Tecla Namachanja Wanjala MA ‘03 was honored as the 2019 Peacebuilder of the Year in May during the Summer Peacebuilding Institute. She accepted the award on behalf of her family, several of whom were present, but also “on behalf of Kenya, and not just Kenya, but Africa.”

“I don’t want to think that this is just my honor,” she said, adding thanks to EMU and to her fellow CJP alumni working together in Africa on peacebuilding initiatives.

Over nearly 30 years, Wanjala has worked in many countries, including Sri Lanka, Cambodia, South Sudan, Burundi, Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda, in various aspects of peacebuilding, from arbitration and mediation to reconciliation and trauma healing.��Currently the board chair for the Green String Network, she has served as commissioner and acting chair of Kenya’s Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission��and in other roles with organizations such as PeaceNet and Pact International.

Wanjala’s peacebuilding work began with Somali refugees in 1991, encountering “trauma when we didn’t know what trauma was.”�� She came to EMU after meeting��Jan Jenner MA ‘99, then a co-country representative with Mennonite Central Committee in Kenya. (Jenner ultimately became the first director of��CJP’s Practice and Training Institute and then of the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program.)

“Jan is the one who identified me in a small village and saw my potential,” said Wanjala, who was working with Catholic Relief Services on resettlement issues. “She brought me on the national level, encouraged me to come to EMU. I looked for funding and she said come by faith.”

At EMU, Wanjala took five courses in trauma, including Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) trainings. She created an independent study to synthesize concepts, “to��think about how we do this in Africa.”

Later, she collaborated with colleagues from the Green String Network who also were familiar with STAR materials: “We communicate best through folklore, stories and images, and so we took the STAR material, translated it into Kiswahili and developed images for each session. This is how Kumekucha was born.”

The Kumekucha program – Kiswahili for “It’s a new dawn” – empowers local leaders to create “space for people to talk, to cry, to affirm each other” in dealing with the country’s historic and current trauma, Wanjala said. The social healing program has expanded from communities to police and prison wardens.

Wanjala was among six Kenyans and three internationals selected as commissioners to the Kenya Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, established to investigate human rights violations and other historical injustices in Kenya between 1963 and 2008. She eventually became acting chair, leading efforts to record and witness testimony.

Though implementation of the commission’s recommendations has not been fulfilled, she says that is not a reason to give up on the hope of reconciliation and the creation of healing spaces in communities. It is important to be ready to see “windows of opportunity” and to gain supporters who agree in the approach and importance of the work.

“Start small, people will hear and join the river along the way,” she said.

As is true around the world, women in the Pacific Islands are often leaders in organizations that can contribute to peace, yet they tend to work in unsupported and invisible roles.

The Pacific Centre for Peacebuilding aims to inspire, educate and create a needed safe space for women to dialogue, gain support and develop action steps.

Noting that short training sessions had a limited effect on women’s abilities as peacemakers, Koila Costello-Olsson, MA ’05, was an early proponent of a program focusing on women’s peacebuilding leadership. In June of 2011, she attended the consultation at EMU with 18 experienced global peacebuilders (including 2011 Nobel Peace laureate and fellow CJP graduate Leymah Gbowee) that developed the broad outlines of the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program (WPLP). Jan Jenner, MA ’99, was its founding director.

WPLP’s first class began in 2012, with 13 participants from Africa and three from the South Pacific. Class 2 included 16 participants from the South Pacific region and five from East Africa. Class 3, which began coursework at SPI 2014, is composed of eight women from Kenya.^[1]

A glance at a half-dozen of the WPLP graduates shows the way they are seeded throughout the South Pacific, from a prime minister’s office and a branch of juvenile justice to women’s rights groups and a theological college:

• Elizabeth Krishna, a lay sister in the Catholic Church, has worked in the office of the prime minister of Fiji under the current and previous three office-holders. She serves on the board of the ecumenical group Interfaith Search Fiji, which brings together 19 religious groups, including Christians, Hindus and Muslims, in an effort to build “bridges of understanding.” In 2016, at age 54, Krishna hopes to retire and prepare herself for further peacebuilding work by completing a master’s degree at EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.
• Patricia Galama Gure, in the first cohort, is now deputy director for juvenile justice in Papua New Guinea, where she manages staff dealing with young people, aged 7 through 17, who come into conflict with the law. “I promote the use of a restorative justice approach,” she said in an email. “And I am heavily involved in collaboration or partnership initiatives within the communities.”
• Menka Goundan entered WPLP as a communications and research officer at PCP and now works in a similar position for Fiji Women’s Rights Movement.
• Ana-Latu Dickson works at the Pacific Theological College in Suva, Fiji Islands, coordinating its pastoral counseling program and providing mentorship to church ministers, lay workers and community practitioners who are students in the program. She also coordinates the EVAW program (Elimination of Violence against Women/girls), which provides training to church ministers, lay workers and community practitioners.
• Tarusila Bradburg is co-coordinator of the Pacific Youth Council, an organization that works with national youth councils or congresses in 10 Pacific nations, based at the Secretariat for Pacific Community.
• Georgia Clarinda Tako Molia is on the executive committee of Young Women in Parliament, which aims to see women stand for election, be elected fairly (amid the common practice of vote buying by powerful male candidates), and be among the first women to serve in the National Parliament of the Solomon Islands. She feels inspired to work with another WPLP colleague “to establish our very own peace institution for the Solomon Islands in the next three years. I have already started the dialogue with key people in the government and non-government sector to gather information/data to start the network and build from there.”^[2]

These WPLP women agree that the first change they experienced in undergoing peacebuilding training was on a personal level.

“God has to be moving somewhere,” Bradburg said. “We see it and feel it as it transforms us. You have to journey within it and sometimes the changes cannot be spoken. We have to value that space, because this learning journey is so different and so much more than the projects we are involved in and the work we do.”

��

Footnotes

1. Funded by Bread for the World, Conciliation Resources, and the European Union.
2. There is precedence for a national-level peacebuilding institute emerging from a regional one – the Korea Peacebuilding Institute was founded in 2012 by some South Korean members of the Northeast Asia Peacebuilding Institute, which started four years earlier.

As with so many aspects of U.S. society and culture, the disaster relief community has its clear “pre-” and “post-9/11” periods. Back in the pre-days, the mentality and capabilities of organizations like FEMA and the Red Cross revolved around the physical needs of disaster victims: food, shelter and clothing. Within days of entering post-era, it became clear that the September 11 attacks pointed to the need for psychological support, not just physical assistance.

Within a week of September 11, 2001, Rick Augsburger contacted EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). Then working in Manhattan as the director of emergency programs for Church World Service – one of the relief organizations facing a challenge it wasn’t well equipped to handle – Augsburger knew about the pioneering work that had been done at CJP of connecting trauma healing to the theory and practice of peacebuilding. Three days after the attacks, he placed a call to CJP to ask for help.

“We were the only conflict transformation program that had any trauma studies in the curriculum,” remembers Jan Jenner, who was director of the Practice Institute at CJP. Through Jenner, Augsburger invited CJP to develop a trauma-healing program in response to the terrorist attacks and pledged full funding for the initiative.

Two weeks after 9/11, CJP professor Barry Hart was in New York City meeting with Augsburger and his staff about a programmatic response to the tragedy. When Jenner and Hart shared the concept with other faculty members and staff at CJP, the group collectively developed an outline of what was to become Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience, or STAR.

“I knew we would get strong commitment, high quality work and an ability to think outside of the box,” says Augsburger, a ’91 graduate of EMU who had previously worked with CJP on several trauma-related projects. “9/11 was something that none of us had experienced before, and we needed something different.”

In Augsburger’s eyes, CJP’s close institutional ties to the Mennonite church strengthened its ability to provide leadership in meeting the needs of traumatized groups. Religion, after all, was perceived as a major player in the events of 9/11, and leaders from a wide variety of religious traditions found themselves on the front lines of response within their own communities.

Putting together the pieces

“We had the pieces – trauma healing, restorative justice, a spiritual center – that we could put in place for the program that is now known as STAR,” says Jayne Docherty, a CJP professor of leadership and public policy who was involved in the program from its earliest planning stages. “Tapping the expertise of all the faculty members here, we were able to develop a holistic, integrative approach to the 9/11 crisis and its aftermath.”

