brought a heart-wrenching documentary film with him when he returned for a brief visit to EMU on June 30, 2011.

Shown to about 50 of his old friends and colleagues at the EMU library, the film told of terrorized women living in Khandamal, a small district of Orissa, a state in the eastern part of India. These women were part of a minority group – in this case Christian – violently victimized by mobs from the surrounding majority-Hindu group.

From Ashok’s perspective, the nature of the minority status in this case is less significant than the reality that all minorities tend to be highly vulnerable to persecution by majorities, unless a culture of tolerance, mutual respect and reconciliation is fostered.

“I’ve worked a lot in Sri Lanka, and there the Sinhalese majority group is Buddhist and the minority group is the Tamil-speaking, who are mostly Hindu and Muslim,” says Ashok. “Regardless of the groups involved in the struggle, the fundamental issue is that everyone deserves the same basic rights of shelter, food, clothing, a means to make a living, and freedom to worship as they see fit.”

Ashok and his wife, , often work as a team traveling to hot spots upon request for trainings in conflict transformation and trauma healing, usually over weekends. During the week, both of them hold demanding jobs in southern India – Florina does operations capacity-building for a refugee self-help organization and Ashok is professor of social work at a major university. Both of them earned PhDs in India after completing their master’s degrees at CJP in 2004 as Fulbright scholars.

“The first question I always ask when I go into a situation is, ‘What happened?’ and then I always hear two different stories, depending on which ‘side’ I am speaking to,” said Ashok. “Then I say, ‘Well, let’s put parts of these stories together and see if we can answer the next questions, Who has been affected by this event? What are the violations and what are the needs? Can we take joint responsibility to address these needs?’

“Answering these questions takes days, of course, of people talking in settings, with facilitators, where they feel safe and can be honest and vulnerable,” Ashok told Peacebuilder. “We have to start with conversations and move to relationship-building to emerge from the trauma cycle of victimization, vengeance and re-victimization.”

In the past year, Ashok has focused intently on helping to alleviate the suffering – and break the cyclical violence – experienced by impoverished Christian citizens living in Khandamal. Over a period of 300 days, 50,000 of them were displaced from their homes and several of their villages were reduced to ashes. And it all could be traced to a misunderstanding about the killing of a popular Hindu swami. Local followers of the swami blamed Christians, but Ashok said actually a Maoist group admitted responsibility for the killing. “My goal is to help the people of this region to create what I think everyone wants, deep in their hearts – a just and peaceful society,” says Ashok.

In one part of Sri Lanka, Ashok and Florina have assisted the people in post-war reconstruction, using development as a tool for building peace. They facilitated a “peace dialogue,” which enabled community members who had been avoiding each other to begin to interact.

Two years later in this community, when a terrorist incident caused the Sinhalese-dominated military to sweep through the homes of Tamils, Ashok says the local Sinhalese gave shelter to their Tamil neighbors and told the military, “If you want to take them, you’ll have to take us first.”

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Fourteen years ago, Sam Gbaydee Doe came to CTP from his native land of Liberia, where about 10% of the population had died, or would die, in one of Africa’s bloodiest civil wars, from 1989 to 1996, followed by a shorter war, from 1999 to 2003.

Liberian warlords used child soldiers to commit atrocities – rape and murder people of all ages and genders, including members of the children’s own families. Liberia’s civil war claimed lives from nearly every Liberian family, displaced most from their homes, and reduced the country’s economy to rubble. The strife also spread to Liberia’s neighbors, contributing to the destabilization of all of West Africa.

Sam needed a place to recover personally from the trauma he had experienced, as well as a place to explore ways to prevent such barbarity from occurring again. Encouraged by Barry Hart (a future CJP professor) – whom Sam met while both were doing conflict transformation and trauma awareness workshops in Liberia – and financially assisted by the Mennonite Board of Missions, Sam came to EMU in May of 1996.

In October 1998, at the end of his MA studies, Sam teamed up with a later graduate of CTP, Emmanuel Bombande (MA ’02) to launch the West African Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP). Sam became its first executive director.

“I left EMU fired up to translate a dream into a reality,” Sam said in a September 2010 interview. “I dreamed of a regional movement of civil society that would collaborate with regional intergovernmental bodies to restore not just stability in Africa but democratic freedom and prosperity. I dreamed of establishing an early-warning system throughout civil society that would head off violent conflict. Those dreams became reality in just five years. The profound thing was the speed at which ordinary people mobilized for peace.”

As an example, WANEP provided support to a Liberian social worker Leymah Gbowee, who organized the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. This grassroots women’s organization was instrumental in ending Liberia’s war in 2003 and facilitating the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president of an African nation. (Leymah is a 2007 MA grad.)

With seed money of $90,000 from the Winston Foundation, WANEP grew in two years from grouping 13 organizational representatives from six countries to 300 member groups from 14 countries. By 2000, WANEP’s annual budget was $1.2 million. By 2004, its budget had doubled. Sam incredulously asks himself: “How did we get from no organization in 1998 to being the largest peacebuilding organization in Africa in 2004, with 22 staff members [at its headquarters in Accra, Ghana] and offices in 14 other countries?” WANEP now runs its own version of SPI, the West African Peacebuilding Institute.

Few people or organizations make headline news for civil wars prevented, numbers of child soldiers quietly rehabilitated and reintegrated into society, or elections held without major violence. Yet WANEP and its partner organizations deserve much credit for their contributions to the growing stability of the majority of the countries in West Africa.

In 2004 Sam began working toward a doctorate in peace studies at the University of Bradford in England. The next year, he went to work for the United Nations as a consultant to its Liberia Mission, followed by a one-year stint with the UN Development Programme Pacific Regional Office in Fiji.

Since 2007 Sam has worked for the UN in Sri Lanka. He completed his doctorate in the spring of 2010. “After my intense work in West Africa, I felt I needed another opportunity to retreat, reflect, and reengage,” he explains.

His doctorate dissertation was on “indigenizing post-war state reconstruction,” a topic that links building peace to building a stable, democratic state. As an advisor and analyst in a country emerging from 30 years of civil war, Sam oversees trainings on conflict-sensitive development, dialogue and reconciliation, and other topics in Sri Lanka. Sam is the 2002 recipient of EMU’s annual Distinguished Service Award.