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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Working in this field is an enormous personal challenge for everyone,” said Dettori, policy and programs staffing coordinator at the WFP’s headquarters in Rome, Italy. “The main challenge for this work is reconciling it with personal life and living in difficult environments, having to move your family around the world, having to leave your family in many situations.”

Dettori, nearly finished with her MA specializing in organizational development, has spent considerable time in stressful work environments herself, including four years in Darfur, Sudan. She began that WFP assignment in 2005, the same year that she first attended the at EMU. Ever since, Dettori has been chipping away at her graduate degree one summer at a time at the summer institute, while continuing to work for the WFP, the food relief agency in the UN system.

While her initial goal at was to study development and peacebuilding (she also worked in Burundi for at one point), her focus began to shift to the internal workings of development and peacebuilding organizations.

“The core of the job is what we do in the field in the country offices, but I have come to realize how much internal organizational dynamics have an impact on how effective our work in the field is,” said Dettori. “If you haven’t got the right staff in the organization, you may have funds and great strategies, but the impact will be minimized.”

A leadership class taught by , associate professor of organizational studies, was key to that realization, said Dettori.

She shifted her work from the field in Darfur to the WFP’s Rome headquarters in 2009. There, Dettori’s main focus is career development for the WFP’s program staff, who comprise about a third of the organization’s 14,000 employees. Acting as an intermediary between WFP program officers and human resources, Dettori provides career advice, coaching and guidance to program staff on stressful field assignments. Without the right personnel functioning healthily, she said, the best strategies and plenty of funding won’t get an organization very far.

Her attraction to CJP was both practical – by taking summer courses through SPI, she could continue working full-time – and based on the program’s reputation for being at the leading edge of its field. The experience so far has met every expectation: “Nearly everything I’ve learned has been of real practical utility for me in my daily life as a person and as a professional,” she said, adding that “CJP has been a lot more than just acquiring technical knowledge.”

Having shifted her focus from the more visible peacebuilding and development work carried out in the field by agencies like the WFP to the equally important behind-the-scenes work of organizational effectiveness, Dettori said CJP has valuable things to teach other large institutions.

The subject of “conflict-sensitive” development and humanitarian work, which looks at minimizing the negative impact and maximizing the positive influence of this work on conflicts on the ground, has become an increasing priority for the WFP and elsewhere in the UN system, she said. By providing more people with practical and theoretical training in this area, she said CJP has the potential to play an influential role in improving the effectiveness of UN programs around the world.

But the tough part of returning Nepal to some semblance of normality had just begun. Jha found himself responsible for the social re-integration of the Maoists’ 3,000 child soldiers (i.e., those under age 18) slated for release under the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Accord.

To Jha’s surprise, many of these youthful soldiers didn’t want to be freed. “They didn’t see it the way the international community did – they wanted to stay with the Maoists; it was a source of identity and pride for them,” said Jha.

In hindsight, Jha wishes the UN had been able to have access to the child soldiers long before the Maoists released them into civilian life. With more time, he and his colleagues might have been able to address their concerns.

As it was, Jha’s team was under pressure – other aspects of the peace process hinged on the release of the child soldiers – so they had to push the young people into deciding among 40 UN-sponsored options, including training in a healthcare profession, starting small businesses with micro-loans, and vocational training (to be, for example, electricians or cooks).

Jha thinks the reintegration package was one of the most comprehensive that the UN has ever put together, but the years of child soldiering had not prepared these young people to be receptive to what they were being offered.

Every action has unintended consequences

Six years later, sitting in a spacious waterfront room used for informal conversations at UN headquarters in New York City, Jha ponders the gap between the ideal application of peacebuilding principles and the realities that peace practitioners often face.

“There is no action that does not have unintended consequences, no matter what you do and how well intentioned you are,” says Jha, who moved in 2010 from Nepal to NYC, where he now works on issues related to children and armed conflict, with a focus on Africa.* “The UN’s efforts to free and rehabilitate child soldiers in Nepal were perceived as coercive by many of the soldiers – causing them to feel unsettled and full of anxiety.”

Jha looks burdened by this memory, adding: “It’s a struggle to put theories into practice. You try to make the best choice at that time, at that moment. The peace process will never be perfect.” Jha derives satisfaction from interactions with his colleagues, whom he describes as highly intelligent, multilingual people from around the world, who often bring special expertise to their UN work. But he adds that the overall system tends to be characterized by a “culture of competitiveness,” based on jostling for funding, authority and responsibilities.