The first STAR workshop was held in February of 2002. As STAR’s founding director, Carolyn Yoder had woven the strands of CJP’s work and her own trauma-counseling expertise into a viable short-term program. While the format and materials have constantly been tweaked and revised, the major elements of that initial workshop have remained largely the same. Later that spring, Yoder adapted and expanded the diagrams used by Barry Hart and psychologist Olga Botcharova – who had worked together in the war-torn Balkans – into a three-part model of trauma healing. This model, including an easy-to-remember snail diagram (see below), remains central to the STAR curriculum.

From the beginning, the intensive, one-week STAR courses have included an exploration of the nature and effects of trauma on individuals and communities as well as study and discussion on the relationship of trauma-healing to the other key pieces of CJP’s peacebuilding framework, including restorative justice, security, mediation and conflict transformation.

A decade prior to all this, Hart was in Liberia helping lead trauma healing and reconciliation workshops for people affected by that country’s civil war. Hart, then pursuing a doctorate in conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University, was working with the Christian Health Association of Liberia, which was very interested in addressing the psychological wounds suffered by so many people in the country.

“I was coming in not as a psychologist but as a conflict transformation person,” says Hart. “It became very clear to me that these so-called ‘ethnic wars’ not only had an identity aspect, but a significant psychological one.”

Pioneer in linking trauma to conflict

Hart ended up spending two years in Liberia. He used the dozens of trauma-healing workshops he conducted there as field research for a dissertation that was one of the first academic works to draw clear links between the fields of conflict transformation and trauma healing.

In the summer of 1994, Hart gave a presentation on his work at a peacebuilding conference at EMU (the forerunner of today’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute). It struck a nerve, leading to a class on trauma healing and ultimately to the subject becoming integral to the MA curriculum.

Over the next five years, Hart continued to integrate trauma healing and conflict resolution while working in war-ravaged areas of the Balkans. He returned to EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute each year to teach on the subject. Hart usually co-taught the course with Nancy Good, a clinical social worker and trauma expert who was a member of the CJP faculty from its early years and who also played a key role in pioneering a connection between trauma healing on the individual level with peacebuilding on a larger scale.

“CJP takes a very interdisciplinary approach to peacebuilding,” says Lisa Schirch, a research professor at EMU and the director of 3P Human Security. “We recognize that people’s personal and emotional wounds need to be addressed in addition to the structural, economic and political changes that are required for peacebuilding.”

“Psychosocial trauma and peacebuilding” is now one of the five academic concentrations offered to graduate students at CJP, overseen by Hart, who joined the faculty full time after leaving the Balkans in 1999. Even today, CJP remains one of a very few graduate-level peace programs in the United States that places such an emphasis on trauma healing.

Pushing edges of field

“In the 1990s, it was pushing the edges of the field to say ‘trauma matters,’ and it still is, as a matter of fact,” says Docherty. An important aspect of CJP’s trauma work is the recognition that “many of our students arrive traumatized, sometimes directly from ‘killing fields,’” adds Docherty, CJP’s new program director. “We have asked ourselves, ‘How can we support them?’ Giving them an education in trauma awareness and resilience is one way.”

Shortly after the inaugural STAR training, the program began to adapt its curriculum for different audiences. In 2002, Elaine Zook Barge interned with STAR as a graduate student to develop a Spanish-language version of the training. She helped lead the first Spanish STAR in November 2002 in Colombia; the first Spanish STAR at EMU was held the next month.

Another early adaptation was Youth STAR, designed by an international team of youth workers and intended to teach trauma skills to young people. (This effort was led by Vesna Hart, a native of Croatia who holds an MA in education from EMU.)

Grant funding from Church World Service supported the STAR program through 2005, by which time nearly 800 people from 38 states and 63 countries had participated in seminars on EMU’s campus, including the first sessions of Level II STAR. This advanced training prepares Level I graduates to themselves become practitioners, leading their own trauma-resilience workshops based on the STAR curriculum.

