, in Croatia 1991-95, in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-95, and in Kosova/o 1999-2000.
2. According to its website (), Vaša Prava BiH’s “core activities are directed to the removal of deep-seated barriers to equality of opportunity and outcome, such as discriminatory laws, customs, practices and institutional processes.” It also entails concern with the development of the freedoms of all individuals, irrespective of gender; to choose outcomes they have reason to value.
3. Tamara Šmidling reports to the director of MCC’s Europe and Middle East office, Amela Puljek-Shank, MA ’04.
4. Both families – that of the Puljek-Shanks and of Plett and Pawlikowski and their respective children – live in Sarajevo. At the beginning of 2013. Amela became the supervisor of the East Europe office staffed by Plett and Pawlikowski, in addition to overseeing MCC’s work throughout the rest of Europe and across the Middle East.
5. This school was co-founded by CJP grad Jarem Sawatsky in 2009 and is covered at length in a separate Peacebuilder 2014-15 article.
6. The funding from MCC that each project receives ranges from $5,000 to��$20,000 (U.S.). MCC would have to bleed these other worthy projects to be the sole supporter of the Peace Academy, which Plett and Pawlikowski are understandably unwilling to recommend.

91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) has long enjoyed close ties to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). In fact, it exists in large part because of MCC.

In the late ’80s MCC staff in its Akron offices began discussing the need to train more peacebuilders by combining practical experience in conflict resolution with the field’s growing academic side, preferably in a faith-based setting.

Before long, John Paul Lederach (fresh from MCC work) and other members of the faculty and administration at 91����Ƶ were exploring the possibility. In 1994, the vision became reality with the establishment of CJP – then known as the Conflict Transformation Program. Most of the program’s early faculty and staff were former MCC volunteers themselves. Now, about half of CJP’s full-time employees have extensive MCC experience, including executive director Lynn Roth, who spent 30 years with MCC, most recently as director of its U.S. East Coast program.

As soon as CJP was up and running at the university, MCC began sending staff from its partner NGOs and church organizations in the Middle East to receive training at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI). To date, MCC has sponsored 60 representatives from its partner organizations in Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Israel to attend SPI.

“Sending trainees to SPI has been an integral part of MCC’s overall peacebuilding program in Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” says Alain Epp Weaver, a long-time MCC volunteer in the Middle East now serving as its director of strategic planning and learning.

A rehabilitation program at the East Jerusalem YMCA, as just one example, now uses conflict sensitivity principles in its work with Palestinians disabled by Israeli military attacks, after MCC sponsored its director to attend SPI, according to Epp Weaver. Several staffers from the Wi’am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem have also received training at SPI, during which they were able to gain broader background in peacebuilding theory and skills, as well as share insight with others on their experience using traditional Palestinian reconciliation processes.

And in Jordan, MCC has begun working with SPI-trained staff from a partner organization to sponsor peacebuilding workshops and training to Syrian refugees in Jordan, as well as to Jordanians living in communities that host a growing number of Syrians fleeing the war in their country. — AKJ

Grateful acknowledgement: In researching and reporting this issue of Peacebuilder, Sarah Adams, Daryl Byler (’79 91����Ƶ grad), Rachelle Friesen and Ed Nyce (’86 91����Ƶ grad) – MCC staff in Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and the U.S., respectively – were extremely helpful.

Who would come from half-way around the world to enroll in a program at 91����Ƶ that was so new, no college catalog listed it? Sam Gbaydee Doe did. From Liberia.

Initially, the plump squirrels running around campus dismayed him: They could be food for very hungry people in his war-torn homeland. He himself would have welcomed eating a scrap from a squirrel not long before.

Today [November 2010] Doe is a “development and reconciliation advisor” with the United Nations Development Programme in Sri Lanka, thanks in part to his master’s degree in conflict transformation from 91����Ƶ.

Herein we explore the lives and reflections of the first group of students to complete 91����Ƶ’s Conflict Transformation Program (CTP), now called graduate studies in conflict transformation under the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). In this series of articles, the acronyms “CTP” and “CJP” will appear somewhat interchangeably, depending on the interviewee and the years referenced.