Reflecting on his CJP years, Jha says he values the theoretical frameworks he gained, giving him an ability to analyze conflicts and to identify what part of a theory is useful and applicable in a given situation. “I’m better able to look at a situation and make sense of it.”

Jha says CJP’s emphasis on building and bridging relationships in any situation is one of his biggest take-aways; he credits “the culture and values of Mennonites” for inculcating a particular style of leadership in himself and other graduates.

Likes Mennonite way of empowering others

“CJP taught us to be self-reflective and to recognize that it’s never one person who has transformed something – hundreds of people contribute. And the more you acknowledge that and expand the circle, the better the outcome will be.”

In the Mennonite tradition, he says, “the emphasis is on enabling others, empowering others, encouraging others.” He adds that students sense Mennonites promote and teach peacebuilding because of their long-standing values, not just for professional reasons. (Jha, a Hindu, is married to a 2010 CJP graduate, Jill Landis, a Mennonite. They have two daughters.)

“It’s distressing for me to see people who act as if they have all the answers. It’s harmful. It’s very difficult to do this peacebuilding work in a way that isn’t damaging. The need to be humble, that’s one of the most important lessons I got at CJP.”

Article originally published in magazine, Fall/Winter 2013.

His journey with the began soon after receiving his master’s degree as a Fulbright Scholar at CJP. Ramiah joined the in late 2002 as a peace and development analyst in his home country, as it moved toward a bloody end to its civil war in 2009.

In 2010, the UNDP shifted Ramiah to its headquarters in New York City, where he started as the conflict and prevention specialist for Asia and the Pacific and is now a team leader for the .

Walking toward his office in the Secretariat building diagonally across First Avenue from UN headquarters, Ramiah pointed at door after door and named some of the countries represented by his colleagues: Egypt, Somalia, Gambia, Colombia, Finland, Canada, Kenya and Serbia. During an elevator ride, warm pleasantries were exchanged and visitors introduced. … All of which lent support to Ramiah’s characterization of his colleagues as being committed, hard-working people who do an amazing job of working well together despite cultural, linguistic, and religious differences.

In a speech to attendees at EMU’s 2012 , he assured them “you are in the right place,” and encouraged them to master written English, if they had not done so already. He said he felt ambivalent about native speakers of other languages, like himself, having to embrace English for formal communication, but in UN circles where employees have hundreds of native languages, a shared language is necessary.

Among the lessons Ramiah offered from his UN work are:

1. Relationships are essential both for sustaining oneself as a peacebuilder and for doing the work of building peace. He advised his SPI audience to use the CJP network for feedback and support. And he stressed the importance of remembering the humanity and needs in each person, no matter how much one disagrees with his or her actions and viewpoints.

2. Conflict analysis and conflict sensitivity are critical in this field. Doing a proper analysis at the front end, based on being sensitive to ways in which conflicts might be sparked or worsened, before planning interventions is in keeping with the “first do no harm” principle, and it allows one to identify and build upon peacebuilding work that is already on the ground.

3. Bridging the divide between theory and practice. Ramiah noted that UN personnel struggle with bridging the gap between great projects on paper that aren’t implementable in reality. “Are there capacities on the ground to implement this project?” is a question that always needs to be answered. “Sometimes we design a space craft and give it to a bicycle shop to implement,” Ramiah said wryly. CJP, however, does a good job of showing how to bridge the gap, he added.

4. Genuine change comes from those who own it. The international community too often takes a “tool kit” approach, bringing in the same set of tools to each setting, rather than recognizing and working with the actual capacity of people in a given setting.

5. Systemic change requires some trained peacebuilders to work within large bureaucratic structures such as the UN, but there is also the occupational hazard of settling into being the “quintessential bureaucrat and becoming arrogantly egotistical without realizing it.”

When UN officials travel around the world, they are often kept “in a bubble” with armed protection against assaults. Ramiah offered two remedies: (1) returning to work in the field, at the grassroots, at regular intervals; (2) making a point to step back, to think, to reflect, to ask sympathetic outsiders, “Am I – are we in my group – on the right track?”

Article originally published in magazine, Fall/Winter 2013.

It’s because he had to leave his home country of Ethiopia when his friends and relatives were being killed or imprisoned during the Derg’s 13-year military dictatorship.