Given that the program had run longer and grown larger than many had expected at the beginning, CJP decided to continue STAR using a fee-for-service model. In 2006, as STAR grappled with the challenges of sustaining itself financially, Barge became the second director of the STAR program.

Adaptation, new directions and new partnerships have characterized STAR in the years since. Barge helped develop a Village STAR curriculum for use in settings where pictures tend to work better than lots of written words. Coming to the Table – now an associate organization of CJP that uses the STAR trauma-healing framework to address the legacy of slavery in the United States –��also grew directly out STAR’s work at EMU.

Coming to the Table’s history-rooted twist on STAR led to Transforming Historical Harms, which looks at “historic traumas” that continue to inflict pain decades or centuries after a traumatic event or circumstance has ended (see article).

Global attention to trauma

From 2002 to 2007, STAR workshops were held in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Uganda, Burundi and South Sudan. In 2008, CJP graduates working in Myanmar requested STAR assistance following a devastating cyclone. Also upon request, STAR went to Mexico in 2009, and Northern Ireland, Bolivia and Haiti in 2010 (for more on the work in Haiti, see this article).

The geographic spread of STAR has also occurred domestically. In Massachusetts, Beverly Prestwood-Taylor, a United Church of Christ minister and trauma-specialist who has taken courses at CJP, adapted STAR for veterans and their supporters into a two-day program called the Journey Home from War (see article). Donna Minter, a STAR alumna from Minnesota, returned home to found the Minnesota Peacebuilding Leadership Academy, which has hosted six STAR trainings since 2010 (see article).

Since she took over as director, Barge estimates that one-third of STAR trainings have taken place at EMU, one-third have been held elsewhere in the United States, and one-third have happened overseas. The total number people who’ve taken STAR trainings over the past 11 years is difficult to determine, given the proliferation of off-site trainings. What is certain is this: hundreds of individual STAR trainings have taken place on five continents, reaching thousands of people directly and rippling out far more broadly yet, as participants use the trauma-awareness and resilience principles in their personal and professional lives.

Rick Augsburger, whose phone call to CJP days after 9/11 led to the creation of STAR, says the disaster-relief community today is far better prepared to recognize and address the psychological impacts of disasters. While STAR can’t take full credit for that, it played an early and important role in introducing trauma awareness to these groups, says Augsburger, now the managing director of the KonTerra group, a consulting firm based in Washington D.C. that focuses on improving clarity, resilience and learning in domestic and international organizations. Growing awareness of and interest in trauma-related issues extends beyond disaster-relief agencies (see article).

“Because of the work we’ve done over the last 18 years here, people have started to pay attention to trauma,” says Barry Hart. “The major funders out there are becoming more and more aware of the need to incorporate trauma elements into the larger peacebuilding framework.”

Looking ahead, this new, wider interest in trauma awareness represents an opportunity for STAR to provide consultation, trainings and workshops to equip organizations with staff who are able to do trauma-sensitive programming (. “As more individuals want to share STAR with others, the program is facing the challenge of making sure that what others call STAR includes the complex mix of psychosocial trauma healing, restorative justice and conflict transformation components that make STAR unique,” says Jayne Docherty, incoming program director for CJP. “We’re working on a process for certifying STAR trainers and practitioners that will be available to students in the MA program as well as to other individuals.”

In July of this year, Africa lost one of its premier peacebuilders in a tragic car accident in Kenya. While Dekha Ibrahim Abdi’s passing is a loss to peace efforts in Africa and around the globe, it’s also a loss to me. I lost a friend and mentor.

Where do I begin to write about how Dekha has shaped my peacebuilding and my life? So many good memories, so much learning, and so many things yet unlearned.

Others will write of her brilliant mind, her analytical skills, her ability to see connections, her incredible teaching and facilitation skills. I’ve learned much from her in all of these areas and will miss them. And yet during these last weeks as I’ve remembered Dekha and the very deep lessons I’ve learned from her, it’s her personal qualities that stand out. I want to share a few stories that illustrate this.