CJP’s first MA students

CJP’s first non-credit students, 40 of them, enrolled in the 1994 Frontiers of International Peacebuilding, the earliest version of the Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

The first for-credit students were two US-born Mennonites: Jonathan Bartsch, raised in Pennsylvania, and Jim Hershberger, raised in Kansas. In the fall of 1994, both men began graduate classes, hoping that their MA in conflict transformation program would be accredited by the time they finished. (The program became accredited in the fall of 1996; the men graduated the following spring.) The first courses taken by Bartsch and Hershberger were done mainly as a combination of independent study and one-on-one sessions with the founding director of CJP, John Paul Lederach, and sociologist Vernon Jantzi, author of CJP’s first curriculum.

CJP’s first MA students came with extensive experience beyond the United States. Bartsch had studied at the University of Cairo and Birzeit University near Ramallah in Palestine and could speak Arabic. Hershberger had lived for eight years in Nicaragua as a Mennonite Central Committee volunteer and could speak Spanish.

In January of 1995, they were joined by [student whose name has been redacted for security purposes.]

Ron Kraybill, who helped shape the new program while finishing his PhD in religion in South Africa, also came aboard that January as CJP’s first professor hired exclusively for the program. Hizkias Assefa, an internationally renowned mediator based in Kenya, taught each summer from the beginning.

By the summer and fall of 1995, word had spread, mostly via circles frequented by Lederach, Jantzi and Kraybill. The program grew exponentially, enabling 91����Ƶ to hire Howard Zehr to teach restorative justice in 1996, soon followed by the hiring of two more faculty members, Lisa Schirch and Nancy Good.

Bartsch, Hershberger, and the third student were joined in the fall of 1995 by 12 more students, including four women. By the fall of 2000, six years after CJP first opened its doors, 37 people had earned master’s degrees or graduate certificates and more than 900 had attended its Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

CJP’s first several dozen graduate students now have had 10 to 13 years to gauge the impact of their studies on their lives and work. For the fall/winter 2010-11, Peacebuilder staff sought to contact each of the 37 to collect their reflections. We succeeded in locating 36 of them, 21 men and 15 women.

Without exception, the 36 felt positive about what they “got” from CJP. Many spoke about how their studies influenced their interpersonal relationships, including those within their immediate family. Those who came directly from conflict-ridden situations also spoke about the need for respite, for recharging their inner batteries.

Gilberto Peréz Jr., who completed a graduate certificate in 1999, recalls the ever-present physical violence in south Texas, where he grew up. Even in his family, it was no surprise when he hit his sister. Today, he and his wife Denise, a 1992 91����Ƶ alumna who majored in Spanish and elementary education, “work hard at having a non-violent household.” They use such techniques as paraphrasing what someone has said and reframing things.

Says Pérez: “My [12-year-old] daughter will stand there and tell her [younger] brother, ‘I’m mad at you.’ That’s not what I would have done when I was her age – I would have belted him.”

Babu Ayindo, MA ’98, says when he was growing up in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, he experienced violence every day of his life. He feels he carries the potential for violence within him, as he thinks most of us do. He and his wife Miriam have taught their children that reacting violently is a short-term act with long-term repercussions. Babu explains:

Momentarily it gives you a good feeling. You’re annoyed, so you kick a chair, or you punch the wall or punch someone. You project on someone else, someone you can easily blame. But if you take your time and reflect on it then you realize that it’s not the best way out. It’s an easy way out, it feels good, but you also live with the trauma you are inflicting on others. You also become a traumatized person.

Sandra Dunsmore began courses at 91����Ƶ while living in El Salvador, where her early Quaker-sponsored peace work involved (in part) listening to people linked to death squads. “I needed some space to think through what I had been involved in, to reflect in a guided way. I hadn’t done a particularly good job of taking care of myself. I couldn’t continue as I had been living.”

On the professional level, 33 of the 36 respondents (92%) mentioned specific ways they have carried their CJP studies into their work as non-profit administrators, mediators, trainers, social service workers, teachers, and other roles.

Jim Bernat, who studied at CJP while working as a mental health specialist in a region 90 minutes from Harrisonburg, says his graduate education helped him “refocus his being, thinking and practice around the principles of justice and nonviolence.”

Bernat is in his 25th year of working for the same government-supported community services board as he did in his CJP days, though he is now an administrator. From his CJP-influenced perspective, Bernat sees justice as “not just what one sees in a court of law, but as an everyday matter: How do we treat our employees here? Do our clients feel valued, and our staff too? How am I contributing to our sense of community?”

In fact, the most enduring trait acquired at CJP, said a majority of the respondents, is viewing the world through distinctive lens. This has proved to be personally transformative.

