“I’m not here to be a tourist,” I protested to Florina Benoit, MA ’04. “I just have 18 hours here. Wouldn’t it be better to relax here for a while?” I could get away with whining to Florina – we had known each other for 12 years, ever since we were both graduate students at 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Now she was my guide on a whirlwind trip to India for Peacebuilder magazine.

Earlier, I had tried to keep up with Florina as she wove through the crowd around our jam-packed train. I hadn’t slept soundly on my thin plastic-covered mattress on a top bunk – with other sleepers breathing heavily nearby – as we traveled eight hours north from Chennai to Hyderabad to visit her former workplace, the Henry Martyn Institute (HMI).

At daybreak, I had climbed down from my bunk, trying not to disturb anyone, and stood by an open doorway near the toilet at the end of our train car, absorbing the beauty of the south Indian countryside for an hour or so. I felt no inner struggle – at that time, I knew nothing about the displacement of rural-dwellers for resource extraction and the destruction of scenes like the ones we were passing.

From the windows of the automobile that picked us up at the Hyderabad train station, I enjoyed low-stress sightseeing. The ride took us alongside the city’s 1,200-acre lake, with a 60-foot-tall statue of the Gautama Buddha towering on a small island, and past awakening streetside businesses.

But now, in the late afternoon, my energy was flagging. I was baffled as to why Florina wanted me to leave the institute’s pastoral premises, where I felt a strong urge to nap in my comfortable bed in a private room provided by our hosts. But she was persuasive and I relented.

That’s how I found myself on a stone platform after climbing 149 narrow, winding steps of the Charminar mosque-monument. I had ascended through one of four mammoth minarets, connected to each other by four grand archways.

Charminar’s significance

Charminar is smack in the middle of what’s called “The Old City” of Hyderabad, where the majority of the residents are Muslim.

As Florina and I gazed over a packed street scene below Charminar, a smiling guy who looked to be in his 20s invited himself to be our tour guide. He explained that the massive mosque visible on the right side of the crowded street was Mecca Masjid, dating to the same ruler as the one who built Charminar. The Masjid got its name from foundational bricks composed of soil brought from Mecca. The structure can hold 10,000 worshipers at a time.

At left along the street below was the Government Ayurvedic Hospital, housed in a colonial-era complex that was crumbling but still lovely. Judging by its name, the services within this complex were based on a Hindu-yogic medical tradition dating back to the Vedic age of India (ca. 1750–500 BCE).

When Florina and I exited Charminar, we passed an ornately decorated, tent-looking structure pressed against one side of Charminar’s massive foundation. This turned out to be Bhagyalakshmi, a Hindu shrine dedicated to the Goddess Lakshmi. This shrine apparently began with the placement of a small statue in Lakshmi’s honor in the 1960s.

The visit to Charminar worked on me, as Florina knew it would: I began to grasp how closely Hindus and Muslims bump against each other in Hyderabad – a city where Muslims were in the majority before 1948 and now are a minority, except in the Old City – and how tenuously peace has been maintained (or not) over the last half century.

Later background reading revealed these violent conflicts in Hyderabad:

• In September 1983, during a religious festival, certain Hindu organizations put up big cloth banners in the Old City calling for India to be declared a Hindu Riots developed in which 45 people were killed.
• In December 1990, rioting raged almost two weeks – believed to have been initiated by non-locals for the national political gain of a particular party – which destroyed countless homes and businesses and cost the lives of hundreds of Hindus and The assaults were vicious: amputations, disembowelments and rapes.
• On May 18, 2007, a bomb exploded inside the Mecca Masjid at the time of Friday prayers, killing at least 13 people and injuring
• Under cover of night on November 1, 2012, Hindu temple officials began to do some construction at the base of Charminar, saying they were simply adding decorations to their Police stopped the non-permitted construction. Muslim-Hindu tensions rose.
• Two weeks later, violence broke out after Friday prayers at the Mecca Masjid, when Muslims began streaming towards the Hindu shrine at Police intercepted them. Street-fighting ensued.

Florina murmured to me that the Hindu shrine looked bigger each time she visited Charminar. She, a Christian, viewed it as a provocation to Muslims who treasure the Persian-Islamic cultural and religious heritage embodied by Charminar.

Our Charminar tour set the stage for a visit that evening to an Old City center for community gatherings and vocational trainings, sponsored by the Henry Martyn Institute, directed by staffer Abdul Majid Shaik. Majid, a conservatively dressed Muslim who is a former social work student of Florina’s, showed us classes of males working on computer hardware and networking, refrigeration/AC mechanics, and typewriting. He said such vocational evening classes attract young Hindu and Muslim men from the neighborhood – 150-200 of them annually, from early teens in the typing classes up to early thirties in the other classes.

During the day, he said, girls and women from the neighborhood came to religiously mixed classes, often sewing or embroidering together. They generate a bit of income sewing clothes for neighbors and friends. This, Majid explained, makes the men in their families more willing to let them come to the center. They also can take classes in literacy, typing and hair styling.

Separately, the men and women learn about HIV-AIDS – a major health issue in Hyderabad – and have access to an HMI-supported health clinic staffed by a physician and a nurse.

In addition to learning useful skills, all students were guided to talk to each other about their lives and religious practices, and to respectfully share parts of each other’s celebrations and festivities. Mixed-religion picnics and other outings are occasionally organized.

Thus HMI lives out its stated goal: “To work in riot-prone areas on ways to build supportive and sustaining relationships between communities through development and empowerment, leading towards peace and cessation of communal violence.”

HMI publications contain heartening stories of the way residents in the immediate neighborhood have learned to protect each other during violent flare-ups in the Old City, such as this one: “Three Muslim women, bowing down to perform their evening prayer, hear the anguished cry of their neighboring Hindu sisters and their children, and rush out to take them to shelter.”

