Doreen was determined to use what she had learned to help shape peace and justice work in Kenya and the wider region. She applied appreciative inquiry in research and evaluation projects in Karamoja. She developed a learning community entitled “Justice that Heals” in Kenya, bringing together people from ten different ethnic groups, diverse professional, geographic and religious origins (from informal settlements, rural and urban, educators, peacebuilders, church leaders, military, police, emergency responders, donors, Muslims and Christians). She wanted to shape a different kind of conversation about justice and possibilities for long-term peace in Kenya, and she led that with her own story, creativity and relationships.

She and her organization, Daima Initiatives for Peace and Development (DIPaD), both engaged in long-term projects and responded to various crises in Kenya, including the Westgate mall and Garissa attacks, by offering STAR-based learning opportunities for survivors and responders. Many of the participants “came to see her as a second mother,” reports Carol Makanda, one of Doreen’s close colleagues working with the students from Garissa.

Personal impacts toward systemic change

The personal vulnerability and compassionate listening Doreen infused into her work brought new life to many participants who worked with her.

• One woman from Mt. Elgon who went through a STAR training with Doreen arrived with painful stories and imminent plans for a stomach surgery for her ulcers. By the end of the week, this woman was leading song and dance. We wondered how sustainable the change would be when she returned home. In the following months, she reported that she no longer needed the surgery. She explained that before she came to the training, she was planning revenge attacks and trading guns and bullets; in the months and years after the training, she was involved in assisting other women who had survived violence, no longer involved in the work of revenge.
• A young man who had been trapped in Westgate mall participated in DIPaD’s response to those attacks. He entered limping, due to the shrapnel still embedded in his leg. At the end of his week engaged in STAR with Doreen and other learners, he said, “I thought a few days ago that I have a limp… and today I can see that I have a new way of walking.”
• In the Justice that Heals learning community, Doreen’s skillful facilitation of a caring and connective environment made space for a relationship between youths from Korogocho, one of Nairobi’s informal settlements, and a police chaplain. In this time of police brutality and deeply rooted distrust between young people and police in so many of the world’s cities, their communication and embrace was at least surprising, if not miraculous.

Facilitating with Doreen, I witnessed a woman who could speak so many languages, not only Nandi, Swahili and English. She knew how to understand and make sense to people in the rural areas, how to resonate with highly educated, cosmopolitan urbanites, how to connect to urban youth who had not had access to education, how to bridge across cultures both local and international. She taught with her life, which traversed these many terrains – from the shamba (farm) to the city, from Kenya to the UK to the US, from quiet youths to high-ranking military and government officials.

She spoke and listened with her heart. She shaped spaces where people could encounter a healthy form of power, in her as facilitator and in themselves. She helped people understand the impacts of trauma and cultivate their resources for resilience. She started where she was, whether with her sons at home, with her team at the office, with loved ones in a foreign land, or participants in a healing circle.

Doreen passed away too soon on January 21, 2016. We dedicate this e-zine to her powerful memory, and we hope that the many seeds she planted may continue to bear nourishing fruit.

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

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

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

Detouring six hours to reconnect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always more to learn

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

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

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

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

Seven times at SPI

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

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

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

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

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

Loves the diverse people

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

Her favorite part about SPI?

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

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

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

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

by Doreen Ruto, MA ’06

In May 2001, a federal court in New York convicted four suspects of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. They were later sentenced to life imprisonment. As a victim who attended the trial, I gave testimony on the victim impact to determine the sentencing of the suspects.

I remember looking at the suspects as I gave my testimony, and how it suddenly occurred to me that, even if the suspects were sent to the execution chamber, it would never bring back the lives of my late husband and the 240 other Kenyans who died in the terrorist attack. What was more important and urgent to me then and now was not the court battles between the prosecution and the defense attorneys, but a more meaningful process, one that would reveal a sense of remorse and accountability on the part of the offenders for the suffering and loss that their acts of violence had cost me, my two sons and the rest of the Kenyans.

To those of us who seek to end violence and injustice in our societies, it is necessary to ask the following questions:

• Do the current justice systems create harmony and healing in society?
• Does the judicial process promote a sense of reconciliation for both parties in a way that is respectful and life giving rather than adversarial?

