Guatemalan Julio Cochoy

The following was written by a Guatemalan man, Julio Cochoy, after participating in a trauma healing workshop. Julio is an indigenous man who was 13 when Guatemalan Army soldiers occupied his town, Utitlan, terrorizing the residents. His uncle was killed brutally by the soldiers, and the family (or at least the boys) stayed inside their house for a year, afraid they would meet the same fate. His first book, “Voces Rompiendo el Silencio de Utatlan” (Voices Breaking the Silence of Utatlan), includes testimonies from 36 families from the town. He’s now working on his second book, My Journey from Hate to Hope.

Tears
Today you came to me

I felt you in the warmth of my tears
your wrinkled face laughed with me
I felt again your energy
You are not physically present
but you are close to my soul
you live in my mind
you remain in my heart

The injustice of your death
no longer hurts me
because in the memory of my people
you live on
You live in the voice of your family
you live in the minds of your grandchildren
Dear Uncle, today I rediscovered you
in eternity

©Julio Cochoy September 11 2012

Quaker Peacemakers Project: Sandra Tamari

20120922-181749.jpg Sandra Tamari is a member of the St. Louis Religious Society of Friends and currently resides in Glen Carbon, Illinois. Born in Jacksonville, Florida to Palestinian immigrants, Sandra is married to Steve Tamari, mother to two school-age children, and works as an admissions advisor to international students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Click the play button below to hear Sandra’s reflections on peacemaking.

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The Peace Resources Committee interviewed Sandra in front of a live participatory audience at the 2012 Annual Sessions of Illinois Yearly Meeting. Listen in to hear her reflections on being a peacemaker, feeling discouraged, the seeds of peace that lead her on this path, the security in life that comes from being raised with love, dealing with the isolation of detainment while in Israeli detention, life lessons from rocker Patti Smith, what the perpetual state of war today means for peacemaking, the role of participation and representation, raising children, and keeping hope.

Download Audio: QuakerPeacemakers_Tamari

Click here to learn more about the Quaker Peacemakers Archive Project where you can nominate Friends in Illinois Yearly Meeting you think should be included in this effort. The project aims to compile and preserve an oral history of Friends whose contributions to peace building offer wonderful opportunities for reflection. As Friends tell their stories in their own words, these recordings will capture and preserve unique and inspired personal acts and thoughts which enrich our Yearly Meeting.

Music: “The Big Ship” by Brian Eno (Another Green World, 1975)

America By The Numbers: Clarkston Georgia

This Georgia town is the current home to QVS volunteer, Justin Leverett, where he is assigned as a communication specialist to a non-profit agency. Clarkston, Georgia is being called one of the most diverse communities in America with residents from over 40 countries speaking over 60 different languages:

[vimeo 46268046 w=400 h=300]

With animation and a cinematic lens, “America By The Numbers: Clarkston Georgia” presents Maria Hinojosa’s exploration of the lessons that can be learned from our newest Americans about democracy and getting along.

Click here to learn more about the project and PBS broadcast times near you.

A call for compassion

Friend David Finke wrote to the committee:

“I gladly call to your attention this situation of an eminent leader in our Islamic community. I believe he deserves support from every person with a concern for Justice.” Here is the letter he has request you read and reflect on:

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Dear Friend,

I never yet have obeyed the “Send this to everyone you know!” command when getting a passionate e-mail appeal.  Aren’t you glad?  But this message, originating with me alone, is one that I hope you will both read and act upon, and I’m urging it to everyone I know.

A friend of Nancy’s & mine here in Columbia must start serving a 36-month federal prison sentence in just 2 1/2 weeks. His “crime” to which he had to admit in a plea agreement (to avoid an even longer sentence) was that he sent money to his family in Iraq during the UN/US sanctions regime: 1990-2003.  His mother was going blind; his sister lost a baby because they couldn’t get $10 worth of antibiotics.  As so many in this town have been saying since we were stunned to learn his sentence several months ago, “Who among us wouldn’t have tried to do the same?”

Shakir Hamoodi’s only chance for not having to be separated from his family for the next 3 years is to be granted Executive Clemency.  We don’t expect that the President will act on this request until after the fall elections, and in fact the appropriate documents can’t be filed until Shakir is locked up.  But a highly committed group in town — including people who have never been “political” before — is organizing to do our best to bring this to President Obama’s attention, including working with the cooperative staff of our Senator McCaskill.

