Spirit in Action
Ending Cycles of Violence in Kenya - Judy Lumb
Judy Lumb is the author of Ending Cycles of Violence: Kenyan Quaker Peacemaking Response after the 2007 Elections, where she captures the historical context, the eruption of violence, and efforts in the aftermath the restore safety & connection, and to promote healing.
- Broadcast on:
- 21 Oct 2012
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- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Today for Spirit in Action, we're traveling far afield in two different directions. I love to see peacemaking illustrated in the practical world. So we're going to be interviewing the author of a book on peacemaking to address the extreme violence that erupted in Kenya following their national election in 2007. More than 1,000 people died, many more injured, and hundreds of thousands were made homeless by that violence. It also happened that Kenya has, I think, the largest per capita, Quaker population in the world, and that they are both committed to Quaker ideals of peacemaking and trained in some of the techniques evolved to help bring about the peaceful kingdom. The historical context, the eruption of the violence, and the work to resolve differences, find a nonviolent path forward, and bring about healing in Kenya. All of these things are covered in this book. I'll be speaking with the author of Ending Cycles of Violence, Kenyan Quaker peacemaking response after the 2007 election by Judy Lum. Judy Lum, however, is not currently in Kenya, but in her longtime home of Belize in Central America. And so, in just a moment, she'll join us for Spirit in Action on her cell phone perched on a hillside in Belize to speak of her work to nurture and report on peace work in Kenya. Judy, it's wonderful to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Thank you for having me. This is that took you down to Belize. Why are you there? Well, I went for two months in 1987 because I was sick. I got conic fatigue syndrome two years before that. Got my two sons through high school and just went for a couple of months to live. I was thinking I would recover and go back to my active life. Well, that didn't happen. Instead, I learned to live an interesting life within my limitation. And then, after a total of 13 and a half years of being sick, I had a marvelous healing in Belize. But at that time, I said even if I got well, I wouldn't change a thing. So, I'm still here. I've been here as long as I have been sick now. Because I have rheumatoid arthritis. I'm a little bit interested, perhaps more interested than the average person in your miraculous cure. Are you saying that at 13 and a half years you did something special or did it just happen? It just happened, but it happened in the context of an indigenous ceremony. Not that I went there for healing. It was something I was invited to and I thought, "Oh, this will be interesting." It actually was the second one where the healing happened. It happened two years later. That is the second one happened two years after the first one. And I now believe that the healing was in payment for two things I did that answered a call. The first one was I was visiting a village and I learned that this woman had a lot of poetry and her native language and stories in place. I said, "Has this been published?" She said, "Well, somebody's working on it, but nothing's happened." A year later I went back and I said, "Okay, you know, has this happened?" "Oh, nothing happened," she said. And I said, "Suppose, you give me language lessons. We use your information stories as my text and in exchange I make a book." And so that happened and we launched our book. That was two years before the first invitation to Dougu, who is the name of this ceremony. And the group is Garifuna. It's an American African combination culture, I believe. The second event was the first Dougu that I was invited to. In the midst of it, I was led kicking and screaming. I can't say, "I can't do that. I'm sick." But I was led to develop a co-management system where the local indigenous people would manage a national park. And the way that happened was just by having a gathering of those five communities, two different indigenous groups. The Garifuna and a Mayan group called Kechi, these villages around the national park had been declared, but it was just a paper park that didn't have any management at all. Because police government doesn't have the money, like the U.S. national parks. So it often happens that local groups love for a group to manage. And they call that co-management because it's managed both in support of the government as much as they can, but mostly the local people and any kind of funding they can raise. But what happened was we organized a workshop called in peoples from these villages. And I just knew who to call to do things. I couldn't do anything. I just sat in the back of the time and rested the rest of the time. But I knew who to call. And I kept telling people, "I'm only an initiator. The appropriate leadership has to emerge from this event." And it did. There's a co-management group that's been very active and working now. That was in '97. So that was a call, and I think only because it happened in the midst of this ceremony was I opened to such a strange thing for me to do, because I spent most of my time in a hammock or in bed. And there was no way I could do any of this, that's what I said. But it worked. So then two years later, I went back. I was invited again for what I had thought was it wasn't a lifetime invitation for me. Even before the event started, the healing happened. I hadn't dragged myself there. I hadn't been out at all. I hadn't seen anybody. I could see the temple where the event was going to... It's not a temple like a Mormon tabernacle, but they call it a temple. It's more like a Mayan or Aztec type. It's definitely like Mayan. It's made out of natural materials with patch roof and patch sides. Anyway, I could see it from my hammock. And I heard that the women were going to clean the temple in preparation on Thursday, before the event started on Sunday. And I thought, "Well, I haven't seen