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.

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

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.

EMU vice-president Luke Hartman offers a point during the workshop. Photo by Jon Styer

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 Depression. 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 thedy 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, 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 trauma-healing framework developed at Coming to the Table had wide applicability to other historic traumas in other settings. 1

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 follow-up 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

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.

Donna Minter, founder of the Minnesota Peacebuilding Leadership Institute and master STAR trainer. Photo by Lindsey Kolb

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, 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

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 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

“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

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. Photo by James Sauder.

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 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 non-governmental 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

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.”

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, and 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,” and that 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, to build democracy, when the personal and communal history still hurts.

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 victim/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; and
• 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, after all, is part of what development and humanitarian assistance are about.

Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience (STAR) equips organizations to work with trauma-impacted populations. STAR provides consultations and workshops for home and field staff that prepare them to do trauma-sensitive programming. This article originally appeared in the September 2012 issue of Monthly Developments Magazine. Reposted with permission.

Fadi Rabieh

I believe in the goodness of human beings and in our ability to transcend above and beyond our painful history to find ways of coping and healing. Over the past two years there has been growing skepticism about the impact of people-to-people projects, especially among the young generation. It is extremely challenging to find people from both sides who are interested in meeting and listening to one another. People are tired of even talking! The cynics say we have tried negotiation and dialogue for over fifteen years, and it has gotten us nowhere. The other side is not genuine and does not seek peace. Yet these voices do not recognize that we have also tried force and violence for over fifty years, and that, too, has gotten us nowhere.

As Israelis and Palestinians we have been living in a cycle of violence for so long that each side’s sense of victimhood has only become stronger with time. Both sides have constructed a narrative that is rooted in this sense of victimhood and righteousness – a narrative that dehumanizes the other; we are the good people, they are the bad ones, we seek peace, they seek war, we are the victims and only defend ourselves against their aggression, we stand alone and the entire world supports them, etc. Both narratives have been created to bolster our sense of victimhood and righteous cause.

As a result of this sense of victimhood, our brains and senses become selective. We see the world in black or white, right or wrong, with us or against us. We become increasingly judgmental and only speak the language of “facts” and the only “truth.” Interestingly, we only see what confirms our narrative and pre-constructed worldview. Throughout the years of my work in the field of peacebuilding, I have been struck by the level of ignorance and negative images both sides have of one another.

Setting Aside Stereotypes

Palestinians and Israelis from all sectors and spheres must meet each other to change these stereotypes and behavior of prejudice. Teachers must collaborate to create a dual narrative that acknowledges each side’s connection to this land, and to present a more human story of the other to the next generations. Business people must find ways where both nations can build on their capital so that communities might prosper. Journalists and media people must find ways to present constructive stories that help people become hopeful and realize the other side’s dignity. Politicians must work to find creative ways to find a proper political framework and solution that address  the needs of all sectors and parties. Religious people must meet to find ways to prevent this conflict from becoming a religious one.

When the two sides come to the table, Israelis come to build a personal relationship with the Palestinians as if the occupation does not exist, and Palestinians come hoping such a meeting will end the conflict and overlook the impact of building a personal relationship. Palestinians fail to understand the collective fear experienced by Jews, and Israeli Jews fail to understand the Palestinians’ sense of loss and pain as a result of the Nakba [“catastrophe” in Arabic]. Both sides seek acknowledgment of their feelings of loss and pain. This is what any dialogue process tries to address. It tries to provide a safe space for the parties to discover the other’s humanity and have their identity needs (i.e. recognition, acknowledgment, and dignity) met.

Unlearning Hatred

Interestingly – and this is the good news – individuals and groups that engage in dialogue programs do have a positive shift in their attitudes. However, the bad news is that this shift is not sustained beyond the encounter (or the life of the project). Also, the change does not go beyond the individual to impact on the surrounding. It is naïve to believe that people will have a positive and sustained shift in attitude from one or two encounters. It is very easy to hate, and is even natural in such an intense environment. It is too painful to engage with the enemy and try to unlearn years of hatred and fear in order to trust and listen deeply. If it took people years to learn and experience fear and hate, how many years do we need to replace it with courage and acceptance?