There’s more about this case that I’d be happy for you to read, and I’m giving links at the end.  We’re delighted how much positive publicity Shakir, as a community leader, has gained. At the very least, I hope you’ll take the next minute to click this link to read more, then consider adding your name to the 3,500 plus signatures we have on an electronic petition.

Many hard-copy petitions have also been circulated.  From these we are working on collecting the best several dozen personalized letters of support and testimonial to add to the official Petition to be filed August 28th with the Justice Department’s “Office of the Pardon Attorney.”  I feel honored to be part of this work, and also to serve as trustee of the “Hamoodi Family Benefit Trust” established to help the family during their breadwinner’s absence.

Our friend Shakir is a naturalized American citizen who came from Iraq to the U.S. to study nuclear engineering, for which he has a doctorate and on which he was teaching at the “Mizzou” campus here.  I find it significant that he chose not to return to Iraq where his skills might have been used to build weapons for Saddam Hussein.  Our government has “thanked” him for this service by having raided his home and seized records 6 years ago.

However, after 5 years of searching through them with Shakir’s full cooperation, they found no evidence that any of the money he transmitted went for anything other than humanitarian relief to individuals.  And then, for reasons that we’ll probably never know, the “Team A” of FBI and federal prosecutors was suddenly replaced earlier this year by “Team B” which recommended a sentence of 5 to 6 years.  So much for cooperation with the expectation of probation — which, in fact, has been given in similar cases even to defendants who moved much greater amounts of money and who took a percentage for themselves.

I will get off my soapbox now (while preparing for 2 testimonial/send-off dinners in Shakir’s honor) and simply ask you to respond — with your signature at least, and a monetary gift if possible (details on request.)  It will be important to mention in our filings how many individuals have gone on record asking respectfully for Executive Clemency.

This is as clear a case as I’ve ever witnessed of the necessity for concerned citizens to come together with compassion to try to undue a manifest injustice.

Whatever you decide to do, I send you greetings, and hope to stay in touch.

In peace,    -DHF

Five Specific Requests, outlined by Steve Tamari

Sandra Tamari’s husband, Steve, recently wrote about Sandra’s experience and its aftermath, following a trip in May where she was refused entry at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport and deported. For Steve, the most unexpected part of the experience was what happened after Sandra returned to the US.

From the piece he titled: “US missing in action as Israel targets Palestinian-Americans” Steve writes:

Sandra’s experience and the outcry that followed made this an opportune moment to act. With assistance from various activist networks, our petition drive secured enough support within a short time to get us an audience with State Department officials on June 26.

We had five specific requests for the State Department officials: to treat Palestinian-Americans in Israel as they would any other US citizen; to raise this issue with Israeli counterparts; to examine the legality of this all-too-common scenario in light of the aforementioned 1954 Treaty; and to inquire whether US embassy or consular officials have any records related to the numbers of Palestinian-Americans denied entry to Israel and areas under its control.

We also petitioned the State Department to protest Israeli plans to destroy the Palestinian village of Susiya, the most recent example of 65 years of Israeli whole-scale ethnic cleansing.

Our exchange with the State Department demonstrated once again our government’s inability to guarantee basic assistance to Palestinian-Americans at Israeli ports of entry.

The officials expressed sympathy, and acknowledged that US officials have repeatedly raised such concerns with their Israeli Foreign Ministry counterparts to no avail. But they could offer little more than a verbal promise to relate our concerns to higher-ups.

I am not holding my breath. The State Department has a 30-year record of offering no effective assistance to its citizens in this regard. Why should we expect anything different this time around?

That said, Sandra’s case solidified my optimism in the citizenry’s basic decency and in the power of grassroots organizing and hard-nosed questioning.

Click here to read the entire piece: “US missing in action as Israel targets Palestinian-Americans” from Ma’an News Agency (updated 7/14/12).

Searching for a peacemaker: Jane Addams

Last winter Hull House shut its doors.

The closing of Jane Addams’ experiment in peacemaking haunts my thoughts, even while attending to the immediate issues of supermax prisons and of drones dropping from the skies on unsuspecting families.  Little public notice seems to have been given this closing.  Are we forgetting Jane Addams?  Somehow, I am feeling that remembering our peacemakers, not just Addams but so many others in our communities, is vital to our civic lives.  Addams teaches what it means to live the life of a peacemaker.