Daagya Dick, MA ’00, who fostered a network of peacebuilders in Central America from 2000 to 2003, said CJP taught her about shifting “from destructive dynamics to positive dynamics.” She said she gained an “understanding of how people work and what human needs are and how to respond to those needs in a way that people can be positively engaged.” She liked the way the program encouraged “balance and wholeness in life in order to be an effective peacemaker.”

Dick, who now teaches Spanish in a public high school in Kansas, added: “You can call on these skills anywhere you work.”

Christine Poulson, MA ’98, used similar words: “What I learned at CTP would be useful to anybody doing anything. It gave me a better

understanding of the world and of myself. I became a more reflective person. I am better at prioritizing what is really important to me.”

Experiences from 33 countries

That first group of 21 men and 15 women brought rich experience to CTP. They were diverse in almost every respect – age, nationality, ethnicity, and motivation for coming to the then-new program. They were not diverse in religion, however. Most of them were Mennonite-style Christians – eight arrived directly from service with Mennonite Central Committee – though there were also Catholics and mainstream Protestants. One student was exploring Native American religions. But there were no practicing Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or Jews. These arrived in later years.

In addition to the United States, the 36 students had lived in 33 places: Angola, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Britain, Burundi, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Karen territory (officially part of Burma/Myanmar), Kenya, Liberia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nagaland (officially part of India), Nicaragua, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Peru, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Vietnam.

91����Ƶ 60% of these graduate students had survived civil wars or other society-wide violence.

Sam Gbaydee Doe of Liberia, one of the 12 students entering CJP in its second year, told this story in When You Are the Peacebuilder, a spiral-bound book published by CJP in 2001:

In December of 1989, I was only two semesters away from achieving my dream [to finish a degree in economics and accounting and become a banker] when the Liberian civil war began. By May of 1990, the rebels had captured every part of the country except the executive mansion where the president was hiding.

By July, 1990, we had gone without food for nearly three months and were hiding under beds and between concrete corners most of the day. One day there was a temporary cease-fire and I decided to take a walk, just to flex my muscles. While walking around this slum community, I came across a young boy, lying under the eaves of a public school. I remember his face like it was yesterday. He was just skin and bones.

I stood over him for quite a while. His mouth was open. Flies were feeding on his saliva. In a surreal moment, I raced to a nearby community to find something edible. I found some popcorn being sold for fifty cents. I bought some and dashed back to this child. I stooped over him, slipped a few pieces of the popcorn into his mouth, and waited anxiously to see him chew the popcorn and regain his strength. ‘Chew your popcorn, you innocent child,’ I said to myself, ‘God has answered your prayer.’

91����Ƶ ten minutes passed by but his little mouth remained frozen. It must have been half an hour later when, with a last rush of energy, he opened his eyes wide and looked at me. Our eyes locked. He shook his head, and closed his eyes. After several minutes, his movements slowed and eventually stopped. The child had given up the ghost. I began to cry profusely. I asked myself, “How many children like you are dying right now throughout this country? How many have been swallowed in the madness of adults?’

I made a pledge to that boy: I would work for peace so that children could live… I have never turned my back on the promise I made to that nameless and faceless child.

From one success to another

Doe went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees in the field of peace, co-found what is now the largest peace organization in Africa (WANEP), join the staff of the United Nations, and spend several years in Sri Lanka, helping that country emerge from 30 years of civil war. In the long term, he sees himself working in Africa once again.

Periodically, Doe teaches at 91����Ƶ’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI). He will teach “conflict-sensitive development” at SPI 2011. He will also attend 91����Ƶ’s graduation ceremony in the late spring, proudly watching as his daughter, Samfee Doe, receives her bachelor’s degree.

— Bonnie Price Lofton, MA ’04 (conflict transformation)

Editor and writer of Peacebuilder

Harrisonburg, Virginia

As director of the “Welcome Center” of the Harrisonburg public school system, Nathan Barge leads the team that registers, evaluates and places hundreds of incoming students. 91����Ƶ half of these come from households that speak a language other than English. Barge himself speaks Spanish, in addition to his native English, having spent 14 years with his wife, Elaine, in Latin America as a volunteer with Mennonite Central Committee.

In the early 1990s, Nathan and Elaine led grassroots groups from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to Colombia to take classes with teachers and practitioners with the JustaPaz organization, four of whom helped shape CJP: John Paul Lederach, Vernon Jantzi, Ricardo Esquivia, and Paul Stucky. The older of two Barge daughters, Rebecca, was born in a war zone in El Salvador, and the family was almost killed when caught in a battle. Co-workers were imprisoned and interrogated. The family also lived through an earthquake.

