Peacebuilder Summer 2013 - Alumni Magazine of EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding

Page 1

Spring/Summer 2013

CENTER FOR JUSTICE AND PEACEBUILDING

EASTERN MENNONITE UNIVERSITY

RESILIENCE


Lynn Roth (center) led CJP during the years when Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience was adapted to Haiti, eventually touching more than 12,000 in that country, as explained on page12. At SPI 2012, six involved in the Haiti program thanked Roth for his efforts (above).

Welcome the New Leaders of CJP This is my 10th opening letter to Peacebuilder magazine since becoming executive director of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding in August 2007. The time has come for me to pass the torch to other leaders while I undertake a new assignment as North American representative for Mennonite World Conference. As of July 1, 2013, the CJP leadership team will be headed by Daryl Byler, who will replace me as executive director. Most recently Daryl worked for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) as Middle East regional representative. He and his wife, Cindy, have lived in Amman, Jordan, for the past six years. In his role with MCC, Daryl worked with a number of CJP alumni. He has been inspired by the impact that CJP has had on the lives of alumni when he has seen how CJP “transformed the way they think about conflict and the way they are integrating the principles and experiences learned at EMU in the challenging Middle Eastern context.” Daryl holds a law degree from the University of Virginia and a master's degree from Eastern Mennonite Seminary. As an undergraduate at EMU, he majored in business administration. Prior to his Middle East assignment, Daryl served as director of MCC’s Washington Office from 1994 to 2007, meeting regularly with policymakers on Capitol Hill, in the State Department, and in the White House. Earlier, Daryl spent six years as a staff attorney in Meridian, Mississippi. He concurrently served as senior pastor for Jubilee Mennonite Church, an interracial congregation. Daryl will give administrative leadership to CJP, with a primary focus on building external relationships, networking

with key university and external stakeholders, and developing resources for CJP’s growth and success. Long-time CJP professor Jayne Docherty has been named CJP’s program director, overseeing the development, integration, funding, service delivery and evaluation of all programs. This includes coordinating the academic and practice programs of CJP and giving leadership to curriculum development. Jayne brings extensive experience and leadership abilities to this position; she will help implement the strategic plans for further integration of the CJP programs internally and with the broader university. It is exciting to anticipate Daryl and Jayne in these management roles, providing innovative leadership and vision to ensure that CJP remains on the leading edge of the peacebuilding field. This issue of Peacebuilder, focusing on trauma awareness and resilience, highlights a major contribution CJP has made to the process of peacebuilding. I have felt honored to witness over the past six years the deep passion and sustained commitment that faculty, staff, students and alumni bring to their work of transformation and peacebuilding. I look forward to continuing to see the impact of CJP domestically and around the globe, as I maintain touch with EMU in my new role with Mennonite World Conference.

Lynn Roth Executive Director PHOTO by Jon Styer


Spring/Summer 2013

EASTERN MENNONITE UNIVERSITY

CENTER FOR JUSTICE AND PEACEBUILDING

PEACEBUILDER is published two times a year by Eastern Mennonite University, with the collaboration of its development office: Kirk L. Shisler, vice president for advancement; Phil Helmuth, executive director of development; Phoebe Kilby, CJP associate director of development.

N ECTIO N N O REC Engaging the offender (or society)

Loren E. Swartzendruber President

Cover Shukria Hassan, holding the drawing, took STAR I and II in 2013 for application to her native country of Afghanistan, where she is a physician. "Everyone in Afghanistan suffers from trauma, including myself," she says. At left in the photo is Katia Cecilia Ornelas Nunez, a graduate student from Mexico. Photo by Jon Styer.

(Acting In)

or t

Aggressor Cycle

pp

T

Mourning, grieving

su

M

Contents © 2013 Eastern Mennonite University.

GE

cjp@emu.edu 540-432-4000 www.emu.edu/cjp

ED

For more information or address changes, contact: Center for Justice and Peacebuilding Eastern Mennonite University 1200 Park Road Harrisonburg VA 22802

Trauma Experience Victim Cycle

Naming and/or confronting fears; accepting loss

EN

Possibility of reconciliation

BEGIN HERE

Memorializing

L NOW ACK

Lora Steiner CJP Admissions/Marketing

Integrating trauma into new self and/or group identity

Reflecting on root causes; acknowledging the other's story

Bonnie Price Lofton Editor

Elaine Zook Barge David Brubaker Valerie Helbert Janice Jenner Lindsay Martin Styer Janelle Myers-Benner Lynn Roth Carl Stauffer CJP Leadership Team Members

Transforming conflict; negotiating solutions; constructing joint narratives

Committing to take risks

Lynn Roth CJP Executive Director

Jon Styer Designer/Photographer

Choosing to forgive

Practicing tolerance and coexistence

Fred Kniss Provost

Andrew Jenner Writer

Establishing justice; acknowledging responsibility; exploring restitution and "creative justice"

(Acting Out) Fin

sa din g

fe t

ya

nd

Role of Trauma in Peacebuilding.........................2 Journey Home From War.........................................6 Addressing Historical Harms ................................8

Trauma Healing Journey: Breaking Cycles of Violence Adaptation of model by Olga Botcharova Copyright © 2013 Eastern Mennonite University www.emu.edu/star

2

STAR in Minnesota and Beyond......................... 11 Building Resilience in Haiti...................................12 On Caring for Self......................................................13 Trauma Training for Humanitarians..................14

8

"Good Intentions Aren't Enough"........................15 Genocide Survivor Chooses Forgiveness......16 The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) is rooted in the Mennonite peace tradition of Christianity. CJP prepares and supports individuals and institutions of diverse religious and philosophical backgrounds in the creation of a just and peaceful world. CJP is based at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and offers a master's-level degree and certificate, as well as non-degree training through its Summer Peacebuilding Institute. Donations to CJP are tax-deductible and support the program, the university that houses it, scholarships for peace and justice students, and other essentials. Visit www.emu.edu/cjp for more information.

peacebuilder ■ 1 emu.edu/cjp


TRAUMA AWARENESS A Key Factor in Peacebuilding

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 predays, 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.