For people-to-people encounters to succeed, they must take place within a political framework or process. The absence of such a process leaves most dialogue encounters sorely handicapped, and they fall short of having a larger impact on both societies. Relationship-building projects must coincide with progress on the political plane; otherwise the positive impact that such encounters may have will regress with the next escalation or increase in violence. Nonetheless, this does not mean we should wait for the resumption of negotiations in order to legitimize people-to-people encounters. People must meet and continue to dialogue. We need to increase the level of exposure Palestinians and Israelis have for each other, especially in light of the separation between the two peoples, and the filtered and biased news.

During the past year Palestinians witnessed an increase in so-called “anti-normalization” voices, which try to pressure and sometimes prevent Palestinians from meeting with Israelis. Despite my understanding of the rationale my fellow Palestinians try to present here (i.e., not to show that we have a normal relationship with Israelis until the occupation ends), I disagree and find it counterproductive. I believe Palestinians have a duty to engage with Israelis to get their message across, and counter a narrative that tries to delegitimize and dehumanize them. I have witnessed people change and maintain this change over a long period of time as a result of their exposure to the other narrative.

First Steps

The dialogue process begins with finding the “right” candidate and convincing him or her to engage. This in and of itself is a process of dialogue and unlearning! How do you convince people to join such projects? The personal connection is the best strategy. The core of this work is trust-building, and this involves us as workers in the field. Maintaining and expanding our relationships within and across communities – with the presence or absence of actual projects – is very important, so when the time comes people feel confident and ready to start their journey. It is extremely important to maintain our credibility within our communities and embody our values. Furthermore, people think dialogue programs must only take place between people who have not been exposed to those from the other side, or have negative perceptions. This is true to some degree, but some peacebuilding programs must also aim to energize, mobilize, and recruit active people who are willing to work for the dignity of the “other.”

I have come to realize that having a diverse group (which include people with positive experiences and perceptions of the other) is the best way to accelerate the humanization process. By witnessing the differences in opinions and positions among members of the same group, we can create the first fracture in the generalization and stereotyping of the other group (no longer do all the members of your “enemy” group look the same; some of them are actually good)! This fracture is like a seed that the dialogue process aims to plant and water. Also, those same agents help bridge the gap between the two divides because they can communicate with both sides and model the desired attitude.

Anti-normalization or convincing people to engage in dialogue are not the only challenges we face when it comes to people-to-people projects. The biggest challenge is to help people maintain open channels of communication at times of increased violence. When such incidents happen (i.e. Gaza or the Lebanon War) the dialogue process comes to halt and the goal becomes how to prevent what we have built so far from deteriorating. Sometimes one feels as if we are starting over from square one. And even in the absence of escalation in the conflict, maintaining a positive shift and relationship among group members for a long period beyond the project’s duration is a major challenge on its own.

Peacebuilders Unite!

In order to address many of the above-mentioned challenges (anti-normalization, conflict escalation, maintaining relationships and positive attitude shifts), we as peacebuilders – individuals and organizations – must think big and bold.

First, peacebuilding organizations might benefit from creating an umbrella body that could unify this effort to become more effective and efficient. Peacebuilding groups and organizations would largely benefit from having one voice, and a coordinated focused strategy to maximize their impact within their communities. Changing the culture from competition to collaboration and synergy among organizations and groups (i.e., sharing resources, expertise, and data of best practices and participants) is the best way to have long-term programs instead of short-term projects.

Second, peacebuilding organizations must transform their efforts towards a peace movement in both societies. Their efforts must be seen and heard publicly. The more peace organizations work in the shadow, the more they harm themselves. Therefore, the work must make it to the streets of Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Becoming vocal, especially at times of escalation, and taking initiative instead of reacting passively is the best strategy – not only to fill a vacuum that is caused by lack of a political process and filled by extremists and anti-normalization voices, but also to increase and regain the public’s confidence.

Here To Stay

Many people – and I am one of them – believe the two-state solution is almost over. However, this propels us to more engagement as two people to find new ways and solutions. We have no choice but to learn how to live and share this land with each other. We know we cannot defeat each other militarily, and that each nation is here to stay.

As peacebuilders we must not shy away from the challenges we face. We fight for the freedom and dignity of every individual and human being, Palestinian and Israeli, for our generation and generations to come.