Such experiences drove home the fragility of life and helped them to understand the common expression, “I will see you tomorrow, God willing.” Nathan entered 91����Ƶ as a graduate student in 1995 as a way of processing what the family had experienced, retooling for new work, and studying a subject that interested him.

As he neared the end of his MA studies, he started a restorative justice program in Harrisonburg in 1999, but left it in 2004 for the school system job. The move was necessary to put the family on better financial footing before the Barge daughters entered college. Nathan continues to do volunteer work as a mediator and restorative justice practitioner. Formerly, he was board president of Gemeinshaft, a Harrisonburg program to assist ex-prisoners to transition to living productively in mainstream society.

Meridian, Mississippi

Mike Clymer learned of CTP while he and his wife Melody were doing voluntary service with Mennonite Central Committee in southeastern Africa. “I found it a great way to help me process and reflect on my experiences in Swaziland and to explore what I wanted to do next.”

Toward the end of his master’s studies, Melody gave birth to their first child, Silas, causing the couple to consider where they wanted to settle and raise children. They ended up joining several friends in Meridian, Mississippi, not far from where they had lived for four years early in their marriage. “It was an opportunity for us to live and serve in a diverse community, with like-minded believers at similar stages in life, in a culture to which we felt called to return,” said Mike.

Mike is a math teacher in the local public high school. He is a lay leader in the Mennonite church in Meridian and has done interfaith community organizing in the city.

“Our time here has been filled with many of the joys and challenges that come with living on the cultural ‘edge’ – close to issues of race, poverty, education, and political-social-religious conflict.” Mike notes that peace-justice voices tend to be “marginalized and isolated” in Mississippi. Nevertheless, he said he “tries to view my work, my church, and my community through peace-justice lenses, and I try to share that perspective as I can.”

He says he uses the lessons he learned at CTP “every day in my roles at the urban high school where I teach math, in my family, and at my church.” The Clymers now have three children.

McPherson, Kansas

When Daagya Dick applied to enter CTP in 1996, she recalls that speaking a language in addition to English was an entrance requirement. (That requirement was quickly dropped, since it eliminated many prospective students.) Raised as a Mennonite in California, Daagya became fluent in Spanish while on a Bethel College (Kansas) program in Mexico.

In 1998, Daagya took her CTP lessons to Guatemala, where she did her practicum with Mennonite Central Committee, working to build a regional network for peace and justice. The idea was to offer trainings close to home for aspiring peacebuilders in Central America, including southern Mexico. She worked there until 2003, marrying a Guatemalan lawyer, Juan Coy, who was an indigenous person. The couple shared a strong interest in human rights, and they planned to remain in Guatemala to work for greater justice.

The birth of their first child, Josue, changed their plans dramatically. Mother and son had almost died during the birth, and physicians feared that Josue might need on-going sophisticated medical care, available in the United States but not in Guatemala. The family quickly moved to Kansas, where Daagya had graduated from college and had close family members.

Unable to work as a lawyer in the United States, Juan has taken primary responsibility for the care of Josue and their second child, Diego, while Daagya teaches Spanish in the local school system. She also runs the school’s program for “at risk” students. Now that Josue is a healthy second grader, and Diego is in kindergarten, the family is looking to return to Latin America with Mennonite Central Committee before the boys finish elementary school. The boys have been raised speaking Spanish at home.

Harrisonburg, Virginia

As Jeff Heie is doing now (in 2010), Jim Hershberger defied gender stereotyping from 1990 to 1996, when he was the main caregiver for the three Hershberger children as they grew from preschool to upper-elementary ages.

Jim’s wife, Ann, was then a nurse with a master’s degree (she now has a PhD). The couple had served with Mennonite Central Committee for 10 years in Nicaragua. When they returned to the United States in 1990, Ann’s nursing credentials put her in the best position to be the family breadwinner.

“It was difficult for me [to be a ‘househusband’ and full-time father],” recalls Jim. “As a man, I was supposed to be out ‘hunting and gathering.’ But I now have memories that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

He entered CTP in 1994 (one of the program’s first two full-time students) to “re-tool” himself, as he puts it. “I thought it would give me some options in terms of future employment.”