Between 1971 and 2002, the Henry Martyn Institute occupied office space on a busy thoroughfare in Hyderabad. For most of those years, it was called the Henry Martyn Institute of Islamic Studies, focused on interfaith dialogue. The 1990 riots catalyzed the institute into reconsidering its role in Hyderabad.

In 1999, the name was changed to the Henry Martyn Institute: Centre for Research, Interfaith Relations and Reconciliation, reflecting its fresh focus.^[1]

In 2002, following successful fundraising, Henry Martyn moved to five acres on the outer edge of Hyderabad, where it has established a retreat-center atmosphere, with a cluster of modern buildings amid well-tended grass, flowers, trees and a pond. It feels like an oasis of peace alongside the crowded bustle of its home city.

In the preface of a peacebuilding manual published by HMI in 2007, former institute director Dr. Andreas D’Souza described HMI’s post-1990s ecumenical focus this way:

… to provide space for Hindus, Christians and Muslims to build relationships; to make available conflict transformation workshops in violence-prone areas such as Nagaland, Manipur, Kashmir and Gujarat; to make possible women’s interfaith journeys, causing women from different countries, races, creeds and castes to travel together to understand what interfaith relations and conflict transformation mean from woman’s perspective.

Andreas also wrote about deciding, after the 1990 riots, that “intellectual dialogue alone is of little consequence if it does not help in transforming the lives of the dialogue partners.” He wanted the institute to add a “praxis” (i.e., practice) component to its academic study.^[2]

As a result, Andreas and former associate director Diane D’Souza focused on development work in the riot-affected slums of the Old City of Hyderabad in the 1990s – initiating and encouraging vocational training for men and women in mixed-religion classes, healthcare outreach, and mixed-religion schooling for children.

Stephen Gonsalves, MA ’03, an HMI board member who then represented Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), encouraged the institute to complement its praxis of development with the praxis of conflict transformation.

Embracing conflict transformation

The idea seriously took root in 1999 with the arrival of Ron Kraybill, one of the founding faculty members of 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. With special funding from an MCC donor in Canada, Kraybill was able to settle his family in Hyderabad and to use a year-long sabbatical to set up a conflict transformation team within the Henry Martyn Institute.

Staffers Diane D’Souza and Ramesh Prakashvelu quickly absorbed Kraybill’s teachings, integrated them with their own experiences, and began putting them into action. They especially liked the concept of experiential and reciprocal learning, wherein workshop participants tap their own life experiences, play active roles in the workshop, and are teachers as well as learners. In short, everyone learns from each other, including the facilitators from the participants.

From 2004 to 2011, HMI offered a post-graduate diploma in peacebuilding that could be earned in nine months. (HMI’s academic department continues to offer a nine-month diploma program with focus on Islam and interfaith relations.) Today, intensive on-campus training for 30 participants occurs via the South Asia Peace Workshop, which runs in the early fall for a week or more (depending on the year and the coursework offered) in a manner similar to SPI.

The Northeast

From its earliest years, HMI’s conflict transformation team wasn’t content staying close to home. Staffers gave trainings in distant conflict-ridden regions of India, especially its Northwest.

India’s troubled Northeast floats apart from the India featured in tourist brochures – it’s like a huge balloon connected by a slender land thread to the Indian subcontinent.

The region consists of Sikkim, plus seven contiguous states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. In three of these states, the majority of people identify themselves as Christians, a legacy of missionaries in the late 1800s. Indigenous (“animist”) religious practices prevail in most places, even among many who call themselves Christians, Hindus or Muslims. These states comprise 209 tribes, speaking 175 languages mostly belonging to the Tibeto-Burmese category.

“The region is known for the longest insurgency and ethnic violence in India,” says the 2007 HMI peacebuilding manual, from which the foregoing statistics were taken. “There are over 100 armed groups in the region carrying various identities and espousing various liberation ideologies.”

The start of HMI’s work in the Northeast can be traced to a three-week workshop on conflict transformation in Darjeeling in May 2000, facilitated by Kraybill, Diane D’Souza and Ramesh. The Naga Women’s Union Manipur then invited them to work in the Northeast. HMI staff thus began working in Manipur (from 2000), Nagaland (2001), Assam (2002), and Arunachal Pradesh (2002). “We began by building relations with key social, human rights and church-based peace organizations,” says Ramesh.

Two CJP graduates – Aküm Longchari, MA ’00, a newspaper editor in Nagaland, and Babloo Loitongbam, MA ’06, a human rights worker in Manipur – were invited to workshops “as resource persons to share their insights, knowledge and wisdom related to peace, reconciliation and human rights work,” Ramesh explains.

On the CJP alumni website, Aküm described one of the region’s peace initiatives this way:

In 2008, I joined with other representatives of civil society organizations to form the Naga Forum for Reconciliation, with support from members of the Society of Friends in Britain and members of the American Baptist Church. The forum seeks to reconcile various Naga armed groups on the basis of the historical and political rights of the Nagas. The forum has been meeting with militant groups … and the groups are moving away from violence and mistrust toward fragile progress and decreased violence.

On the same CJP website, Babloo summed up the challenges peacebuilders face in the Northeast:

The cycle of violence keeps the region in turmoil. There are a number of insurgency groups vying for autonomy or outright independence. This in turn makes the [Indian] military use harsh measures. Great economic difficulties drive desperate people to join the insurgencies and the cycle continues.

Leadership from Florina to Ramesh

Two years after completing her MA at CJP, Florina Benoit joined HMI as associate director of praxis, responsible for four teams: conflict transformation, community development, women’s interfaith journey, and tsunami relief and rehabilitation.

