I want to share a blessed ‘Big Up’ and a warm ‘Shout Out’ to the Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding Crew! Powerful, humble, inspiring friends representing Sierra Leone, Grenada, Egypt, Cameroon, US, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Canada, and Indonesia. Our small global community spent two weeks together building, cultivating, and nurturing a culture of peace while diving deep into principles and practices of non-violence; meanings, concepts indicators of peace and peacelessness; conflict theories and analysis tools; personal and group reflections; and individual and collective action plans that embodied the teachings and major learnings during our short time together.
I was honoured and privileged to be invited once again to co facilitate the Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding spring certificate course at the Coady International Institute with friend and mentor Thomas Turay (aka Dr. Peace), world renowned Peace Educator hailing us from Sierra Leone. I continue to find strength and wisdom from reflecting and writing and therefore I share with you my perspective of our two week global peace community through a series of blogs beginning with an aha moment related to the transformative power of building cross cultural, class, religious, gender, race and so much more …. relationships!
At the start of our second week Dr. Peace asked everyone to take a photo, one photo that represented everything learnt over the past week. With imaginary and real cameras everyone took their photos. Some snapped images of flip charted tools and strategies, others took photos of the classroom set up, some took photos of people and others snapped themselves. The main goal was to reveal the diverse lenses we all operate from; to explore and identify the various frames in which we see the world and how this differs from person to person depending on various contexts. In my mind I gathered our group together and took a collective photo. The aha for me was confirming once again how my world and personal view is influenced by people, by relationships, by building community wherever I find myself; community that is as diverse as the colours of a sun drenched rainbow. I look out onto the world through a people centred frame and I confirmed once again how deeply I learn from these relationships! Creating and sustaining a culture of peace within our small global community over the past two weeks through sharing and learning from one another’s perspectives, opinions, contexts, stories, histories/herstories, our differences and similarities, our cultural assumptions, our families and communities; our states of peace and peacelessness; and our work both home and abroad stretched and transformed me once again!
With this aha I extend deep rivers of gratitude to Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Cameroon, USA, Afghanistan, Grenada, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Canada in the presence and richness of Mabel, Joice, Alice, Hamdan, Osee, Popal, Maureen, Mary, Thomas, Ghada, and Catherine !
One Love
One Family
Stay tuned for further reflections from community conflict and peacebuilding course!
One Family
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