Two years later Jim began work in the Harrisonburg Refugee Resettlement Office. He found his conflict transformation training handy when dealing with the school system. One teacher, for example, became frightened when a child recently arrived from Yugoslavia kept drawing pictures of tanks, bombs and people dying. Jim was able to explain that the boy’s own home had been bombed and that people close to the boy had been killed.

When a hurricane devastated Nicaragua in the fall of 1998, the Hershbergers returned to that country for a year to do relief work sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee.

Jim next became the pastor of Beldor Mennonite Church in Elkton, Virginia, a village 18 miles east of Harrisonburg. He pastored for nine years, sometimes addressing conflicts within his congregation, before returning to the Refugee Resettlement Program as its director in September 2010.

When he was with the refugee program in the late 1990s, the clients were mostly Christians from Eastern Europe and Central America. Now (2010), they are mostly Muslims from Iraq. “This is a chance for area churches to extend hospitality to people of another faith,” Jim says.

Harrisonburg, Virginia

Long-time work with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) seems to leave people with rich experiences and much wisdom, but not necessarily with credentials that translate into comparably responsible work in the US. Or so Hadley and Jan Jenner found after leaving their shared 7-year-long roles as MCC country representatives in Kenya.

Hadley had been trained as a land planner and had worked in planning for nine years in Alaska prior to heading to Kenya. So, in Kenya, he had a particular interest in land-use and environmental matters.

In 1997 when he enrolled in CTP – to “retool,” like Jim Hershberger and other returning MCC volunteers were doing, with MCC tuition assistance – Hadley became interested in conflicts arising from environmental issues.

Two professors in particular, Vernon Jantzi and John Paul Lederach, encouraged Hadley to take CTP into the public policy arena by marketing CTP’s services “to help address conflict in ways that nurture healthy communities, clean environments, and robust participation in a sustainable future,” as explained in a brochure published at the time.

For several years Hadley tried to realize this laudable vision, but sufficient funding never materialized. His wife was hired to write grants for CTP, which weighed in favor of the family remaining in Harrisonburg. Hadley, who had completed a master’s degree in environmental planning at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, went to work as a planner for Rockingham County.

As the three Jenner children approached college age, Hadley felt he needed to find a new career path that would both challenge him and offer the family solid, stable income. So he returned to 91����Ƶ and completed a BS in nursing in 2005. (He was fast-tracked through 91����Ƶ’s nursing program, having previously earned a BS in biology at Earlham College in 1972.)

How does Hadley use his CTP training in the hospital? “I am able to connect with all of the different kinds of people who come in, to establish relationships of trust.” Yet he confesses: “I miss thinking strategically [about burning social issues], gathered with other thinkers around a table.”

Harrisonburg, Virginia

Jan Jenner is outranked only by Howard Zehr for being the longest-serving full-time employee currently at CJP. Over the last 13 years, she has been a student, grant writer, administrator, book author, and teacher at CJP.

She and her husband Hadley formerly served with Mennonite Central Committee in Kenya.

Books she co-authored – When You are the Peacebuilder: Stories and Reflections on Peacebuilding from Africa (2001) and A Handbook of International Peacebuilding: Into the Eye of the Storm (2002) – continue to be widely referenced. Most issues of Peacebuilder, for instance, cite at least one of these books.

“CJP is certainly more rigorous than it was when I was a student,” Jan says. “It is larger, more structured.” She notes that the CTP graduate program began in the 1990s with professors drawn from other fields, such as sociology, religion, social work and history (of crime). By 2001, however, CJP had three professors with PhDs in the field: professors Lisa Schirch, Barry Hart and Jayne Docherty had all earned their doctorates at George Mason University’s Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

CJP’s evolution reflected a trend, says Jan: “The field has professionalized over time. It depends more on bureaucracies than individual people. It is less led by Westerners. People know a lot more about what they are doing and why. We have moved from working on an anecdotal basis to evidence-based work.”

She expresses concern, though, that the field may become “too professional.” She doesn’t want people to think “they can’t do anything unless they have the right [academic] degrees. I don’t think we should be dis-empowering ‘Joe on the street’ from working for peace.”

She is also concerned by the disconnection she sees between “the short-term orientation of most of the funding and the long-term commitment necessary to stabilize communities.”

Jan is the behind-the-scenes administrator responsible for launching STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience) after the events of 9/11 and for the founding of Coming to the Table, an initiative to deal with the legacy of slavery in the United States.