One time, she taught me by her works as a builder of institutions and a doer of good deeds.  Twenty Years at Hull House remains a classic in our peacemaking tradition.  In time I have found myself attending to the less pronounced, often illusive, facets of her interior life where I think I glimpse meanings in her calling as peacemaker.   Her connections with Quakers, while seemingly incidental, are revealing.  Although her father forsook the Quaker meeting for the Presbyterian church and she kept her father’s faith, Jane felt an affinity with Friends in particular by way of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.  And yet on reflection she chose not to become a Quaker.  This Quaker connection, however tenuous it may seem, points to common sensibilities that guide the lives of peacemakers no matter their specific faith affiliation.

Respectful listening, patient reflection, and quiet courage—these habits of mind shaped her calling.  While guided by her beloved father’s principle of service, she came to wonder whether the truths she had learned from a privileged, Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon childhood could guide her work with poor, Eastern-European, and Catholic immigrants.  Or could those inherited verities, for example the explanation for poverty’s causes, carry the patronizing attitudes of the missionary?  As she listened to her new neighbors, she turned inward.  Sometimes the work was difficult.  While bearing witness against racial violence, she listened to painful lessons from her associates who reminded her that she too harbored racist attitudes similar to those that sparked the lyncher.   Democracy, she came to see, was something larger than legal forms guaranteeing the citizen’s rights.  It lay in the ability to listen to others, to reflect, and to realize that the truths passed down from past generations could easily become impediments to service in the present.  This quiet habit of listening, of opening oneself to others’ voices, and of reflection led Addams through long years of evolution.

As I read Newer Ideals of Peace, I discover a quiet courage to challenge the conventional and to risk the unconventional.  Writing at midcourse in her thinking, she was reconsidering time honored truths and unquestioned patterns of authority.  Reverence for the Founding Fathers and their constitution might blind oneself to the changing times and to needs once unimagined.  Prescriptive truths, as if written in stone, work to prevent the democracy from attending to different voices in the neighborhood.   Truth is unfolding.   Each generation finds it in the changing contexts of community life.  Militarism, she speculated, becomes more than the application of organized force but a manifestation of pervasive authoritarian impulses deeply embedded in the culture.  Militarism, she ventured to propose, included habits of mind that twisted relations with neighbors as well as with peoples abroad.  As she wrote, she sometimes stumbled in her effort to fashion new vocabularies to guide her thinking.  Yet she continued and in her steadfast, patient, spiritual quest demonstrated a remarkable and exemplary resolve and courage.  Later in life, as she watched the flapper generation of the 1920s, she felt bewildered, even troubled.  But she advised her associates to attend to young people and to beware imposing verities on them lest creative thought be stifled.

And so we return to Addams and the Quakers.   The affinity seems to run deeper than her public work against militarism.  It reveals itself in habits of  listening and reflection, of attending to truth emerging from the present, and of reconsidering prescriptions inherited by generations past.  Let me return to what seems contradiction: her affinity with the Society of Friends and her hesitancy to join that circle.   Clearness came to her when she was asked how public association with Quakers might affect her relationship with her neighbors—Catholic, Jew, Eastern Orthodox—in the Hull House community.  Would she create distances and stifle her ability to speak with them?

And so I ask myself: how do we understand peacemaking?  Is the peacemaker identified by the deeds well done?   A resume such as of Jane Addams would meet that standard.   Founder of Hull House, charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, outspoken opponent of the First World War, leading light in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—her works earned her a worldwide reputation in the peace community.  Her persistence is also worthy of recognition.   While vilified for resistance to American entrance into the Great War and branded “the most dangerous woman in America,” she continued steadfast, though sometimes disheartened, to her calling.

But what if she had not done these deeds?   Is her inner quest for understanding the way to peace worthy of notice?  With this question I find myself turning to Rufus Jones and his reflections on the spiritual life.  Sometimes, he counseled, we are tempted to look to spiritual heroics, inspiring moments, for example and guidance.   Yet by so doing we overlook the quiet searchers.  We cannot all be Saul on the Road to Damascus.  Nor can many of us be a George Fox atop Pendle Hill.   Those dazzling moments may distract us from attending to the less visible, less eye catching, workers for peace.  And so who is the peacemaker?   To paraphrase William James who deeply admired Addams’ Newer Ideals and who inspired Jones’ writing we need to be alert to the varieties of the peacemaking experience.