If not, do we need to consider additional forms of creative justice that will heal and reconcile communities alongside the legal system?

I have taken a keen interest in alternative justice systems, those that look at the relationship of parties beyond the courtroom in order to address the needs of both the victims and the offenders and to heal communities. Most have their roots in the indigenous African justice systems. They propose that any form of violence against an individual is a violation of the basic needs of safety and security. Most indigenous forms of justice were wary of retributive justice since it would only serve to further polarize the community and the relationships therein. The systems therefore attempted to restore community harmony first and foremost, rather than hastily punish the offenders.

In a paradigm shift, some of the victims of violent crime, with the help of the court and a trained facilitator, have requested to meet the offender in face-to-face meetings outside the courtroom so that the victims can ask those vital questions that are left unanswered by the legal system, yet are very crucial and personal to their healing process.

The creation of such a “safe space” for both the victims and offenders is not usually provided for by the judicial system. The defense’s focus is on finding the offender not guilty while the prosecution seeks a guilty verdict. The victims are therefore asked questions that further traumatize them.

Victim advocacy groups are now requesting judges and defense lawyers to pay attention to the needs of the victims and find ways that are sensitive to all who are affected by crime or acts of violence. If victims take the lead in the process, they are able to effectively end the cycles of violence by dealing with their own feelings of revenge.

My own experience as a victim of violence taught me that justice and healing do not come easily. Even if the court found the suspects guilty and sentenced them to life imprisonment, I still had to deal with my own feelings of anger and bitterness. It took several years to realize that sometimes all the justice a victim needs is an apology from the offender, an acknowledgement from the rest of the community/society that something wrong and awful happened, and the assurance that such a thing will never happen again.

[This is a revised version of a longer essay that appeared in Wajibu (Vol. 24, No. 4, 2009), a quarterly journal “of social and ethical concern,” published by Gerald J. Wanjohi in Nairobi, Kenya. It is reprinted by permission of the author and publisher. When she wrote this essay, , MA ’06, worked for the USAID Office of Transitional Initiatives in Nairobi as a monitoring and evaluation officer. She now teaches at , using a peace curriculum that she developed with fellow teacher , MA ’07.]

EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) has more MA graduates in conflict transformation in Kenya than in any other country of the world, except the United States.

Thirteen graduate-level alumni or professors are based in Kenya. Our Summer Peacebuilding Institute has hosted 50 people from Kenya, including Dekha Ibrahim Abdi, one of six named from around the world as recipients of the 2007 Right Livelihood Award. Seven U.S.-based CJP faculty and staff members have done peace-themed work in Kenya.

So, where were “our” people when the killing started? Ironically, most were taking a brief break from their usual jam-packed work lives, like folks everywhere tend to do over the Christmas holiday period. Let’s look at these three people – Doreen Ruto, Babu Ayindo and Hizkias Assefa – as examples of the range of responses from the CJP group to the violence.

Doreen Ruto

Much of last year, Doreen Ruto, MA ’06, collaborated with Babu Ayindo, MA ’98, on developing a curriculum designed to teach conflict-transformation and peace education skills in Kenyan classrooms. By Christmas 2007, the UNICEF-funded project was nearing the pilot-stage of testing the curriculum in some schools and refining it. Ruto’s 11-year-old son Ronnie was out of school for the holiday period. (Her older son, Richard Bikko, was and is an undergrad at EMU.) She left Ronnie with cousins and went to vote on December 27.

“It was the first time in my life that I voted. I just was not interested before,” she says. “But after going through CJP, I went back and said, ‘We need to be part of the change.’”

(Ruto came to CJP as part of her healing process – and desire to explore the path of nonviolent change – after losing her husband, the father of her two sons, in a terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. Her husband was not the target of the attack; he was in a neighboring building that collapsed.)

“I stood six or seven hours on the queue to vote. I was so determined. I wanted to see a difference. I wanted Kenya to have a more inclusive government and not confine its leadership to one part of the country.”

Ruto comes from an ethnic group that is different from the one of the current president. To understand why this is highly significant in her country, read “Towards Understanding the Violence in Kenya” on page 17.

