Shortsville, New York

In the late 1960s, around the time of his first stint as an EMU student, Willy Bontrager did voluntary service in the Congo for two years and in Nigeria for a year and a half. Upon returning home, he spent a couple of decades as a dairy farmer in western New York State. Willy next tried his hand at a “thoroughly boring” bakery business. He underwent training in the Quaker-founded Alternatives to Violence Program (AVP) and became an AVP volunteer in Attica Prison, a high-security institution near his home. After a volatile prison incident that he handled successfully, he began talking to his first cousin, Vernon Jantzi, about EMU’s fledgling program in conflict transformation.

Willy was then 55 years old, with a son in grade 8 and a daughter in grade 1. Was it foolish of him to pursue a master’s degree at a university located almost 8 hours by car from his home? With the support of his wife, a school psychologist, Willy finally decided to enroll. He drove the 16-hour round-trip to weekend and summer classes for four years. The next stage in Willy’s history is described on www.pirirochester.org, the website of Partners in Restorative Justice Initiatives. It reads, in part:

While completing his master’s degree in restorative justice at ��ݮ���� in March 1998, Will Bontrager gathered members of Rochester’s governmental departments, nonprofit agencies, victim advocacy groups and interested individuals to introduce them to the principles of restorative justice. Less than two years later, in May 2000, Bontrager founded the Finger Lakes Restorative Justice Center.

He directed the center until 2003, then stepped away because “I disliked intensely applying for grants,” and he felt fresh energy was needed. Today the center has reached dozens of schools, courts and communities – and hundreds of people – in western New York State through trainings, facilitations and presentations. Some schools arrange for all their personnel to be trained in restorative practices, including doing circles in the classroom. In one recent year, the organization handled 40 cases referred from area courts. Comments Willy: “You never know when you start something, how it will turn out and how many people you will impact.”

Silver Spring, Maryland

Fidele Lumeya feels that much of the material he covered to obtain his master’s degree in conflict transformation actually was embodied in African traditions of living in community, working out problems peaceably, and practicing reconciliation.

Fidele articulated some of his views in a 2009 French-language book The Culture of Peace: From Traditional African and Judeo-Christian Perspectives. He has just finished writing The Congo: The Long Road to Peace and Justice, in which he proposes Africa-rooted restorative justice practices as the way to address deep-seated, real issues rather than their symptoms.

In 2001, Fidele co-wrote a training manual, African Culture: Source of Conflict, Resource for Peace, which he used in teaching an “introduction to conflict transformation” course at the African Peacebuilding Institute held at the Mindolo Ecumenical Center in Zambia. The manual has been published in English and Portuguese and has been used by the Council of Christian Churches of Angola, the Council for Church of Christ in Angola and JustaPaz, based in Mozambique.

Like many of his fellow graduates of CTP, Fidele says funding is at, or near, the top of the challenges faced by people in the peacebuilding field. “Agencies will fund you for one week of training, but there is [generally] no money for follow-up, for the long-term work necessary to sustain the momentum begun by the week of training.”

Fidele credits Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), Catholic Relief Services and Church World Service for funding difficult work at the grassroots level year after year, decade after decade, rather than basing their funding on the social-issue fads that tend to sweep through the peacebuilding field.

Fidele enrolled in CTP in 1998 after three years of working for MCC in the war-torn eastern section of the Congo and in Swaziland. After earning his master’s degree, Fidele resumed his work with MCC, this time in Zambia and Angola from 2001 to 2003.

Fidele is the executive director of the Congolese American Council for Peace and Justice ().  He is a French-language commentator on justice and peace issues for the Voice of America.