2

peacebuilder spring/summer 2013

Elaine Zook Barge developed a Spanish-language version of STAR while completing her studies as a graduate student in conflict transformation. She helped lead the first Spanish STAR in November 2002 in Colombia. In 2006, Barge succeeded Carolyn Yoder as STAR director.

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 PHOTO by Molly Kraybill


STAR

Barry Hart oversees the psychosocial trauma and peacebuilding concentration in CJP’s graduate program. As part of his doctoral studies, Hart pioneered the link between conflict transformation and trauma healing in the 1990s, underpinned by his field work in Liberia and the Balkans.

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 (shown on page 1 and in photo on page 4), 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 PHOTO by Jon Styer

peacebuilder ■ 3 emu.edu/cjp


Carolyn Yoder, STAR’s founding director, wove the strands of CJP’s work and her own trauma-counseling expertise into a short-term program. While the format and materials get tweaked constantly, the major elements have remained largely the same since STAR was launched in 2001.

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 4

peacebuilder spring/summer 2013

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 PHOTOS by Jon Styer


STAR

Vernon Jantzi, a sociologist who directed CJP from 1995 to 2002, is the expert most often tapped by Elaine Zook Barge to co-facilitate STAR trainings, whether on campus or internationally. Fluent in Spanish, Jantzi has introduced STAR to Mexico, Bolivia and Colombia.

– 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 on page 8).

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 page 12). 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 page 6). 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 page 11). 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 resil-

ience 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 pages 14 and 15). “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.”  — Andrew Jenner 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 traumasensitive programming (see page 15). “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.”

peacebuilder ■ 5 emu.edu/cjp


‘JOURNEY HOME

FROM WAR’

Program Brings STAR Principles to Veterans, Families & Friends

After he got back from the war, Mark Lauro

couldn’t pick up his young son without thinking about that night in Iraq. He was an Army National Guard sergeant with a company deployed in 2007 to provide security for military supply convoys. Lauro was in an armored vehicle running reconnaissance a few kilometers ahead of the others, keeping an eye out for trouble and choosing the best route to follow. As he often did, Lauro led the group against traffic on a divided highway to lessen the chance of an IED attack, clearing oncoming civilian vehicles off the road until the convoy had passed. Among the vehicles he encountered that night was an ambulance, which continued to advance slowly despite Lauro’s commands to stop. Intelligence reports had been warning against possible attacks from emergency vehicles filled with explosives, and Lauro began to run down the rules of engagement checklist: verbal commands, flashing lights, warning shots. The ambulance finally stopped, but a man climbed out and continued to approach on foot, carrying something in his arms. Lauro was preparing to exercise his final, lethal option when he saw that the man was weeping, carrying his badly wounded son, in a desperate search for help. Lauro waved the ambulance on its way and radioed back to the convoy for medical help. The boy died, Lauro later learned. Months later Lauro returned home to his family in Virginia, but he continued to be troubled by the incident, especially by the way he’d nearly shot another man who was simply trying to save his son. The STAR program and the war that Mark Lauro helped fight in Iraq can both trace their origins to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. They were very different responses by very different institutions to unprecedented traumas in modern American history. More than a decade after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, public concern is growing about the psychological cost of those conflicts on American soldiers. In early 2013, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reported that 22 veterans commit suicide every day. As a result, the STAR program has increasingly looked for ways to work with veterans

6

peacebuilder spring/summer 2013

still struggling on the home front. One of those closely involved with the issue is Beverly Prestwood-Taylor, executive director of the Brookfield Institute, a Massachusetts-based organization that promotes trauma-healing and peacebuilding. She was familiar with EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding by way of graduate classes she’d taken while pursuing a doctorate at Hartford Seminary. Seeking ways to prepare church congregations and veterans’ families to support soldiers after their return home, Prestwood-Taylor took the week-long STAR training at EMU and began to incorporate its methodology into her work. The result: a program called the Journey Home From War, a specialized STAR workshop designed for veterans and people in their families, communities or congregations looking for ways to support them. Prestwood-Taylor led the first Journey Home from War workshop in 2009, and has since spun off a variety of similarly designed programs aimed at specific audiences like the clergy and women veterans. More recently, the Brookfield Institute has also provided trauma-healing and resilience training to a group of United Church of Christ congregations in Massachusetts that were looking for ways to support returning veterans. The participating churches have since launched their own programs, including several support groups and a yoga class for veterans. Not long after his return to Virginia, Lauro enrolled in the Adult Degree Completion Program at EMU to earn a degree in management and organizational development. Among his final assignments was a paper about his difficulty readjusting to life back home. The style of discipline Sergeant Lauro used for 20-year-old Army privates in Iraq didn’t translate well to a household with two young children. One night, driving to Washington D.C. for a getaway with his wife, a pair of approaching headlights on the interstate triggered a flashback to his reconnaissance patrols in Iraq. The professor who read Lauro’s paper told him about the STAR program and connected him with STAR director Elaine Zook Barge, who was looking for ways to reach out to veterans. Barge


STAR

After serving in Iraq with the U.S. Army National Guard, Mark Lauro benefited from seeking assistance in healing from residual trauma.