Finally–remembering seems important for peacemaking.  This is why I am concerned that Jane Addams may be forgotten, even by today’s workers for peace.   Peacemaking can be lonely work, as Addams felt.   Forgetting can cut the young witness for peace adrift in time without a sense of an anchoring tradition and without awareness of others who endured and thereby teach and invigorate by example.  To be aware of a tradition of people who persevered and, perhaps most important, lived fulfilled lives may be essential to maintaining that spirit.   The drones will continue to kill, prisoners in our midst will be mistreated.  And continuing to keep courage may come, in part, from stopping to remember.

A marvelous peaceworker: Canadian Friend Elaine Bishop

“To many of the people she helps and the people she works with, Elaine Bishop is a saint, but the woman who runs the North Point Douglas Women’s Centre and lives in the impoverished neighbourhood is just doing her part to make her little corner of the world a better place.”

Click here to read this wonderful story of peace, courtesy of Winnipeg Free Press print edition – June 9, 2012.

Interview with Val Liveoak co-founder of Peacebuilding en Las Américas

Val Liveoak is the coordinator and co-founder of Peacebuilding en Las Américas (PLA) with the Friends Peace Teams (FPT). The program promotes peace and healing in countries where the violent legacy of civil war has added to the continued poverty and injustice that sparked the conflicts. FPT’s programs build on the Quaker experience, combining practical and spiritual aspects of conflict resolution. PLA currently works in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Colombia. Val has also done volunteer work with the Alternatives to Violence Project in Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Burundi, Rwanda, Canada, and Kenya.

Click here to hear the full interview.

Val Liveoak, who became a nonviolent activist in Austin in the early ’70s, has been named a “Woman of Peace” by Womens’ Peacepower Foundation (2009) and Peacemaker of the Year by the Austin Peace and Justice Center (1986). She has chosen to live below the poverty line and work as a volunteer since the early ’90s and currently lives in an “intentional neighborhood” in San Antonio, when she’s in the United States.

Sharing the Stories of Quaker Youth “Walking the Walk”

I was recently contacted by Friend Greg Woods, wanting to know if I could help him to “tell some stories about young Quakers doing awesome things” as he prepares for an upcoming workshop with the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Middle School program.

Over the past decade I have attempted to help tell the stories of my generation, Quaker youth living their faith in inspiring contemporary ways. For a number of years, Friends Journal supported this leading by publishing a series of pieces that I’ll share again here in hopes that Greg can use them and that you, dear reader, might enjoy them too.

Walking the Walk: Greg Woods
Walking the Walk: Ian Fritz
Walking the Walk: Rainbow Pfaff

In my life now as a radio producer, I’ve attempted to bring those skills to benefit the telling of these stories as well. In 2005, ILYM hosted the annual “Quake that Rocked the Midwest” and invited me to come record the youth gathered there. Friends Journal published that effort as well. Presented as audio stories, you can learn more about contemporary young Friends and their ideas of Quakerism here.

But Greg’s request made me want to see what else might be available online today showcasing young Quakers doing awesome things. What have you found? Did reading the stories of Greg, Ian or Rainbow resonate with you or remind you of Quaker youth you know?  What does “walking the walk” mean to you? And is that harder to do when you’re young?

What does patriotism mean to you?

ILYM Friend David Finke was profiled last week as part of the Columbia Missourian’s coverage: “Boone County residents describe what patriotism means to them” (July 2, 2011).

David is elequently quoted throughout; here is an excerpt from his profile:

Finke is a member of the Religious Society of Friends, a group otherwise known as the Quakers. He has made a “religious commitment” against war and violence, but he also noted that “to be for peace is more than being against war.”

“To uphold human dignity … is a moral obligation that for me stems both from patriotism and from my religious understanding,” he said.

[sic]

Finke referenced a phrase in the first sentence of the U.S. Constitution: “in order to form a more perfect union.” America, he said, is “not yet perfected.”

I am pleased with much of, but not all, that America stands for. And I will continue to work to make it better: to live up to the dream and the promise.

Finke said he will display his American flag on the Fourth of July because “this should be a symbol that drives the U.S. to be our very best.”

It is always a special moment when the philosophy of Friends is shared with a wider audience, through a contribution such as this.  Check out the rest of David’s profile here.

What does July 4th mean for you, dear Friend? What reflection have you taken on today? What does patriotism mean to you?  Please share your thoughts here.