He got to the United States on a student visa in 1973 and kept plowing through a succession of degrees while his parents were telling him: “Stay out. Stay where you are, or you will be killed.”

Assefa was able to return safely to Ethiopia in the early 1990s. By then he was married to a U.S. citizen, with two daughters.

In hindsight, Assefa treasures the breadth and depth of his formal graduate studies – law, economics, public management, and international affairs. “The more I learned, the more it whet my appetite to learn more,” he told magazine.

“I realized the benefit of this broad background when writing my dissertation. Every discipline gave me a different lens for looking at conflict and peace, and it was most useful to integrate them together and come up with a multi-disciplinary approach.”

Before coming to the United States, Assefa practiced law briefly in Ethiopia. “There was not a lot of integrity in the profession. It was competitive, and I felt like I was a hired hand for the elite. I felt co-opted into the system.”

Later in Chicago, when he again was part of a law firm, he felt the same discomfort. “The lack of integrity wasn’t as blatant as it had been in the Ethiopian judicial system – it wasn’t as crude – but it was there.” These experiences weren’t a waste – he believes studying and practicing law sharpened his analytical capacity and enriched his later work in the peace field.

Assefa turned to economics, earning a master’s degree in the field, in an attempt to understand poverty. He found economists have “fantastic ideas” – “great insights” – but offered little in terms of addressing poverty. If one tries to understand “economics without politics, it’s like clapping with one hand,” he says. “You need to understand politics to understand the role of power in economic systems.”

Outside of formal graduate programs, Assefa has delved deeply into psychology, philosophy and religion, subjects he needed to “put it all together.” As the “icing on the cake,” Assefa turned to studying peace and conflict transformation, plus practicing in the field, for 30 years now.*

“The kind of knowledge needed to be a peacemaker is not easy to define – I feel it more than I can talk about it. I think we have to start by reclaiming our humanity. Who are we as human beings? What is our place in the universe? What is life itself?” he asks.

“Human beings are not separate from everything in our environment. We cannot treat our environment as a group of objects to be used as we wish. We are part of an interdependent whole. If we can come to recognize this reality – that our survival, our well-being, derives from the healthiness of this interdependence – our attitude will change towards other humans, indeed towards all life and every aspect of living in this world.”

As Assefa gropes for words to describe the lack of awareness among humans about their place in the web of life, he explains that the English language limits his ability to articulate his feelings on this subject. “I am writing a book in Amharic now – though I stopped using it [his native language] 40 years ago – because it lets me touch on ideas that I can’t explain in English well. It lets me be less inhibited, less apologetic for exploring [in his book] the non-cognitive aspects of life and being that go beyond regular social science academic discourse.

“Some of what I want to say is beyond the intellect – in fact relying on the intellect alone can become a hindrance. It is part of the problem with discourse in the Global North: the main framework is intellectual, with very little room for the affective and spiritual.”

Assefa says there is wisdom in the perception of some indigenous elders that the so-called developed North tends to function as an immature child within the family of humankind, acting impulsively and without much self-reflection. “I hope the family will survive the growing-up stage of the child,” Assefa says wryly, adding that socio-economic and military practices of the so-called developed world underlie much suffering in the world today.

When Assefa feels tempted to succumb to despair, he calls to mind miraculous, heart-to-heart moments, like a time in 2006 when he was one of two with whom Joseph Kony agreed to meet in a remote area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kony, known to have used tens of thousands of children as soldiers and sex-slaves, had been indicted the previous year by the UN’s International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“After being lured into the bush, we were surrounded by armed people. I thought we were being kidnapped,” says Assefa. But when he finally met Kony face-to-face and spoke gently with him, Kony met Assefa’s eyes and said, “I never knew my father. Can I call you my father?” The question touched Assefa to his core – not that it diminished the enormity of the harm that Kony had set in motion for millions.

“I felt moved to see a flicker of humanity and vulnerability in this incredibly cruel and overtly invincible human being,” says Assefa. “It made me realize that compassion ought to be the starting point for peacework. The work of peacemaking is to nurture these little glimpses, however faint, and bring them out so that they can shine more and light up the darkness in our humanity.”

# # # #

Article originally published in magazine, Fall/Winter 2013.

“Until now, I have seen a top-down approach for solving problems,” Abou said in a May 2011 interview with Peacebuilder.