“What STAR offered that we didn’t receive from the military was an explanation of the trauma process. It helped me to understand the technical side of trauma, to understand its actual dynamics, and how these can affect the different parts of the brain.” – Sgt. Mark Lauro invited Lauro to a STAR training, and in 2011, he went, intending concepts. It was science.” to do nothing more than provide her with feedback from a vetPrestwood-Taylor says STAR is unique in integrating a physieran’s perspective. To his surprise, the experience became intensely ological understanding of trauma with a broader view of its personal. He talked about the night he met the ambulance, and impact on one’s spiritual and social health. in doing so, explored the grief and remorse he’d held ever since. “When most programs look at post-traumatic stress disorder, “I felt free of that burden I’d been carrying.” Lauro says STAR they deal with body-brain dysfunction and try to help the veteran has brought considerable healing to his life, though he still deals manage that,” says Prestwood-Taylor. “But there are other aspects occasionally with the effects of his experiences in combat. of healing that are crucial to finding wholeness.” In November 2012, Lauro returned to STAR as a speaker at a She also notes that the majority of veterans who commit Journey Home From War workshop led by Prestwood-Taylor on suicide today have been home for years (69% are over 50 years EMU’s campus. old, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs), meaning “What STAR offered that we didn’t receive from the miliprograms like Journey Home from War need to take a long view. tary was an explanation of the trauma process. It helped me “The need for the community to reach out to veterans and to understand the technical side of trauma, to understand its provide support isn’t a short-term need,” Prestwood-Taylor says. actual dynamics, and how these can affect the different parts of “My hope is that there will be something sustainable for 10 years the brain,” says Lauro, who works in human resources for the from now, 20 years from now, when it is needed just as much as it Virginia Department of Transportation. “It wasn’t just theory and is today.”  — Andrew Jenner PHOTO by Jon Styer

peacebuilder ■ 7 emu.edu/cjp


HISTORICAL HARMS

NEED TO BE ADDRESSED Or They Keep Doing Damage 8

peacebuilder spring/summer 2013

PHOTOS by Jon Styer


STAR

Traumagenic. Don’t know the word? It’s a new adjective

found throughout the manual Transforming Historical Harms by David Anderson Hooker and Amy Potter Czajkowski. Traumagenic refers to events or circumstances – like colonization, civil war, slavery, genocide, systemic discrimination – that cause traumatic reactions and impacts, typically embodied in generation after generation. The victims (and their descendants) of such trauma obviously carry wounds, but so do the perpetrators, though these roles may shift over time, with changing circumstances. Think of the Hutus and the Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi – at different times each group has been among the victims and each among the perpetrators of violence. “Historically traumagenic circumstances that have not been healed, reconciled or made right can have continuing consequences at the individual, family, organizational, communal, regional, national and even international level for generations,” write Hooker and Czajkowski in Transforming Historical Harms, published in 2011 by EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. The authors emphasize that the mere passage of time does not heal trauma. For this reason, EMU’s STAR program offers trainings centered on the teachings in the Transforming Historical Harms (THH) manual. “The THH framework requires an understanding of trauma, historical trauma and harms, the mechanisms of legacy and aftermath, and finally a holistic healing approach that’s inclusive of these understandings,” explain Hooker and Czajkowski. The “healing approach” is grounded in these values:  truth, based on understanding and facing what really happened in the past;  mercy, based on developing an empathy for the “other” in his or her context;  justice, based on righting the wrongs of the past by taking corrective steps today;  peace, based on recognizing each other’s dignity. Hooker, assisted by STAR director Elaine Zook Barge, led a two-day THH workshop for 11 participants in April 2013 at EMU. In it, Hooker stressed the importance of “narrative,” or listening to each other’s stories, as a key step in the healing process. As an example, the THH manual cites Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone (fambultok.org), a national movement of reconciliation and healing to address the aftermath of an 11-year civil war in that country. Sparked by John Caulker and Elisabeth Hoffman, Fambul Tok spread through villages and the countryside, with circles of neighbors sitting around bonfires sharing their experiences, including many instances of confessions, apologies, and forgiveness. At the end, cleansing ceremonies were held. In the United States, Hooker pointed out that racism remains prevalent through various belief systems and social structures that can trace their roots back to slavery and other events and institutions that many people would consider bygones. One specific example that came up at the April training was how the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, or HOLC, assessed property values in hundreds of American cities in an attempt to mitigate a foreclosure crisis during the Great Depres-

EMU vice-president Luke Hartman offers a point during the workshop, while lead facilitator David Anderson Hooker (facing page) directs a role play with Cricket White (left) and Jessica Bonnan-White.