This is not a matter of choice; it is a matter of destiny.
* * * *

Fadi Rabieh, who earned his master’s degree in conflict transformation as a Fulbrighter at EMU, is co-manager of the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, working out of the Jerusalem office of Search for Common Ground. He released this essay on Nov. 20, 2012.

Co-authors Thomas Norman DeWolf and Sharon Leslie Morgan

In 2001, I took a life-altering journey. A cousin, Katrina Brown, had made the startling discovery that the DeWolf family was the largest slave-trading family in United States history. Over three generations, they had brought more than 10,000 people to the west to be bought and sold. So I set out with nine distant cousins to follow the trail of our ancestors. We traveled to the family’s home state of Rhode Island, then on to Ghana and Cuba.

As we went, we filmed a documentary which was later nominated for an Emmy award: Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. On that trip, I began writing my first book, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, published by Beacon Press in 2008.

I learned so many important facts of history that I never knew before, and became viscerally aware of the legacy of slavery and its lingering damage. Standing in a slave dungeon on the rocky shoreline of Ghana where human beings were shipped off, never to return, I felt as close as I ever had been to utter despair.

Yet in spite of my enhanced awareness, when I returned from that international journey I had more questions than answers. I was left with a big dialogue bubble floating over my head that read, “Now what? What can I do about it?”

I can’t imagine what my life would be today without the first Coming to the Table (CTTT) gathering I attended in January 2006. In that program, which started at Eastern Mennonite University, black and white family members met to address the legacies of slavery in the United States. It introduced concepts from neuroscience, trauma healing and storytelling. But the heart of the experience for me was the stories we shared. Participating later in two levels of STAR training and in a week-long EMU Summer Peacebuilding Institute course in restorative justice helped ground me in a powerful set of resources.

All this gave me hope and began to answer the “Now what?” question.

The most significant project to grow from my connection to CTTT and STAR is the book project with co-author Sharon Morgan. We committed ourselves to living the healing model, which is grounded in the concepts of Truth, Mercy, Justice and Peace, and to writing about it.

Over a three-year period, Sharon and I traveled thousands of miles through 27 states and overseas together. A major element of our journey and what we wrote about is sharing experiences and evaluating them from two very different frames of reference. Sharon Morgan is a black woman. I am a white man. She lives on one end of the country. I live on the other. We have interacted with each other’s families and friends and shared many meaningful conversations about ourselves and our views.

With genealogy as an undercurrent, we visited ancestral towns, courthouses, sites of racial terror, cemeteries, and museums seeking to understand the trauma of historic slavery and present–day racism. We attended Civil War reenactments and visited former slave plantations. We slept in antebellum homes.

Along the way, we led a workshop at the John Hope Franklin Center National Symposium on Hope and Healing in Tulsa, Oklahoma entitled “Gather at the Table: A Path toward Reconciliation.” During our book tour, we’ve presented at conferences, museums, high schools, colleges and universities throughout the United States.

What have I learned from the commitment we made to live this healing journey? It’s a surprise to me that I feel more pessimistic than when we began because I recognize more than ever just how deeply embedded systems of oppression remain. Yet there also is reason for hope. Some of Sharon’s and my comments from the last chapter of Gather at the Table say it best:

“The actions of one or two people rarely make a significant difference in the world. But the commitment of many people, acting individually and collectively, has great potential. Hope springs when people take the STAR training: when members of Coming to the Table congregate on a conference call to discuss restorative justice, genealogy, or relationship building, when six women in Seattle create a weekly ‘Healing Together’ workshop, and when a man in Virginia inspires people in his community to explore the history and impact of slavery through Negro spirituals and to raise their voices together in song…

“This is our work: to repair unhealed wounds from the past and challenge systems that remain unjust and either dismantle them or work to heal the damage they continue to cause.

“We would love to say of our experiment, ‘Boy, this is it! This is the lightning bolt. We’ve found the answer.’ But it isn’t that simple or tidy… The lessons are in the quest. The answers are found in the journey. These are ripples on a pond. They spread outward.

“And on we walk…”

Tom was born and raised in California. He and his wife, Lindi, live in Oregon. They have four grown children and eight grandchildren. Sharon grew up in Chicago. She lives in a rural town close enough to New York City to often see her two grandchildren who live there.

For more information about the book, Gather at the Table, visit http://gatheratthetable.net/.