When the violence began, Ruto was at home in Nairobi with Ronnie. They were imprisoned by the violence. Outside their doors, in the streets, supporters of her ethnic group were attacking and killing others and vice versa. After three days, she decided “enough.” She phoned George Wachira, senior research and policy advisor of the Nairobi Peace Initiative, to discuss what steps to take.

By January 2, Ruto, Wachira, Abdi and about 60 others – including Jebiwot Sumbeiywo’s uncle, Lt. Gen. Lazarus Sumbeiywo – convened at the Serena Hotel in downtown Nairobi. They called themselves Concerned Citizens for Peace.

For Ruto, traveling via taxi to the meeting took faith and courage. Soldiers and tear gas filled the streets. Roaming bands of young men could easily stop a taxi and pull out a single female occupant whose ethnicity did not suit them. Ruto had left Ronnie in the care of relatives, hoping that she would be returning to her son at the end of the day.

About 10 of the 60 in Concerned Citizens for Peace had a history linking them to CJP and thus to each other. Perhaps most remarkable – and fortuitous in this situation – the Kenyans trained at CJP have come from seven different ethnic groups. Ruto sat across the table from Anne Nyambura, MA ’06, who comes from the ethnic group viewed to be “in power” in Kenya.

“As graduates of CJP, we speak the same language,” says Ruto. “We see what is going on through the same lenses. We condemn the same injustices, even if we may have voted differently.”

More on Ruto follows in Babu Ayindo’s story.

Babu Ayindo

Doreen Ruto’s collaborator on the UNICEF-funded peace curriculum for schools, Babu Ayindo, MA ’98, was among the first Africans to earn a master’s degree in conflict transformation at EMU.

If you Google his name, you will find that he has led trainings in places as diverse as South Korea, Fiji, Australia, the Philippines, and most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. He is renowned for using improvisational theater techniques in conflict transformation.

Yet at the end of December 2007, Ayindo was doing none of the above. He was in his backyard – literally. He was in a city on the edge of the Rift Valley. He was eight hours by bus from Nairobi, but only 100 meters from the area where violence would be the worst over the next several weeks.

“My wife and I have a quarter-acre farm where we raise cattle, goats, chickens. We grow passion fruit, mango, cabbage, kale, tomatoes, onions,” says Ayindo. “My wife grew up on a farm. We are resurrecting a tradition of sustaining oneself. Having constant contact with the land is important. I want my children to experience all this.”

Ayindo took a break from his gardening to cast his vote for the opposition on December 27. Not that he thought a new president might bring great change to Kenya – more equity, less corruption – but he thought it might be an improvement.

Then the attacks began on non-Luos in the streets outside his compound. Ayindo is Luo (though “I don’t look like the typical Luo”); his mother and wife are Luhya. “The crowds were out with stones and other crude weapons, looting and driving away people perceived to be sympathetic or to have voted for other parties (other than the Orange Democratic Movement). The police and the para-military were engaging the crowds with tear gas and live bullets.

“We kept down and away from the windows. Our three kids (ages 14, 10 and 4) came to recognize the sound of every type of gun. They saw their first dead people…I wish they hadn’t.”

By the end of the first week – a week with no water and electricity in his home – Ayindo was in cell-phone contact with George Kut of the Nairobi Peace Initiative. Kut flew to join Ayindo and by January 9 they were traveling through parts of the Rift Valley and Nyanza regions together, listening to people, particularly the youth, to learn more about what was going on. On January 12, they reported their findings back to the Nairobi Peace Initiative.

Their main recommendation was to urge peace workers to “listen deeply in order to understand the root causes of the unprecedented violence,” says Ayindo. The Nairobi Peace Initiative later expanded this “listening project” to other parts of Kenya.

Meanwhile, the Concerned Citizens for Peace had started circulating peace messages – “choose peace and not violence” and “let’s give dialogue a chance” – via cooperating cell phone companies and mass media. They put up a website, www.peaceinkenya.net, which presented constructive ways out of the conflict and offered the personal cell numbers of CCP’s leaders, including Abdi’s. Celebrities weighed in with a song of peace played widely on the radio. It began to be hummed throughout the country.