sion. In Richmond, Virginia, the HOLC assigned grades of A, B, C or D to rank neighborhoods from high (A) to low (D) in terms of desirability and property value. Reflecting the prejudices of the time, race figured into the HOLC assessors’ work in a way shocking to any sensibility today: every neighborhood where African-Americans lived got a D regardless of other factors. Every white neighborhood was given an A, a B or a C, and proximity to “negro” areas was sometimes listed as a reason why a white neighborhood received a lower assessment than facts would otherwise dictate. That was in 1937, and it would be unthinkable today for an agency of the federal government to engage in such blatant racism. Even so, the effects of those 75-year-old policies continue to inflict pain in Richmond. “The areas that were ‘Ds’ are impoverished neighborhoods now, and they were not necessarily that at the time [they were assessed],” says workshop participant Cricket White, national director of training and project development for the Richmond nonprofit Hope in the Cities. The HOLC assessments directly affected property owners’ access to credit and depressed home values in low-rated neighborhoods. Before long, well-to-do people of any race who lived in D neighborhoods left. Poorer ones stayed, concentrating poverty in specific areas. In ensuing decades, policy-makers picked these exact neighborhoods for public housing redevelopment. Today, residents in these neighborhoods face the full gamut of trauma-causing structural problems that plague the urban poor in America: limited access to education, transportation, jobs, healthy food at market prices, and other basic components of comfort, peacebuilder ■ 9 emu.edu/cjp


This April 2013 workshop was one of the first official Transforming Historical Harms trainings offered through the STAR program.

security and dignity. Another aspect of historic trauma addressed in the THH training is the role of “legacy,” or beliefs and biases in perpetuating trauma rooted in the past. In the case of the HOLC neighborhood assessments in Richmond, an example of this legacy would be modern-day explanations for the poverty that persists in the neighborhoods assigned a “D” rating decades earlier: laziness, irresponsibility, self-destructive choices, and residents’ other personal shortcomings. Using the THH approach, these explanations are seen to be focused on the symptoms of a social illness – a modern injustice – that began with a past harm inflicted by racist policies. “Even if we are ‘past’ it in terms of policy, we’re not past it in terms of attitudes that people have passed on,” says White. Identifying, understanding and changing the persisting legacy of trauma-causing events in the past is “the heart of transforming historical harms’ work,” says Hooker, who has been affiliated with CJP for a decade and regularly teaches at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute. “Everything else is form and function behind that.” The THH manual by Hooker and Czajkowski was originally prepared for Coming to the Table, a program developed at EMU that adapted the STAR model to address the specific historical trauma of slavery in America. (Czajkowski now works with the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program at EMU.) The two undertook the project as it became clear that the historic traumahealing framework developed at Coming to the Table had wide applicability to other historic traumas in other settings.*1 *Coming to the Table continues its work confronting the legacy of slavery as an “associate organization” to EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, while the STAR program has begun periodically offering the more general Transforming Historic Harms training.

10

peacebuilder spring/summer 2013

At the April workshop, Hooker encouraged each individual participant to imagine specific steps to begin healing the ongoing traumas connected to their lives. In Richmond, White and her organization have begun to address the legacy of the HOLC neighborhood assessments by creating a PowerPoint presentation to publicize resources available to address specific problems – e.g., access to transportation – that persist today. The April training at EMU, attended by nearly a dozen people with varying professional and personal interests in the subject, was one of the first official THH trainings offered through the STAR program. Hooker has also been using the methodology for the past three years in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he is part of an effort to address the city’s history of racism. Karen B. Froming, assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco, wrote in a followup email to Hooker and Barge, “I have found the material to be haunting me as I think about all the ways in which historical harms operate in our lives. While I may do work in Rwanda, it is quite apparent how much work we have to do in this country.” Several participants said the opportunity to spend two days with other people who share an interest in the understanding and healing of historical trauma provided encouragement. “It feels good to know you’re not alone doing this stuff,” says Iris de León-Hartshorn, director for transformative peacemaking of Mennonite Church USA. De León-Hartshorn is involved in addressing historical traumas related to boarding and mission schools – including several run by the Mennonite church – where Native American children were sent for assimilation into white American culture.  — Andrew Jenner & Bonnie Price Lofton PHOTO by Jon Styer


STAR

Spreading STAR in Minnesota and Beyond It was supposed to have been a one-off deal – just a single, week-long STAR I training in Minneapolis, Minnesota, back in the summer of 2010. Donna Minter, the organizer, had caught the STAR bug over the previous two years while taking Level I and II trainings at EMU. She enrolled to expand her own skill set for dealing with the trauma she encountered in her work as a psychologist; upon returning home, she’d simply wanted to spread the word in her own community. “STAR is so different from traditional trauma and psychological care continuing education, because it includes the concepts of restorative justice, peacemaking and conflict transformation,” says Minter. “From a professional perspective, I don’t know of any other program that’s tying those concepts together in the same way.” With the help of her congregation, Faith Mennonite Church, Minter developed a PowerPoint presentation about STAR and “hit the pavement” to drum up interest in the training, for which she’d already reserved space at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. She pitched the program to dozens of groups, made a special effort to recruit participants from the city’s different ethnic and religious communities, and raised about $8,000 to fund the event and sponsor attendance for people who couldn’t afford the registration fees. Minter’s hard work paid off. The training, led by STAR director Elaine Zook Barge, kicked off in June 2010, with a full roster of 25 people representing five ethnic groups and five religious traditions, ranging in age from 20-something to 60-plus. Afterwards, participants said they were particularly enthusiastic about the practical skills they’d acquired, enabling them to recognize and deal with trauma in their personal and professional lives. All in all, Minter deemed the training a big success, the culmination of months of hard work. She soon discovered she’d only just begun. Participants immediately encouraged her to organize more STAR trainings. She started getting phone calls from strangers who’d heard about the event and wanted to know when the next training would be. Not wanting to stand in the way of the plan God apparently had in mind for her work, Minter doubled down in 2011 by planning two more STAR trainings and upped the ante again with three week-long STAR trainings in 2012. After the first training, as it became clear that Minter’s STAR project was meeting a widespread need,