Florina shepherded to publication A Manual for Facilitating Peace Building Processes and brought in playback and interactive theater and puppetry, which complemented the arts-based work HMI had been doing through the visual arts, especially paintings.^[3]

In her 30 months at HMI, Florina’s conflict transformation staffers led about 30 trainings per year – reaching about 600 people annually – largely in the Northeast, but also in Kashmir (with the India-Pakistan conflict and its effects) and Gujarat (west coast location of recurring riots and massacres between Hindus and Muslims).

In all her trainings, “I found people were hungry for ways to emerge from the cycles of violence in which they felt trapped,” says Florina. “The STAR approach [addressing the underlying trauma that fuels violence] proved to be highly useful to the trainees.”

While employed at HMI, Florina did doctoral work at Osmania University. After completing her PhD in 2008, she resigned from HMI to return to her husband (social work professor Ashok Gladston Xavier, MA ’04) and their home in Chennai.

As did Florina before him, Ramesh heads the praxis programs of the Henry Martyn Institute.

My first impression of Ramesh wasn’t of him – it was of his black T-shirt, featuring a dignified-looking American Indian man wearing an eagle-feathered headdress. From beneath a tan-woolen visor, Ramesh’s hair flowed loosely below his shoulders. He was not one who would blend into a crowd.

Ramesh holds a master’s degree in international peace studies from the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame. He’s been doing peace work for 16 years, often in sensitive situations that can (and do) regularly explode into conflict. Four full-time staffers and two associate facilitators report to him. Collectively, they train about 450 people per year.

I soon realized Ramesh’s appearance heralded his passion for indigenous peoples – for their connections to nature, for their spirituality, for their relatively egalitarian ways of living, for their need for justice. For survival.

A month earlier, Ramesh had directed the ninth session of the South Asia Peace Workshop, which centered this time upon three topics: the UN Declaration on Rights of the Indigenous People; the relationship between respect for individual/group rights and peace; and appropriate development alternatives for indigenous people.

Called “tribals” in the Northeast and adivasis in other regions, the indigenous peoples of India have been described as the most exploited people in that country.

Struggles over natural resources

“Nobody likes to have their land stolen,” said Ramesh, by way of explaining why tribals throughout India are distressed and choosing to resist in some manner.

“Successive Indian governments have lined up with corporate forces to grab the mountains, forests and seas – to extract resources regardless of the people living there – regardless of their ancestral rights and constitutional protections. And if the people resist their dispossession, they are often labeled as leftists or anti-development.”

Ramesh and his team are trying to offer tools for transformation that are alternatives to taking up arms. Throughout much of the Indian subcontinent, the possibility of warfare lurks just beneath the surface.

Immediately north of Hyderabad, for example, is the “Red Corridor.” This is a swath of central India where Maoist guerrilla fighters known as Naxalites are most active. Of India’s 84 million tribals, 70% of them live in this Red Corridor, where they are facing massive displacement and communal destruction in India’s rush to extract coal, iron ore, limestone, dolomite, and bauxite, according to National Geographic (April 2015). Dams for hydroelectric power are also being constructed. Amid this widespread extraction, the Naxalites combine intimidation, youthful soldiering, and populist appeals to flesh out their ranks of fighters. “Rather than reduce the imbalance between the rich and poor, mineral wealth has exacerbated the divide, adding pollution, violence and displacement to the daily struggle of those whose livelihood is locked up in the land,” said National Geographic.

Diverse team

The five who make up the core conflict transformation team at HMI reflect the diversity with which they must grapple in their work. Ramesh is a Tamil with indigenous sympathies, Robinson Thapa is a Christian tribal member from the Northeast of India, Jalaja Devi is a Hindu woman from Kerala, and Najma Sanai and Arshia Ayub (both associate facilitators) are Muslim women from Andhra Pradesh.

Veteran facilitator Robinson belongs to the Tangkhul tribe, one of 16 tribes in Manipur. He saw his father killed. Close friends and relatives were raped and tortured, if not killed. “I grew up in a place where violence seemed to be the only way to address the issues that we faced.” He himself once believed in armed struggle.

Out of curiosity, Robinson attended a workshop in Manipur on conflict transformation and peacebuilding and got hooked on the ideas – because “in spite of 60 years of armed struggle, we have not gotten anywhere. I now believe we can be nonviolent and continue the struggle in other ways.”^[4]

Najma Sanai has a counseling practice in Hyderabad, where she particularly serves Muslim women like herself and seeks to improve parenting skills. She started on the road to being an associate facilitator at HMI when Ron Kraybill took her aside during one of his HMI trainings in 1990-2000 and said, “You have a gift for facilitating conflict transformation. Would you want to be a staffer here?”

She felt honored. “Ron’s facilitation skills were amazing. We looked to him as our guru.”

For years, she worked at getting peer mediation programs and other cultural shifts into the schools, but such change, she came to realize, must be sought within the system. “The schools would never give us the time we needed. They said, ‘We can’t spare teachers for two days,’ even for just two- or three-hour sessions. I learned an important lesson – the time, space and inclination must be there for a program to take off.”

Today, Najma works in both the praxis and academic wings of HMI. On the academic side, she regularly lectures on Islam and women’s rights, trying to dispel what she regards as myths pertaining to the religious basis of the subjugation of women.

The results?

Ramesh is not given to boasting. So when I asked him what the Henry Martyn Institute can show for its 16 years of conflict transformation work, he said modestly, “The amount of hatred and stress has come down in the areas where we’ve worked.”

Then he added, “People have stopped one village from burning another village because they knew it would become cyclical. We’ve seen those kinds of changes. But have we been able to stop something big? Not so far.”

It’s not that Ramesh doubts the value, the ultimate impact, of what his team does. It’s just that “you have to invest in the long term – it cannot be done on a one-time or short-term basis.”