Abou comes from the Tuareg ethnic group, who traditionally live nomadically in the Saharan interior of North Africa. The famous Berbers of Morocco are part of this same group.

Though Abou was raised with family members who continue to lead the nomadic life in the dessert – to this day, his mother herds her own camels, goats and sheep across a vast territory – Abou went a different route. He pursued higher education and became a high-ranking police officer at age 27, initially based in Mali.

By 2008, he was deputy director of the National Policy Academy in Mali. He 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. As a police instructor and trainer, he has worked with the United Nations. He has been a consultant and facilitator at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Canada.

Despite his impressive credentials, Abou does not present himself as someone who “knows it all”— that is, as someone who prefers issuing commands rather than listening thoughtfully. Instead he seems like the type of kindly and thoughtful person that anyone would want as a neighbor, friend, father, or brother.

Abou speaks of walking 10 to 15 miles to attend a French-language school as a child and of being 11 when he lost his father, an army soldier, to sickness.

Abou explains that after Mali started shifting to a democratic political system in 1990, its police force began to open itself up to minority peoples. Abou was one of the first Tuareg persons to rise to a senior police position.

At CJP, Abou says he is trying to gain a deeper understanding of the roots of conflict – and ways to mitigate it, short of using force that contributes to the cycles of violence. “I want to be a peace officer in the future,” he says. “Our prisons are full – the police and courts cannot guarantee stability and peace.”

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

Abou has seen a society that represents, for him, the worst possible social degradation. It was in Darfur. There for a while, Abou 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.

He 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 says in a soft-spoken voice.

John Paul Lederach

John Paul Lederach, the co-founding director of the Conflict Transformation Program at EMU, now the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), will speak at 7 p.m. in Martin Chapel of the seminary building on “The Poetics of Peacebuilding.”

“Peacebuilding requires an eternal belief in the creative act, the building and coaxing of imagination itself,” Dr. Lederach has stated. He will elaborate in his presentation.

Lederach is currently professor of international peacebuilding at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame University. He received the Reinhold Niebuhr Award from Notre Dame on May 19, 2009, given annually to a Notre Dame student, faculty member or administrator whose life and writings promote or exemplify social justice.

Lederach was named a “distinguished scholar” on the faculty of EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and returns to teach in CJP’s annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI).

He has authored and co-edited 15 books and manuals in English and Spanish, including The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005), The Journey Toward Reconciliation (Herald Press, 1999), Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (Syracuse University Press, 1995), Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (USIP, 1997) and The Little Book of Conflict Transformation (Good Books, 2003).

Lederach received his PhD in sociology with a concentration in the Social Conflict Program from the University of Colorado. He and his wife, Wendy, have two children, Angie and Josh.

Admission to the program is free. A reception with refreshments will follow at 8:30 p.m.

For more information, call Phoebe Kilby, 540-432-4581 or email: phoebe.kilby@emu.edu.

Read more…

Instead they found themselves cowering with 10 other friends and relatives in two small rooms, with no food and little water, as bloody inter-religious riots swirled outside their hiding place.

When the rampage subsided, 3,000 in his city were dead. Relatives and friends had lost their property. Some had lost their lives. “Every knowledge I had about peace disappeared completely,” recalls Tapkida. “You don’t know where to begin.”

Tapkida’s journey from the depths of numb shock to breaking the cycle of violence is recounted in an earlier issue of .

As a sequel, here is a report from a recent observer of Tapkida’s work: “While at EMU in 2003, I did my practicum under the in Jos, Nigeria, where Gopar Tapkida was heading the peace program,” writes Priscilla A. Adoyo, a 2003 masters in conflict transformation graduate. “It seemed to me that Gopar was faced with a daunting task, and I really wondered how long it would take before we saw the fruit of his labor.

“Well, I had the privilege of going back there for my doctoral research last summer [2006], and I was truly amazed at how effective and widespread the trainings in had been. There was a remarkable difference in just three years. There is plenty of hope for peacebuilders.”

Tapkida, MA ’01, and his wife Monica are West Africa regional peace coordinators for Mennonite Central Committee, based in their home country of Nigeria.

Adoyo, a Nigerian who is a PhD candidate at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., adds: “I am eager now to get my studies over and done with, so I can go out there where the real learning takes place!”

Tapkida will be teaching the course “Identity and Transformation” with professor at the 2008.

Article originally published in magazine, Winter 2008.