Donna Minter, founder of the Minnesota Peacebuilding Leadership Institute and master STAR trainer

she put together an advisory board and secured a small grant from Mennonite Church USA to fund subsequent programs. (Total fundraising for project support from a variety of sources is approaching $50,000 to date.) More recently, Minter founded the nonprofit Minnesota Peacebuilding Leadership Institute, or MPLI – she acts as its executive director – to serve as the institutional home for the STAR trainings in Minnesota and an expanding body of related work, like a monthly peace and justice reading group and film screening. Already, licensing boards in Minnesota have designated the MPLI as a certified continuing education provider for a wide variety of social workers, counselors, teachers and medical professionals. Since the start, it’s been a labor of love for Minter, who continues in her full-time psychology work. (Figuring out how to make the MPLI executive director position sustainable from a financial and career perspective is a goal she and her board are working toward, though.) The original STAR training in Minneapolis has become six; 113 participants from 90 different organizations and a great diversity of personal and professional backgrounds have attended the sessions. Minter is one of eight EMU-certified STAR trainers. In 2013, the MPLI will sponsor STAR trainings June 12-16, Sept. 16-20 and Oct. 11-13 & 26-27. Prior to its summer convention in Phoenix, Arizona, Mennonite Church USA has also invited MPLI to offer a STAR training in Phoenix, June 25-29. For more information on these trainings, contact Minter at STAR.mpls@gmail. com or 612-377-4660, or visit www.mnpeace.org.  — Andrew Jenner

PHOTO by Lindsey Kolb

peacebuilder ■ 11 emu.edu/cjp


Harry Thélusma, the sole male student in the center of this class on psychosocial trauma at the 2012 Summer Peacebuilding Institute, is committed to spreading trauma-resilience principles widely in his native Haiti. Professor Al Fuertes (front row, left), a native of the Philippines, has taught or co-taught this course five times at EMU. In this class, 12 countries were represented.

Haitians Embrace Trauma-Resilience With a history of violence linked to colonization,

intense poverty and vulnerable geographic location, Haiti has long suffered from natural disasters, social conflict, and other traumatic events. That is one reason more than 12,000 Haitians have welcomed trainings, materials and principles of Wozo, a program derived from EMU’s Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR). “Wozo has helped me to know better ways to act and react when faced with conflict,” says Smith Rafael, director of a school in his home community of Wanament. “I live more nonviolently and help other people to do that too.” Rafael says he uses Wozo material in a radio show he hosts for two hours each Sunday evening (streamed via powerhaiti.com). For Dieudonné, Wozo has been a vehicle for building selfesteem, both for himself, as a man with a deformed leg, and for Haitians generally, as citizens of a country dealing with a multitude of problems. “We need mental peace,” he says. “We are so traumatized by our history, our culture and the earthquake, we must find ways to be at peace mentally. As a society, we have lost our self-esteem.” Dieudonné (who goes by this one name) has undergone six operations on one of his legs to correct a deformation since birth. He walks with the aid of crutches and is coordinator of the Association of Handicapped Persons for Northwest Haiti. “Prior to taking Wozo, I always had problems with accepting myself, the way I am. Now I accept myself as a person of value and know how far I can go. This has been the biggest change in myself.” Wozo is basically STAR translated and contextualized for 12

peacebuilder spring/summer 2013

Haiti. STAR director Elaine Zook Barge and other project staff have taught trauma awareness and response skills to a core group of 1,000 volunteers, including Rafael and Dieudonné, many of whom are now putting the concepts to work in their own communities. Sixty-eight of these volunteers have completed the Level II STAR program, enabling them to train others. Enthusiasm for the trainings – sponsored by six Christian organizations including Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) – demonstrates the profound need for trauma work in Haiti, as well as STAR’s relevance across cultures and contexts, say several people affiliated with the project. “It is really a blessing. It is really amazing to have this kind of program in Haiti to contribute to the construction of human beings as well as the resilience of the Haitian people,” says Garly Michel, the Wozo coordinator (pictured at far right in photo facing page 1). He oversees the trainings throughout the country. The three-year project, now completing its final year, was launched in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake that killed 316,000 and left 1.5 million homeless, according to Haitian government statistics. Ten months after the earthquake, a cholera epidemic occurred. Originally focused on the areas most affected by the earthquake, Michel says the project’s scope soon expanded to include all 10 départements, or states, in Haiti. Barge notes that Haiti also is recovering from collective, historical trauma from the effects of slavery during the colonial era, racial discrimination, and structural violence, including external interventions that impose foreign interests. “We’d like to see a nonviolent, healthy and resilient Haiti where each Haitian feels comfortable, safe and proud to live,” says Harry Thélusma, Wozo program officer. Michel, Thélusma and 32 other Haitians are alumni of EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute, where they have taken classes on a variety of topics, including humanitarian aid, leadership for healthy organizations, and monitoring, evaluation and learning.  — Bonnie Price Lofton PHOTO by James Souder