Beginning in 2002, for example, HMI staffers worked patiently and persistently for two years to bring 42 leaders from different communities and tribes in the Northeast together for the first time to talk about their common problems and possible solutions. The logjam was broken by women in the communities, Ramesh said, who were the first to see the possibilities of such a meeting.

Now he sees increasing numbers of young people – some from human rights organizations, some from women’s groups – who want to collaborate on peacebuilding.

HMI’s conflict transformation work over the years has been largely supported by grants from church-based development and relief organizations, including Bread for the World-Germany, Mennonite Central Committee, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Church of Sweden, the Church of Scotland, and KAIROS – Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives. A handful of governmental agencies, such as the United States Institute for Peace and the Canadian High Commission, have also contributed.

When Ramesh and his team aren’t doing trainings or interventions (or preparing materials to do these – everything is customized to suit the context), they’re preparing reports for their funders or writing applications for further funding. They feel challenged to communicate the necessity of culture-sensitive, region-specific, participatory approaches to trainings that aim at empowering as many people as possible to do peacebuilding in their own ways, adapted to their own environments. This is not something that can be accomplished quickly.

Of the five proposals written for 2014-15, two yielded funding for HMI’s conflict transformation work.

“It may take 20 to 50 more years – or beyond my lifetime – to see the results of our work,” says Ramesh. “But if we do our work conscientiously, our descendants will benefit from its long-term effects.”

Footnotes

1. In its earliest decades – in the 1930s, 40s and 50s – the institute existed to acculturate Christian missionaries from Europe and North America who were intent on spreading the gospel among Based in six cities at different times, it served an evangelical purpose of some kind through the 1970s. Today HMI is directed by Rev. Dr. Packiam T. Samuel, who makes it clear in an interview with Peacebuilder that HMI harbors no proselytizing tendencies, instead promoting understanding of, and respect for, the positive attributes of India’s religions and ethnicities.
2. The information in the Henry Martyn peacebuilding manual will feel familiar to those who know another manual originally connected to Kraybill’s teachings, the Conflict Transformation and Restorative Justice Manual, published in five editions since 1989 by MCC (the latest issued in 2008).
3. The two articles dealing with playback and interactive theater in the 2008 MCC Conflict Transformation and Restorative Justice Manual were written by Florina Benoit and Ashok Gladston Xavier (her husband).
4. When this Peacebuilder was at pre-press stage in April, Florina Benoit conveyed the distressing news that Robinson Thapa had died after falling ill while conducting a workshop in Imphal, the capital of his home state.

When Ramesh Prakashvelu, the Henry Martyn Institute’s associate director of praxis, was asked what he learned from Ron Kraybill, a former CJP professor who spent 1999-2000 on sabbatical at HMI, Ramesh quickly recited this list of 14 takeaways. In Ramesh’s words, but in no particular order:

1. Early on, Ron taught us, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything will look like a nail.”
2. How to organize a participatory and empowering workshop, centering around attentive listening and allowing space for different perspectives and
3. The importance of a posted “activity sheet,” so people can see what they can expect to learn and how long it will They can see their questions added as we go along and they can see notes on what we’ve done.
4. Always cover the importance of confidentiality in the workshops – that is, what occurs should not go outside these
5. We all have our biases – none of us is objective – so we need to beware of our own We need to put them out on the table or leave them out of the room, in order to do our best to reflect the views of the people in the room.
6. If there is an “elephant” in the room, acknowledge it; if there are important things that are unspoken, speaking about these things will
7. “Energizers” (lively exercises as breaks in the workshop) are
8. When you do brainstorming, don’t judge the ideas people Let them be registered for consideration.
9. How to write effective role plays that elicit empathy and let people put themselves in others’ Now we are able to create role plays on the spot – it was drilled into us.
10. The importance of working together as a team and not being “experts” who come and go in the We facilitators are all present from beginning to the end, regardless of who is the lead facilitator at a particular time. And we always sit together and debrief at the end of each day.
11. Being willing to change, to adapt what we planned, based on the needs of the participants and the flow of the work Always maintaining awareness and making adjustments, as needed.
12. Having respect for the people in the Choosing to walk with them – rather than exercising power over them – and acknowledging that we are all learners, we’re all doing the best we can.
13. Lose your Ron taught us, “Either you can work for solutions, or you can work for credit.”

Most importantly, trust your own resources – don’t parrot what other facilitators do. I, as a Tamil, was told, “Your culture, language and religion can contribute as much to peacebuilding as they do to conflict,” so I started digging for Tamil peacebulding practices and I found them.

Decades ago, when international conflicts tended to be between neighboring countries, the United Nations’ approach to peacekeeping was primarily focused on observation and reporting. The blue-helmeted peacekeepers would sit peering through telescopes, trying to make sure people on either side of the border behaved.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, wars between sovereign states have increasingly been replaced by conflict within nations, often with meddling from proxy players. In the absence of functioning state institutions, UN peacekeeping missions have taken an increasingly hands-on role in these countries, expanding the scopes of their missions to include development, peacebuilding and state-building efforts, often in partnership with other organizations and agencies. Since the early 1990s in particular, peacebuilding and development have assumed greater importance throughout the UN system, beyond military-style peacekeeping activities.

As a police planning advisor with the UN Office to the African Union, Kamal Uddin Tipu, MA ’04, represents one facet of the new, broader approach to peacebuilding being employed by the United Nations everywhere, but especially in Africa, where the majority of its multidimensional peacekeeping missions are. Working closely with the , Tipu helps the organization plan the policing components of its peacekeeping missions across Africa. While Tipu provides the AU with his expertise as a police officer, he has colleagues who address more than a dozen related areas, including elections monitoring, military and civilian logistics, medicine, mediation, mine action and other structures necessary for sustainable peace after violent conflict has ended in a country.