First, Dekha had a seeming inability to stereotype people; she was able to see beyond the title, the uniform, and the ethnicity, to the heart and soul of the person in front of her. The last time that Dekha was at EMU, just a few weeks before her death, we went shopping for gifts for her children and friends. We wandered into a shoe store, and staggered out three hours later with thirteen pairs of shoes for her daughters and others. During that time in the shoe store, I again watched in amazement as she made friends with one of the salespeople – a young, tattooed woman who, by the end of that encounter, had an entirely new understanding of Islam and women who choose to wear veils. By sharing her humanity, humor, and joy in buying those shoes, she connected with the saleswoman in ways that went far beyond that of customer.

Second, not only have I learned from Dekha the importance of not stereotyping myself, but of helping others break the prejudices that they have. Dekha’s first visit to EMU in 1998 was during the time that money was being collected to build a mosque in Harrisonburg. During that time a local Presbyterian Church had set aside their fellowship room on Fridays for the local Muslim community to have a place for prayers. Dekha was very pleased to be able to donate money for the mosque, and through the years talked often about how important it was for her to share the story of a church that shared their space with a Muslim congregation.

And Dekha taught me the importance of living by faith and values. Her rock-solid grounding in Islam became more and more evident during the years that I knew her and her work. Dekha’s life, her being, flowed out of that. We had many conversations through the years about Islam, Christianity, and faith. Knowing this deeply religious Muslim woman has moved me to a deeper commitment to my own Christian faith.

Finally, Dekha taught me about enjoying life. Her smile, her enthusiasm at each new experience, her joking and chuckle, even in the midst of difficult times, will stay with me forever. She loved life, she loved her children, her family, her friends, and her colleagues, and she welcomed everyone and every experience into her wide, opening acceptance.

Dekha once told me a story about when she was in Nairobi, in a shop purchasing butter, and two men behind her started speaking in English about “why this Somali woman was taking so long just making a simple purchase – that’s how all those Somalis are.” Dekha turned around and explained to them that actually she was contemplating why butter imported from New Zealand was cheaper than local butter, and trying to decide whether she should place more importance on her family’s budget by buying the butter from New Zealand, or whether she should support the national economy by buying the more expensive local butter. She laughed with pleasure as she remembered the way the men looked at her, and kept chuckling, still hoping she had changed the way the two men viewed “those rural women.”

The last time I was with Dekha, just a few weeks before her death, she spoke over and over again about her family, about how happy she was with her children and about how much her husband, her mother, her brother and others meant to her. Her smile as she talked about them engaged not just her entire face, but her whole being. Her life was very full, and she was content.

I will miss you, Dekha:�� my colleague, my friend, my sister.���� And the lessons that you have taught me will remain with me, in my work and in my life.

See also:�� (EMU News)

[ (MA ’99) is director of the Practice and Training Institute at ��ݮ����’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Jan’s expertise in project planning, development and management, community-based peacebuilding processes – particularly in Africa – has helped of the field of peacebuilding.]

In recent years, Kenya looked as if it were going to be among those African countries in the forefront of finding their way toward national unity and social equity, with peace and prosperity as the ultimate outcomes.

Kenya’s peace was fragile, however, mostly because its economic gains were unequally distributed. When the violence erupted last December and January, some observers feared a Rwanda-like ethnic war. This didn’t happen. To repeat: the violence did not escalate into an all-out civil war. Kenya pulled back from the brink.

This is evidence that millions of Kenyans from all walks of life doubt violence will lead to the changes they desire. Church, school, health, refugee, and even military leaders in Kenya routinely use terms like “sustainable peace,” “reconciliation,” and “dialogue.”

Much of this awareness can be traced to CJP-trained people, who in turn have trained and reached out to thousands of others in Kenya. CJP folks, of course, do not work alone. They become employees, consultants, and partners with like-minded organizations, sometimes founding new ones.

“It’s hard to determine the full impact of CJP-trained people in Kenya during the post-election crisis,” says , , director of CJP’s Practice and Training Institute. “Clearly, though, the conflict-transformation skills taught at CJP do work in the ‘real world,’ as they did in Kenya.” Jenner and her husband Hadley were co-country representatives for Mennonite Central Committee in Kenya from 1989 to 1996.