STAR

On Caring for Self: A Critical Part of Peacebuilding

The people who gravitate towards the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, especially towards its courses and workshops on psychosocial trauma, often have experienced traumatizing situations. They may even come in the hope of addressing their own posttraumatic stress disorder or burnout. Sarah Crawford-Browne of South Africa was one of these people. She took Strategies in Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) Level I in August 2005, followed by STAR Level II in April 2006. In a first-person piece posted on the CJP website September 7, 2012, she tells part of her story: One day, I witnessed a double murder/assassination whilst looking out my living room window. I had just spent five years working with trauma in Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uganda and Sudan. Now I was head of service at a trauma center in Cape Town. The center runs a 24-hour response service to crises in the city, so when I saw the murders, I grabbed my neon-colored response jacket and my response backpack and went down to help. I was involved the full night. Due to the demands of my resource-challenged center, I went right on to work the next day without sleeping. This incident proved to be the tipping point for Crawford-Browne. She had worked at the Cape Town trauma center for ten months, and she continued working there for another eight months in an effort to fulfill the center’s contractual obligations. But she began to exhibit classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I woke up at about 1 a.m. completely confused. My mind swirled in a series of primitive emotions. Nothing was making much sense. The emotions were not linked to language and I could not access words. Eventually at about 5 a.m., I thought, “I am going mad.” And that thought somehow linked me to the psycho-education pamphlets that I’ve given out so frequently which list common experiences of people who have witnessed violence. One of them is feeling like you’re going mad. I then realized that I was traumatized. Drawing on her training as a trauma expert and clinical social worker, Crawford-Browne knew she needed to ease the “hyper-arousal” that is typical of PTSD by unwinding regularly and removing herself from situations that set her off.

Unwinding required that I ground myself, consciously getting back in contact with my center, getting back into my body. What specifically helped me to do this was listening deeply to music, meditation, knitting, journaling – activities where I could be engaged whilst unwinding the layers of caught-up energy. Being in spaces where I could be alone and have quiet, not noise, helped, too. Sometimes it meant creating a small ritual to divert energy that was distressing. It took about eight months until the PTSD abated. As active practitioners in the fields of peace and justice, most of the faculty and staff of CJP have themselves faced the challenges of “burnout.” After the arrival of Ron Kraybill as a faculty member in 1995, the curriculum of CJP expanded to include recognizing the signs of burnout and addressing it, as well as improving day-to-day interactions. In Kraybill's words: It took 15 years of full-time work with peace initiatives before it dawned on me that it is not lack of skill or money that most severely limits the organizations I know best. Rather it is the struggle of staff in those organizations to get along with each other and with other organizations around them, compounded by fatigue and burnout of individuals in them. Kraybill developed a course called “Disciplines for Transforming the Peacebuilder” and drafted a book titled Self-Care for Caregivers. Restorative techniques taught by Kraybill, embraced and enlarged upon by other faculty members since the 1990s, include an afternoon nap, regular exercise, yoga, meditation with breath work, having mentors or counselors, adequate sleep, involvement in a faith community, relaxing activities such as dancing, playing music and doing art, keeping a journal, and reserving time for quality relationships with family members and friends. In 2004, CJP brought David Brubaker aboard as the faculty member focused on teaching ways to build "healthy" organizations, where leaders and team members have the self-awareness and skills necessary to address inevitable conflicts in a positive manner. In the 2013 Summer Peacebuilding Institute, out of 20 courses offered, four pertained to understanding psychosocial trauma and nurturing resilience for sustained peacebuilding. Toward the end of one of these seven-day courses, Al Fuertes (pictured on the facing page) told his students: "We cannot give what we don't have. Who heals the healers?" Projecting to the future, CJP calls in its current five-year strategic plan for continued emphasis on “personal, relational, and spiritual well-being.” 

— Bonnie Price Lofton

peacebuilder ■ 13 emu.edu/cjp


Carolyn Yoder, founding director of Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience, says organizations that offer assistance to populations affected by war, natural disasters or other traumatic occurrences need to be "trauma informed" in order to support wellsprings of resilience.

Being Sensitive To Trauma In Humanitarian, Development Aid By Carolyn Yoder During the recent civil war in Nepal, the staff of a vocational training project reported that the young trainees were displaying behaviors probably related to the stress of the violence: difficulty concentrating, aggression, low self-confidence and the tendency to suddenly burst into tears. Many had difficulty completing the course, and those that did finish had difficulty succeeding in the labor market, which diminished the project’s success. In a paper on the issue, entitled “The Vicissitudes of Empowerment in Conflict-Afflicted Nepal,” Barbara Weyermann reported that project staff, “didn’t want to ask the trainees about how they or their families were affected by the war because they didn’t know what to do when the young men started to cry.” 14

peacebuilder spring/summer 2013

The human tendency to avoid difficult topics, at both individual and organizational levels, is hardly unique. Weyermann notes that “in most ‘normal’ development projects, the effect of violence [on beneficiaries] is almost always ignored.” On the other side of the world, Nicaraguan psychologist Martha Cabrera observed in the late 1990s that no one seemed to be taking note of the subjective, psychological or spiritual needs of her country in the post-conflict, post-Hurricane Mitch era. Development and humanitarian assistance projects abounded. Everyone had been “work-shopped” on various topics, but with few concrete results. Cabrera wondered why. Using a health survey as a point of entry, Cabrera and her colleagues at the Valdivieso Center traveled to the worst-affected regions with a goal of addressing psychological needs. The depth and breadth of what they discovered staggered them. They found high levels of apathy, isolation, aggressiveness, abuse, chronic somatic illness and low levels of flexibility, tolerance and the ability to trust and work together. They reported their findings in a paper entitled “Living and Surviving In a Multiply Wounded Country.” Nicaragua, the team realized, “was a multiply wounded, multiply traumatized, multiply mourning country,” which had “serious implications for people’s health, the resilience of the country’s social fabric, the success of development schemes, and the hope of future generations.” Cabrera noted it is hard to move forward, and to build democracy, when the personal and communal history still hurts. PHOTO by Molly Kraybill