“You have to go into all these areas to resolve conflict,” says Tipu, a deputy inspector general of police in Pakistan now deputized to the UN.

Police in support of stable governance

In South Sudan, which gained independence in 2011 after decades of civil war within Sudan, Fred Yiga, MA ’06, is also working to establish a functioning police force in a country almost devoid of state institutions when it became independent.

“The greatest casualties in South Sudan’s conflict were the institutions of governance,” says Yiga, an assistant inspector general of police in Uganda now serving as the UN police commissioner for the . “Their frameworks and the whole notion of governance culture must be started from scratch.”

And so Yiga has begun doing just that, establishing police officer screening and payroll policies, conducting a needs assessment to guide planning for training and funding priorities, and developing policing models and programs such as police-community relations committees.

“There is a lot of hope that we are on the right track with police development in South Sudan,” continues Yiga, who anticipates the country having a well-trained and professionalized police force with influence in the wider region within five years. “We will definitely succeed!”

Developing a transitional justice process

Though it has not fallen into full-blown civil war like so many other African nations, Guinea has nonetheless been plagued by repeated violent conflicts over the past several decades. In southeastern Guinea, where Francois Traore, MA ’11, has worked as a human rights national program officer for the , the roots of these conflicts were the usual suspects like land disputes between farmers and livestock herders, or unequal access to natural resource revenues. Often, these conflicts have been exacerbated by ethnic and religious differences between the opposing parties.

Drawing on the “holistic approach” of ‘s and his study of restorative justice, Traore worked to develop a transitional justice process in this region of Guinea based on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model pioneered in South Africa. (Former CJP professor Ron Kraybill was involved in South Africa’s truth-and-reconciliation program at its conceptual stage, as was current professor and CJP alumnus , who lived and did peace work in South Africa from 1994 until he came to teach at CJP in 2010.)

In addition to the cultural, religious and economic aspects of these conflicts, generational divides within these communities have eroded their traditional conflict resolution methods. In the past, Traore said, elders from opposing sides used an animal sacrifice, shared a meal, and performed oath-taking rituals to resolve or prevent conflicts. Younger people in these communities, however, view such practices as outdated and irrelevant to modern life and problems – adding another layer of complexity to the violence in the region.

“Understanding these dynamics and linking them to the conflicts they generate requires a strong peacebuilding theory,” says Traore, who left the UNHCHR in 2012 for a position with the USAID Mission in Guinea and Sierra Leone. The multi-disciplinary nature of his studies at CJP, he says, has allowed him to play a leadership role in developing a transitional justice component to a nationwide reconciliation process planned for the near future.

Community-based early warning systems

Just across the border in Liberia, Nat Walker, MA ’10, is leading the development of an early warning and early response (EWER) network to respond to conflicts in communities across the country. This first entailed establishing community-based EWER networks, linking local peace committees with a network of responders that includes civil society groups, UN agencies and Liberian government agencies.

Now, Walker is setting up “rapid response centers” in the cities of Gbarnga, Zwedru and Harper. These centers figure into a larger, countrywide peacebuilding and reconciliation program supported by the and the Liberian government.

“Linking the current EWER initiative with the bigger, UN-supported justice and security framework in the country is critical to maintaining peace and security in Liberia, especially as the UN mission draws down its military strength,” he says.

Walker is a long-term consultant on the project with , an American NGO which is working in partnership with the Liberian Peacebuilding Office, the UN Peacebuilding Fund, and other governmental and NGO partners. The community-level conflict monitoring and response systems, Walker says, play an important role in Liberia, where state security institutions are weak or absent entirely.

Walker says his experience at the , combining “critical peacebuilding theories” and “sound practice-based education,” have given him a grasp of conflict-sensitive development and organizational development skills, enabling him lead the conceptualization and development of EWER networks in Liberia.

Once conflicts or potential conflicts are identified and reported by EWER personnel, Walker says, response activities include formulation of policy recommendations, advocacy campaigns led by civil society organizations, and community-level mediation and dialogue led by members of the community. Incidents and the responses are later analyzed to improve the community’s ability to address future conflicts.

“[This means] local conflicts are dealt with before they escalate to disrupt community and national peace,” says Walker.

EWER is by no means unique to Liberia. Working for , Gopar Tapkida, MA ’11, nurtured into existence a similar system in Nigeria, the Emergency Preparedness and Response Team, supported by 10 organizations, encompassing Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals, women’s groups, the Red Cross, UNICEF and others committed to promoting nonviolence and peacebuilding. Team members covering 175 states use text messages to confer with each other about possible threats and rumors of attacks.

Need to build peace from bottom up

In Darfur, Sudan, Moussa Ntambara, MA ’02, spent two years, through the summer of 2013, as a manager with the . He oversaw around $10 million annually in funding provided to other UN agencies and NGOs working on grassroots peacebuilding projects in all five states of Darfur, where inter- and intra-community conflicts arose over issues such as access to natural resources.

Ntambara supervised teams of specialists and monitors who oversaw work in the field and provided technical assistance, project quality review, and feedback on project implementation. “My major role, as it relates to my education in peacebuilding, consisted in the development of engagement for peace strategies, identification of entry points, key actors and factors identification, peacebuilding methodologies and guidance on approaches,” says Ntambara, who now works in Bamako, Mali, as head of child protection for .

Abou Ag Ahiyoya, MA ’12, a former chief superintendent of police in Bamako, Mali, was one of the leaders of the civilian police force dispatched to the Darfur area of Sudan by the African Union from 2005 to 2007. For a while, Ahiyoya was the acting chief of police operations under the African Union, serving a vast refugee population and supervising almost 1,000 officers from about 25 African countries. Toward the end of his tour of duty��in Darfur, he worked as a member of��the transition team preparing for the UN’s African Mission in Darfur.