Notice the language used by president Kibaki and opposition leader Odinga on January 24, when they shook hands, smiled and shared the same platform for the first time since the election was disputed. Beside them was a visibly pleased Kofi Annan. Out of the spotlight but nearby was EMU professor Hizkias Assefa, the mediation advisor for Annan’s successful peacemaking effort.

Both political leaders appealed for immediate calm, according to the BBC, with Kibaki pledging to rebuild destroyed homes and towns, resettle the displaced, and “do everything else possible to ensure Kenyans live as brothers.”

Odinga said his party was committed to peace, but stressed that to be sustainable, it had to be based on justice.

Annan summed up: “I think we have begun to take some first steps towards a peaceful solution of the problem, and as you can see, the two leaders are here to underline their engagement to dialogue and to work together for a just and sustainable peace.”

Over the next few months, Kenya’s government took new shape. Odinga filled the newly created position of second prime minister and the president’s cabinet was enlarged to make room for members appointed on the basis of their party’s numbers in Parliament.

“We can now consign Kenya’s past failures of grand corruption and grand tribalism to our history books,” Odinga said when he took office. “We will ensure that power, wealth and opportunity are [in] the hands of many, not the few.”

To reach these worthy goals, Kenya must navigate through minefields: a high rate of unemployment, budget deficits, poor infrastructure, corruption in the civil service… not to mention the still-simmering problems of refugees and ethnic tensions.

And here is where the people trained at CJP – and those who they, in turn, train; who in turn train others (it’s a multiplier effect) – come into play.

“Last spring when I was East Africa, I heard our graduates called the ‘EMU mafia,’” says Jenner. “It was meant as a compliment, in the sense that our extended family of peacebuilders has had a major impact on the easing of violent conflict in Africa.”

In a September 27, 2007, Washington Post article, reporter John Prendergast said that after spending 25 years writing about atrocities, tyranny and famine in Africa, he wanted to write about the “hope, self-transformation and inspiration” he was seeing of late, belying “outsiders’ low expectations for the continent.”

“Africans are demanding that their voices be heard – through the ballot box, through civil society organizations, new media, revitalized political parties, and reformed institutions to provide accountability,” Prendergast wrote.

Despite the temporary (one hopes) lapse in Kenya last year, Washington Post journalist Craig Timberg echoed Prendergast’s optimism about Africa in an article published March 13, 2008. “Peace, however fragile, is the norm rather than war,” he wrote, citing the growing vigor of civil society and democracy in Ghana, Benin, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria.

Here’s an example of how peace spreads: An organization called Oasis Africa, directed by Dr. Gladys Mwiti, has partnered with the Ford Foundation to train Nairobi high school teachers in trauma counseling. Dr. Mwiti came to EMU’s STAR program in 2004 . Later, she helped field-test and refine a training manual for Youth STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience), funded by the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Oasis Africa agreed to pilot test the STAR manual with youth in a Nairobi slum, with “amazing outcomes,” according to the Oasis Africa newsletter.

The completed version of the Youth STAR manual arrived at Oasis Africa this year, when Jan Jenner and CJP director visited Nairobi and hand-delivered the full STAR package to Dr. Mwiti. She and her staff are now using the manual in training about 114 teachers in 57 high schools in Nairobi.

“It is expected that each of the 114 teachers will train 30 peer counselors,” said the Oasis Africa newsletter. This means that about 3,420 peer counselors will be trained. Each peer counselor is “mandated” to pass along his or her training to at least 30 fellow students.

Here’s the math: more than 100,000 people will be impacted by Oasis Africa and its usage of the Youth STAR manual, developed by Vesna Hart (M.Ed.’04) at EMU with the help of Dr. Mwiti and many others. And this is just one of a dozen far-reaching programs in which our alumni are involved in Kenya.

Earlier versions of the trainings caused Kamiti High School, which was formerly conflict-ridden, to be “a shining example of the transformative power of this intervention,” said the newsletter. The current trainings are aimed at schools “situated in slums, such as Mathare, Kibera and Mukuru, the most affected communities during the post-election violence.”

The idea is to reach “the most needy and the most affected youth, and so hope to break the cycle of trauma and anger that may in the future become a brewing ground for community violence,” explained the Oasis Africa newsletter.