STAR What Weyermann and Cabrera describe are the effects of trauma on the body, brain and behavior of individuals, communities and societies. In recent years, humanitarian and development organizations have recognized these needs and have increasingly included psychosocial programs when working with populations impacted by natural disasters or violence. Weyermann notes that the support provided by these projects can be vital to victims/survivors, but she points out two drawbacks: the stigma those receiving services often face; and the fact that addressing economic hardship – which can be traumatic in itself – is outside of the mandate of most psychosocial projects. A way to address these limitations is for organizations to become “trauma informed” so that a trauma-sensitive framework can be integrated into any project: economic, health, governance and others. This means more than putting a psychologist on every project team. Awareness of the repercussions of trauma needs to extend across the organization, to headquarters and field staff alike. Being trauma-informed includes:  Understanding the physiological, emotional, cognitive, behavioral and spiritual impact of traumatic events (current or historic) on recipient populations, and how unaddressed trauma contributes to cycles of violence.  Going beyond traditional mental health diagnosis and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as the measure of trauma impact, and also recognizing community and societal dynamics and behaviors that are indicators of unaddressed trauma.  Identifying processes from multiple fields – human security (including economic security), conflict transformation, restorative justice, neurobiology, psychology and spirituality – that can address trauma and increase resilience.  Recognizing that addressing the psychological needs of populations creates the need to monitor staff for secondary trauma and to equip them with self-care skills and tools. Trauma-informed organizations can design programs that are trauma sensitive across all stages of the programming cycle: needs assessment, design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. Trauma-sensitive programming can improve project outcomes, reduce stigma around trauma, and provide new ways to address difficult issues that contribute to intractable conflict and violence. Cabrera says the people they worked with were initially startled by the approach. But they thanked them afterwards because it helped them recognize their own resilience, find meaning in what they had lived through, and move forward in life. Moving forward – that is, after all, part of what development and humanitarian assistance is about.  Carolyn Yoder, a 1972 graduate of EMU, was the first director of Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience (STAR). She holds an MA in linguistics and an MA in counseling psychology, as well as multiple licenses in counseling. She has lived and worked around the globe, including extended sojourns in the Middle East, Eastern and Southern Africa, Armenia, Asia, and the Caribbean. This article originally appeared in the September 2012 issue of Monthly Developments Magazine. It is reprinted with permission.

'Good Intentions Aren't Enough' “There’s been a lot of documentation that interventions from the outside can do more harm than good,” says Lisa Schirch, the director of 3P Human Security and a research professor at EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). “Good intentions aren’t enough.” With that awareness in mind, many humanitarian and development organizations do trainings to develop “sensitivities” – conflict sensitivity, gender sensitivity, environmental sensitivity – to influence the way their staff design and implement projects. Joining the list recently is “trauma sensitivity,” as articulated on the facing page by former STAR director Carolyn Yoder. “[International] agencies were often very, very eager to rush into communities that had been deeply affected by violence without having any real understanding of how [their work] could re-traumatize people,” says Lauren Van Metre, dean of students with the Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). STAR is being tapped to provide trauma-sensitivity training and develop other projects in Washington D.C. In addition to helping participants avoid unintentionally doing harm, STAR helps people rotating through field work to manage their own traumatic responses to extremely difficult work situations. “The NGOs and the military are looking for trauma programs, and we’ve got one that’s 12 years old, and it’s proven,” says Elaine Zook Barge, current STAR director. As an example, USIP found that its rule-of-law assessment teams working overseas began to report back that their investigations into traumatic events were causing fresh pain for the people they interviewed. STAR and USIP collaborated for a first training in September 2012, with another scheduled nine months later at USIP headquarters in D.C. Van Metre says the STAR training at USIP has been particularly valuable for people who have been affected by their extended stints in conflict zones. Through its peacebuilding academy, USIP has also developed its own two-day training based on the STAR methodology. In a 2009 interview with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs, former CJP trauma studies professor Nancy Good said all relief and development workers can benefit from trauma training. “I don’t think we’re doing our jobs if we’re sending people out to do this really important work and are only training them on things like how to work with building houses and acquiring clean water and sanitation,” said Good, now a wellness consultant with the Washington D.C.-based KonTerra group. “We need to [provide] workers [with] basic knowledge and skills for stress management, trauma healing and resilience.”  — Andrew Jenner

peacebuilder ■ 15 emu.edu/cjp


During 2012-13, Jean Claude Nkundwa of Burundi transitioned from being a graduate student (center) to being an assistant instructor in "Understanding Psychosocial Trauma," taught by Al Fuertes, PhD. Nkundwa is a 2013 graduate of the MA in conflict transformation program at EMU.