In Darfur, Ahiyoya dealt with killings, rapes, and other crimes on a daily basis. He saw children growing up without families, and tens of thousands without real homes. “I witnessed the consequences of war – I don’t want this to happen to any community or country,” he recalled in a 2011 interview at .

By 2008, Ahiyoya was deputy director of the national police academy in Mali and the director of the UN’s training program for police and peacekeepers within the Ecole de maintien de la paix in Mali. He also was a consultant and facilitator at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Canada.

When Ahiyoya was earning his as a Fulbright Scholar during 2010-12, his heart was heavy with the knowledge that his country was spiraling into bloody chaos, without the international community seeming to care. As he feared then, the situation has worsened over the last several years.

Belated intervention by the military of France on Jan. 11, 2013, did not bring peace to Mali. As of fall 2013, there was a UN-supported “stabilization mission” comprising more than 10,000 military personnel and 1,440 police, plus staff providing humanitarian assistance, but they are trying to operate in a dangerous, volatile situation.

“The AQMI [Saharan fighters inspired by al-Qaeda] are recruiting lots of our youths because they don’t have jobs,” Ahiyoya told in an . “We need to address the causes of terrorism and solve problems from the bottom up.”

UN is cumbersome��but irreplaceable

Sometimes the UN system is criticized for being a large, confusing bureaucracy that is hard for those outside of its structures to understand. As an example, the DCPSF (the UN program Ntambara worked for in Darfur, beneath the UNDP’s umbrella) partners with numerous other agencies and organizations, including UNAMID in Darfur, itself a specific collaboration between the United Nations and the African Union, which is known as UNOAU, where Kamal Udin Tipu serves as a police planning advisor.

As confusing as the system may seem, Tipu says the United Nations nevertheless has “been very active in keeping peace” around the world, and is refining, improving and strengthening its approach to peacebuilding by addressing the root causes of conflict rather than simply intervening in violent conflict. And, he says, consider the alternative: “If there’s no UN, what else do we have?”

• Zehr is “distinguished professor” of restorative justice, a pioneer in international restorative justice field; author, co-author or editor of about 22 books pertaining to restorative justice
• Zehr’s bestselling Little Book of Restorative Justice (over 110,000 sold) was cited as a reference in Handbook on Restorative Justice Programmes, published in 2006 by UN Office on Drugs and Crime following UN conferences in 2000, 2002 and 2005.
• Former CJP director Vernon Jantzi served on Working Party of Restorative Justice, a major resource at UN Congresses on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in 2000 and 2005. WPRJ drafted basic principles on restorative justice adopted by UN Economic and Social Council.
• ��Jantzi, professor emeritus of sociology, now works for Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR).

Carl Stauffer, PhD��

• ��Assistant professor of justice studies and co-director of 91����Ƶ’s Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice
• As regional peace adviser in Southern Africa for Mennonite Central Committee, 2000-09, Stauffer was associated with peace accords, community-police forums, truth and reconciliation initiatives, and local community development structures, often interacting with UN agencies involved with post-conflict stability.
• The UN Secretary General’s 2004 Report on The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-conflict Societies defines transitional justice as “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation.”
• ��Stauffer elaborated on this theme in his “Restorative Interventions for Postwar Nations,” a chapter published in Restorative Justice Today – Practical Applications (Sage Publications, 2012).

Barry Hart, PhD��

• ��Professor of trauma, identity and conflict studies, former CJP academic dean
• Has conducted workshops on psychosocial trauma recovery and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Burundi and among Rwandan refugees in Tanzania.
• Lived and worked for years in Balkans, launching trauma and conflict transformation programs for schools, communities, religious leaders.
• Collaborated with UNICEF personnel in Liberia to create the Kukatonen (We Are One) Peace Theatre, along with a manual of the same title, centered on these themes: understanding conflict, active listening, conflict resolution, reconciliation and trauma healing.
• Developed a training manual Za Damire I Nemire (For Peace and Not for Peace: Opening the Door to Nonviolence) for UNICEF while in Croatia.
• Collaborated with UN humanitarian and relief agencies when working in Liberia, Tanzania and the Balkans.

��Lisa Schirch, PhD��

• Research professor
• Director of human security at the Alliance for Peacebuilding
• Senior advisor to “People Building Peace” conference held at UN headquarters in 2005, encompassing about 1,000 civil society peacebuilding delegates from 119 countries.
• Evaluator for the UN Peacebuilding Support Office to advise on grantmaking to support women in peacebuilding in 2011.
• Facilitated UNDP meeting in Fiji between military, government and civil society groups.
• Consultant to UNDP in 2012 to develop strategy for UNDP to fit into new UN Peacebuilding Architecture
• “The UN is central to the success of peacebuilding in many countries. UNDP has an opportunity to provide the link between short-term humanitarian response in the midst of a crisis and longer term support for building the foundations of peace. UNDP is also one of the few institutions that is positioned to bring together civil society, governments, international NGOs and donors to work together to support strategic peacebuilding.”

��Ron Kraybill, PhD��

• ��Founding faculty member of CJP (’76 graduate of sister college, Goshen), current Senior Advisor on Peacebuilding and Development United Nations, assigned by UNDP to Philippines, previously assigned to Lesotho
• ��Supports peace process in Mindanao.
• Worked behind scenes, 2009-13, to nurture peaceful elections in Lesotho.
• Supported process led by Lesotho heads of churches, working with gridlocked parliament to negotiate electoral agreement among political parties to pursue free and fair elections.
• Effort yielded Lesotho’s first free, fair and peaceful election since independence in 1966.
• Facilitated visit to Lesotho of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who oversaw signing of political pledge that committed parties to respect laws and accept outcome of election.
• “Mediation, facilitation and process design lie at the heart of almost all that I do; I strengthen human capacities to respond constructively to conflict.”