Oasis Africa doesn’t limit its work to schools. In response to post-election tension among its multi-ethnic employees, the management of the Coca-Cola bottling company in Nairobi endorsed a six-day program led by Oasis Africa that covered conflict resolution, peacebuilding, team building, and trauma healing. Many of the 600 Coca-Cola employees had been affected by the violence outside their workplace – injuries, loss of loved ones, loss of income and loss of their homes or other property – and they responded eagerly to the lessons offered in self- and communityhealing.

Trained peacebuilders also are working with churches in Kenya. For example, Charles Nyoike Ndegwa, MA ’05, gave a speech to 100 pastors at AIC Kijabe Mission Center in late February, just a few weeks after violence in the streets had ebbed. Ndegwa challenged them to pay attention to the early warning signs of upheaval – such as the tribal divisions evident in the 2004 national referendum on changing Kenya’s constitution – and “to be fully involved in looking for solutions to the problems facing our communities.”

“Burying the dead and distributing relief aid is not enough,” Ndegwa said. “Christians must do more to avert conflicts and violence… and that work should include confronting the powers that be.”

EMU’s trainers play supporting roles

This April CJP, under contract with -Sudan Program, will wrap up nine months of “Leadership in Peacebuilding” training in South Sudan in which men and women representing various constituencies in the region – including the government, military, and ethnic communities – were brought together for an intense, in-depth educational experience.

“This is the most ambitious – and possibly far-reaching – peacebuilding program we have ever done,” says Jan Jenner, director of CJP’s Practice Institute. “If it is successful, it could be a model for tilling the soil and sowing seeds of peace in post-conflict zones elsewhere.”

Funded and staffed by Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the South Sudan program consists of six workshops, each attended by the same group of 43 people for five days. Almost all of the participants have experienced trauma themselves as a result of spending their entire lives in a region wracked by more than 50 years of war.

“We could not do these trainings without the grassroots networks, trust, and logistical support – not to mention funding – of CRS,” says Jenner.

CRS staff work closely with participants between the workshops to assist them to assimilate and apply the lessons of one training before returning for the next workshop in the series. Each time the participants return, the workshop facilitators ask the participants for feedback on what did and didn’t work in their context.

“We are continually refining the workshops, based on the feedback we receive,” says Jenner. “It’s really a group process, where we are all teaching each other.” There are always at least two facilitators, one employed by EMU and one based in the region.

The workshop participants often represent different interests in the still-simmering conflict in South Sudan. By the end of the training, participants will emerge with the tools and skills they need to, in turn, run their own workshops and train hundreds of others in peacebuilding. The six workshops build on each other in this sequence:

1. Introduction to leadership in peacebuilding
2. Trauma healing and resilience
3. Restorative justice
4. Conflict transformation
5. Leadership
6. Summing up the learnings

Participant evaluations are carefully studied after each workshop. So far (after workshop #3), responses have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, though valuable suggestions are sometimes offered. One participant, for instance, asked that leaders from cattle-raiding areas be invited. Another asked that more chiefs be invited instead of sending trained young people to the chiefs. “I think this is very important,” wrote the participant, seeking to stress that aged chiefs generally have more influence than young to middle-aged adults in southern Sudan.

Elaine Zook Barge, co-facilitator of several of the workshops in Sudan, adds: “The Sudan-based CRS employees involved in this project (Adele Sowinska, Paul Nantulya, Anisia Achieng and others) possess long-term and valuable knowledge of a very complex political and social situation. Without them, it would be difficult – perhaps impossible – for EMU to play a role in breaking the cycle of victim-hood and violence in individuals and communities in Sudan.”

Nantulya, who is the main liaison in Sudan between CRS and EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, paid a visit to EMU in the fall of 2007 to participate in .

Afterwards he wrote to Zook Barge, who directs STAR: “My visit to EMU was a profoundly transformative experience for me. It was humbling to see just how sensitive the EMU community as a whole is to developments in the rest of the world. CJP is clearly embedded in an environment which projects and promotes the very values which the centre stands for. There is no doubt that we will do great things in the Sudan.”

CRS and CJP are exploring replicating this “Leaders in Peacebuilding Program” in other areas of South Sudan.