Out in the land of the center of the opposition, Ayindo felt that the youthful voices of despair that he had listened to over several days were not being addressed by the peace messages coming from Nairobi. “If the grievances of the people in the streets get ignored, another cycle of violence will occur. And I didn’t hear enough about addressing those grievances.”

Ayindo’s colleague Doreen Ruto – who had also voted for the opposition – was saddened by a text message she received after speaking on TV about the need for dialogue. A good friend texted: “We want justice and not peace.”

“I understood my friend’s anger,” says Ruto. “But my immediate priority was ending the loss of lives and the displacement of people from their homes. My greatest fear and concern was that if we went on like this, the violence would soon take the country to a point of no return. I tried to convince my friend of how the violence on the streets would soon catch up with us, even in the safety of our homes, but both of us seemed to be from two different worlds at that time. She wouldn’t hear of it.”

This exemplifies the truism that those working for peace also must deal with divergent views among themselves. In this case, Ayindo, Ruto, and Ruto’s friend saw the violence somewhat differently from their differing vantage points.

Hizkias Assefa

Hizkias Assefa, born in Ethiopia but based in Kenya, was among the founding group that launched CJP in 1994. Holding a PhD and JD, Dr. Assefa has taught at EMU’s annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute ever since.

Known globally as a skilled and trusted mediator, Dr. Assefa is often one of the unnamed faces in photos taken at negotiating tables, when the big-names finally come face-to-face despite their mutual hostility. It suits Dr. Assefa not to be in the news – it makes it easier for him to quietly offer guidance on how to talk and what to talk about.

When the elections took place in Kenya in late December, Dr. Assefa was on holiday with his family in neighboring Zanzibar. He returned a week after the elections to a country that felt profoundly different. “Everyone seemed to be polarized,” he says. “At the early stages of the violence, it was difficult to find citizens who could stand above this polarization and see the big picture.”

After the Concerned Citizens for Peace began to assert itself, Dr. Assefa says it took time for the public to recognize that the ad-hoc group crossed ethnic lines and that it was not aligned with one or the other side in the conflict.

Many leaders from other African countries poured into Kenya to try to stop the violence from escalating and to bring the parties to the negotiating table. After a few weeks a mediation process sponsored by the African Union got underway in the same Serena Hotel where the Concerned Citizens for Peace had been meeting.

The mediation was led by Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations. Also on the team were the former president of Tanzania, Benjamin Mkapa, and the former first lady of Mozambique and of South Africa, Graca Machel. Dr. Assefa was invited by Annan to join the mediation team.

“I was brought in as a mediation expert to help provide guidance on how to handle the negotiation process,” says Dr. Assefa. He dealt with such issues as how to structure the process, how to think through the root causes of the conflict, and how to help the parties move towards agreement. He also advised on overcoming obstacles, avoiding pitfalls, and involving civil society.

The Annan-led mediation process, held from late January to early May, is widely regarded as the turning point in easing the violence. From it came an agreement that moved the parties to a political solution to the crisis. The mediation process brought in national and international experts to help develop a powersharing government, as well as to design roadmaps for electoral, constitutional, land, public service and economic reforms to address the issues of the crisis.

“As a long-time resident of Kenya, I was directly affected by the conflict and could also see how it affected the lives of those around me,” says Dr. Assefa. “I therefore had an opportunity to bring the perspective of everyday Kenyans into the process.”

Dr. Assefa frequently argued for addressing the root causes of the conflict, such as the unequal distribution of resources, and not just papering them over. He said he sought consideration of the steps necessary for long-term stability and harmony, rather than being satisfied with temporary peace.

“Regrettably, addressing root causes is very complicated,” he says. “It is a long-term process. Once there is no immediate pressure of turmoil, it seems that the pressure is off of everyone – the politicians, the negotiators, the population, even the mediators and sponsors of the process. So people lose focus on the long-term underlying issues, and things slowly begin to return to business as usual.”

In Dr. Assefa’s eyes, one of the challenges of peacebuilding is getting people to recognize the factors likely to lead to destruction for a society and to take preventive steps before a crisis looms.