David Brubaker, MBA, PhD��

• ��Associate professor of organizational studies, co-author of The Little Book of Healthy Organizations.��
• Hired by UNICEF-Mozambique for peace education and conflict resolution trainings immediately after peace accord signed in 1992.
• On joint project of Mennonite Central Committee and World Council of Churches, interacted with UNHCR staff at Benako refugee camp in Tanzania in 1994.
• ��Applauds UN for work on human development, women’s rights, indigenous rights, and awareness of environmental perils. But adds: “The UN’s basic structure hasn’t changed since it was founded 68 years ago. Healthy organizations need to undergo a structural review process every three to five years to ensure that their structure is still meeting their mission and objectives.”
• “My main issue is with the UN Security Council, where the veto power of the five permanent members often blocks meaningful international action, as seen in the cases of Israel and Syria.”

Catherine Barnes, PhD��

• Associate professor of strategic peacebuilding and public policy
• Has been engaged with UN since the early 1990s, when helped conduct trainings in conflict analysis and resolution for diplomats and staff.
• Regularly involved in policy dialogue in the UN on peace processes, especially how to increase public participation for inclusive and comprehensive settlements and effective use of sanctions, incentives and conditionality.
• Served as advisor during 2002-05 to Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict and participated in UN discussions on roles of civil society in preventing armed conflict and building peace.
• ��Helped design and facilitate 2005 conference on this theme at UN headquarters in NYC, which involved about 1,000 people from civil society, governments and IGOs from around the world, including CJP alumni, faculty, staff, and partners.

Paulette Moore, MA ’09��

• Associate professor of the practice of media arts and peacebuilding
• As MA student, did practicum with Community Development Gender Equality and Children, an agency within UNHCR. There created a blog – itbeginswithme.wordpress.com – launched on International Women’s Day in March 2009.
• Next, as UNHCR consultant, worked on films in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, along with a blog, in collaboration with a young woman filmmaker in that camp named Kate Ofwano, who is now in film school in Geneva.
• Moore recalls leaving career in corporate media to become more invested in community. “I didn’t want to keep being the kind of person who would helicopter in somewhere, do something, and helicopter back out,” as she thought UN personnel often did.
• ��Experience at UNHCR made her aware of a third way: “To partner with people who I really, really trust. Big organizations and community-based work aren’t necessarily exclusive.”

Amy Knorr, MA ’ 09��

• ��CJP practice coordinator
• Worked and lived in Haiti for 7.5 years total
• Worked with UNDP “disarmament, demobilization and reintegration”program 2006-07, on team to reintegrate gang members into society, often using stipends, vocational training, and cash to start small businesses.
• Didn’t work – community members were fearful; program heightened conflict rather than transformed it – i.e., it was not “conflict sensitive.”
• UN workers were required to wear bullet-proof vests and helmets, circulating with armed escorts when in dangerous urban areas. “This sent an uncomfortable message – were the UN workers’ lives more important than the Haitians’?’’
• With the UNDP at that time, “relationship-building and trust weren’t really there. There were civil society groups in existence in the communities where this project was working. But the UNDP didn’t work directly with these groups. They created new ones that conformed to the vision they’d dreamed up for the project – without the input of local groups that knew what things were really like.”
• The UNDP had $14 million to spend in this Haitian case: “The UN has a huge potential to reach many stakeholders, but attention must be given to conflict analysis.”

Ali Gohar, MA ’02

• Founding director Just Peace Initiatives (JPI) in Pakistan
• Was commissioner, 1987-2001, on UNHCR-funded project for 258 Afghan refugee camps, concentrating on community development, peacebuilding, drug use and HIV/AIDS, the plight of street children.
• Has partnered with UNDP, UNICEF, UNHCR and UNFPA to address humanitarian situations – when much of Pakistan was affected by devastating flooding; when 50 primary schools in Bajur Tribal Agency needed clean water and sanitation facilities; when four areas were assisted in restoring their livelihoods, building community-based infrastructure, and improving their governance.
• With UNICEF funding, JPI now working on two unprecedented projects on social cohesion and resilience in three areas – SWAT, DIR, and Bajur.
• With UNFPA funding, JPI addressing gender-based violence cases through alternative dispute resolution in camps housing large numbers of host-community and internally displaced peoples.

Manas Ghanem, MA’06��

• ��Project Development Officer, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), now based in London, England
• Native of Syria employed by UNHCR, 2006-11, delivering direct support to refugees and displaced peoples due to violent conflict in such countries as Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen.
• “My work now [beginning in 2012] is more of coordination of private sector fundraising in support of various operations around the world, because most of the operations are underfunded, and refugees and displaced are in dire need of every support, even if little.”
• “UNHCR is present in every conflict area to help, with dedicated and passionate staff.”
• “The agency does not have a political mandate to influence political peacemaking. But I see it as one of the most effective peacemakers on the ground, with its efforts to reduce the suffering and to call the international community to show compassion and participate in sharing the burden of helping.”
• “Often when I am in the middle of something problematic, I find myself recalling CJP classes or a discussion with a CJP professor regarding organizations, theory, human rights, practices in conflict transformation, mediation and restorative justice.”
• “Most importantly, I remember STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience) – I try to always find ways to take care of myself and to recall that self-care is important, if I am to help others.”

Amy Rebecca Marsico, MA ’09

• Manager of NYC-based stage productions; conflict and peacebuilding consultant
• Presented arts-based approaches to peacebuilding to UN Interagency Framework Team for Preventive Action
• Did practicum for her MA at UNHCR in the Community Development, Gender Equality and Children section.
• Promoted AGDM (age, gender and diversity mainstreaming), whereby refugee women, men, boys and girls contribute to the design and implementation of programs, identify own protection risks, and participate in finding sustainable solutions.
• Helped develop the Heightened Risk Identification Tool, a field tool used to identify refugees at risk.
• “To be part of work that was engaging in long-term change processes – seeing refugees as active partners instead of passively waiting for a handout – was incredibly meaningful.”