Genocide Survivor Prepares to Stabilize Peace Jean Claude Nkundwa came to the Center for

Justice and Peacebuilding with a desire to help his country address its history of violence. Most people in the United States, when they hear about Tutsis and Hutus, think about the genocide in Rwanda, but genocide also occurred in neighboring Burundi and greatly impacted Jean Claude and his family. Six years before he was born in 1978, Burundi experienced its “first genocide” wherein both Hutus and Tutsis participated in the killings resulting in over 100,000 deaths. Jean Claude’s mother, a Tutsi, successively lost two husbands, both Hutus, to the violence. She escaped death, but was greatly traumatized by her experiences, including temporary deportation and injury while pregnant. People began to say that she was cursed because of marrying Hutus. Jean Claude's father was a Tutsi, but this fact did not help his mother escape her traumas. She was an educated woman – a teacher and a journalist – but found herself unable to cope with the persecution she was experiencing. Jean Claude was sent to live with his grandfather so as to be provided a healthier home life. Then came the second genocide of 1993. A Hutu, Melchior Ndadaye, won the first democratic election in the country, but was assassinated by Tutsi soldiers. This set off another wave of killings – over 300,000 civilians died. Jean Claude, at 15, was placed on the list to be killed by the Hutus because of his Tutsi ethnic background. Hutus scoured his home area while Jean Claude and an uncle hid in an avocado tree through the night. Jean 16

peacebuilder spring/summer 2013

Claude fled the next day as the violence resumed. He met two cousins, and they wandered for three days not knowing where they were going. Jean Claude and his cousins were stopped three times along the way, but they were let go. To this day, he is not sure why. He found a Tutsi army camp, where he was safe, and eventually made it to the capital, Bujumbura. Later he found out that several extended family members were killed, 45 in all in his community. By 1994, the situation began to stabilize, though there were still tensions between the Hutu government and the Tutsis. Jean Claude began high school in 1996 – the year that his mother died – thanks to a program that provided a free high school education to victims of genocide. Friends in the peace movement helped him with the funding to obtain a bachelor’s degree in social work and community development from Hope Africa University. His passion for peace and justice blossomed during a two-year peace education training program offered to him by Mennonite Central Committee in 2000. He decided that reconciliation with his family’s oppressors was a goal he should pursue and he visited with the Hutus who had killed his family members. He saw that they too had suffered and continued to suffer from past traumas, starvation and malaria. Jean Claude has since served as the Burundi coordinator for the Peace and Reconciliation Program of Harvest for Peace Ministries. At a Great Lakes Region peace seminar organized by MCC, he met CJP professor Carl Stauffer, who inspired him to want to come to CJP to pursue a master’s degree. Jean Claude began his studies at CJP in January 2012. He brought with him his wife Francine and his one-year-old son Duke. Through his studies here, he hopes to build his capacity and skills to work with civil society – churches and nongovernmental organizations – to sustain peace in Burundi. He is particularly interested in transitional justice to assist his country in addressing past human rights violations in both judicial and non-judicial ways.  — Phoebe Kilby PHOTO by James Souder


In 1993,15-year-old Jean Claude Nkundwa witnessed genocide in his village in Burundi, one of many perpetrated by both Hutus and Tutsis over the country’s modern history. Family members and friends died that day, but Jean Claude escaped and eventually was able to overcome his fears and anger. He came to CJP to learn more about how to help Burundians deal with their traumas and reconcile in peace. (More of his story on facing page.)

The world needs more leaders working for peace and justice. Please help CJP educate, train and nurture promising new leaders.

Online: emu.edu/cjp/giving By check to EMU/CJP sent to: Development Office Eastern Mennonite University 1200 Park Road Harrisonburg VA 22802 For more information, contact: Phoebe Kilby, Office of Development 800-368-3383 phoebe.kilby@emu.edu

Four reasons to support the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding:

1.

Known world-wide for educating and developing effective leaders in conflict transformation, restorative justice, trauma healing and conflictsensitive development.

2.

Home to one of the few graduate-level programs that equips people to work for peace and justice at the community level, thereby supporting peace and justice at societal and global levels.

3. 4.

Attracts many exceptional applicants who need scholarship support in order to enroll.

emu.edu/cjp/giving

Ways to give:

Sows the seeds of peace in 120 countries through the work of faculty, staff, 442 graduates, and more than 7,800 trainees.

Join us in realizing our vision to develop leaders who will create a just, peaceful and secure world. peacebuilder â– 17 emu.edu/cjp


EASTERN MENNONITE UNIVERSITY 1200 Park Road Harrisonburg VA 22802-2462 USA

STRATEGIES FOR TRAUMA AWARENESS AND RESILIENCE Toward healthy individuals and societies

SEMINARS 2013

STAR I: May 27-June 4 (at SPI) STAR I: June 12-15 (at EMU Lancaster, Pa.) STAR I: June 24-28 (at USIP in Washington D.C.) The Journey Home from War: September 12-13 STAR I: September 16-20 STAR II: November 11-15 Plus five other trainings offered through www.mnpeace.org

REGISTER TODAY • emu.edu/star • star@emu.edu • 540-432-4490 Pictured above in a STAR Level II training, Denita Connor of Glenmoore, Pa., is a certified forum facilitator for the Young Presidents' Organization and World Presidents' Organization.


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.