Sarah Crawford-Browne of South Africa was one of these people. She took Strategies in Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) Level I in August 2005, followed by STAR Level II in April 2006.

In a first-person piece posted on the CJP website September 7, 2012, she tells part of her story:

One day, I witnessed a double murder/assassination whilst looking out my living room window. I had just spent five years working with trauma in Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uganda and Sudan. Now I was head of service at a trauma center in Cape Town.

The center runs a 24-hour response service to crises in the city, so when I saw the murders, I grabbed my neon-colored response jacket and my response backpack and went down to help. I was involved the full night. Due to the demands of my resource-challenged center, I went right on to work the next day without sleeping.

This incident proved to be the tipping point for Crawford-Browne. She had worked at the Cape Town trauma center for ten months, and she continued working there for another eight months in an effort to fulfill the center’s contractual obligations.��But she began to exhibit classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

I woke up at about 1 a.m. completely confused. My mind swirled in a series of primitive emotions. Nothing was making much sense. The emotions were not linked to language and I could not access words. Eventually at about 5 a.m., I thought, “I am going mad.” And that thought somehow linked me to the psycho-education pamphlets that I’ve given out so frequently which list common experiences of people who have witnessed violence.��One of them is feeling like you’re going mad. I then realized that I was traumatized.

Drawing on her training as a trauma expert and clinical social worker, Crawford-Browne knew she needed to ease the “hyper-arousal” that is typical of PTSD by unwinding regularly and removing herself from situations that set her off.

Unwinding required that I ground myself, consciously getting back in contact with my center, getting back into my body. What specifically helped me to do this was listening deeply to music, meditation, knitting, journaling – activities where I could be engaged whilst unwinding the layers of caught-up energy. Being in spaces where I could be alone and have quiet, not noise, helped, too. Sometimes it meant creating a small ritual to divert energy that was distressing. It took about eight months until the PTSD abated.

As active practitioners��in the fields of peace and justice, most of the faculty and staff of CJP have themselves faced the challenges of “burnout.” After the arrival of Ron Kraybill as a faculty member in 1995, the curriculum of CJP expanded to include recognizing the signs of burnout and addressing it, as well as improving day-to-day interactions. In Kraybill’s words:

It took 15 years of full-time work with peace initiatives before it dawned on me that it is not lack of skill or money that most severely limits the organizations I know best. Rather it is the struggle of staff in those organizations to get along with each other and with other organizations around them, compounded by fatigue and burnout of individuals in them.

Kraybill developed a course called “Disciplines for Transforming the Peacebuilder” and drafted a book titled Self-Care for Caregivers. Restorative techniques taught by Kraybill, embraced and enlarged upon by other faculty members since the 1990s, include an afternoon nap, regular exercise, yoga, meditation with breath work, having mentors or counselors, adequate sleep, involvement in a faith community, relaxing activities such as dancing, playing music and doing art, keeping a journal, and reserving time for quality relationships with family members and friends.

In 2004, CJP brought David Brubaker aboard as the faculty member focused on teaching ways to build “healthy” organizations, where leaders and team members have the self-awareness and skills necessary to address inevitable conflicts in a positive manner.

In the 2013 Summer Peacebuilding Institute, out of 20 courses offered, four pertained to understanding psychosocial trauma and nurturing resilience for sustained peacebuilding. Toward the end of one of these seven-day courses, Al Fuertes told his students: “We cannot give what we don’t have. Who heals the healers?”

Projecting to the future, CJP calls in its current five-year strategic plan for continued emphasis on “personal, relational, and spiritual well-being.”

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

Washington, D.C.

Before Sandra Dunsmore became a CTP student, she worked for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in El Salvador. During the last two years of El Salvador’s war, from 1990 to 1992, she met with, listened to, and encouraged the leaders of labor, peasant and business organizations to enter into a process of dialogue about the future of their country.

After the war ended, Sandra acted as executive secretary to the Economic and Social Forum, a mechanism established by the 1992 Peace Accords. “Although the forum never addressed deep-rooted economic and social issues, as envisioned by many of us at its beginning, I continued despite its limitations because I wanted the government, business and popular leaders involved to experience the potential of multi-sector negotiation,” she told Peacebuilder.

“Those were intense and hard years. I never admitted to AFSC the psychological toll that my work was taking.”

While still in El Salvador, Sandra was able take Ron Kraybill’s “disciplines to sustain the peacebuilder” course via email correspondence. “The course was hugely important for me. Ron played an important role in helping me process my experiences and regain energy for future peacebuilding work.”

During the 13 years since finishing her graduate studies, however, it is the teachings of John Paul Lederach that have proved to be the most enduring aspect of her 91����Ƶ experience. “His approach to conflict transformation has informed everything that I have done professionally.”

Sandra, who is a native of Winnipeg, Canada, spent a total of 13 years in Central America. In addition to the AFSC, she worked for the Organization of American States where she headed up the team that developed their first peacebuilding program, and consulted for the United Nations Development Programme and for USAID. She returned to Canada to be president of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, which trains thousands of people annually for peace operations globally.

As Latin America director for Open Society Foundations, Sandra leads a team of eight in Washington DC and three consultants in Latin America to determine how to disperse the Open Society’s grant money in Latin America.

As befits the vision of Open Society’s founder, George Soros, the Latin America program is focused on support for democratic governance – notably citizen security, access to information, transparency and accountability, human rights and improved public policies (including changes in US foreign policy relative to Latin America).