anybody." So I thought, "Well, maybe there's something I can do sitting down, at least I'll see people." So I dragged myself through the little golly and up the edge of the temple and walked inside. And there were bottles to pick up, sweeping to do, and sand slid over the dirt floor. An hour and a half later, I was still on my feet doing things. When I walked in, I couldn't talk while standing up. And people knew me and were looking at me like, "Wow, what's going on with duty?" And I thought, "I wonder if this magic is just right here, and if I walk outside, it's going to go away." But from then on, it was gone. And when I got back home to the island where I lived, to conquer, people didn't recognize me. The change was so dramatic. They would do a double kick and say, "Oh, Judy, what happened? I didn't even know you. You look so light. So what happened?" So that's the story of my healing. Can I ask, "What's your age?" I'm 69. And this happened how long ago? Well, I was 42 when I got sick and lost my active life. And this happened August 6, 1998. So I was sick for 13 and a half years, and now it's 14 years since I got well. Well, that's amazing. I think I'd like to talk more about that perhaps later, but I think we'd better get to your book. Ending the cycles of violence, Kenyan, Quaker, peacemaking response after the 2007 election. Of course, it's by you, Judy Lum. It's a book that you put together just this year. You did a trip over to Kenya to research for it. So, first of all, we're talking about the violence following their 2007 election. People in the USA may or may not even remember that there was violence. I happen to know about it both because I've been to Kenya before and because in 2008, in February, I headed to Rwanda. And there was one person who was part of our Quaker folk dance group who was supposed to be coming from Kenya, and she almost couldn't get out because of the issue going on there. What led you to get involved about the Kenyan violence and the response to it? Well, I had always wanted to go to Africa and the opportunity arose when there were two events, the Climate Change Summit in December of 2011, and then the World Conference of Friends in Kenya in the end of April. I thought, "Well, this is the right amount of time as I'm going that far. I have to stay a while." And my main objective really was to understand about life in Africa. What is it like? Well, I needed something to do between the two events. So I volunteered for the African Great Lakes Initiative, which is a Quaker group. It really started more with Rwanda and Burundi. But the coordinator is David Terezka in Kenya. So I volunteered. And because he knew that my background was in publishing and editing, he said, "You know, we haven't really done a good job of documenting the work that's been done. In Kenya since the election during the post-election violence. And since you have this experience, maybe you could document it and write a book." When I got there, I said, "Sure, that's good. I can do that." He said, "Well, you know, it'd be really nice to have the book available for the World Conference began the 17th of April." And by that time, it was like the 15th of January, and I thought, "Oh, I wonder if I can do this." I thought, "Well, it's possible, but I'm not sure." And then everything just fell in place. It felt like it finally inspired, really. I didn't feel like I was doing it so much. Because 34 people, all of them were wonderful interviews. And I had spent a couple of weeks just reading background and getting it all in my mind so that I could interview people with some knowledge, and I ended up writing the first section on the background before I even started interviewing people. And then the rest of the book wrote itself because I mostly used quotes from the interviews. Again, people in the USA might have very little idea about the violence that happened following the Kenyan 2007 election. How about you give us a little bit of an idea? How many people were killed, the injured, how much damage was done, what percentage of the population did this affect? Well, they have official numbers. I think it's officially 1200 people killed and 650,000 displaced. A lot of people say that those numbers are grossly underestimated. What happened was, well, we should go back to a little more background information. There's a sort of a culture of violence in Kenya. Kenya's normally thought of as a very peaceful place, but actually there's an underlying violence that really comes out of the British method of colonizing Kenya. I always contrast it with Belize because in Belize, the British were here, but they didn't do the same kind of system of colonizing as they did in Kenya. In Belize, there was never a time when the white families were brought in to colonize particular areas. The politics in Belize are not ethnic. They're five major groups in Belize and two major parties, but both parties just recruited from all ethnic groups. But in Kenya, the politics has evolved over ethnic groups, and there's probably between ethnic groups really goes back to the colonization, the means of colonization. Belize was colonized by the British in the early 1800s, but Kenya was much later than that. In the 1890s, the British moved across Kenya, encountering each separate indigenous group that had been living on their own land with maybe some skirmishes, but without a lot of contact between the groups. So as the British went across, they just attempted to annihilate each group, and there was great resistance, but in the end, the British military power and brutality, each group made their own teeth, and in each case, it was a very, very brutal agreement that they made. They had to agree to, just not to face annihilation, they had to agree to allow white families to come in, and in fact, they moved off their own land into less fertile land. And even the missionaries were set to different groups so that even the churches are ethnic. Different churches have one major ethnic group because that's the way they organized because it was more orderly that way. And they were kept separate, divide and conquer kind of system. There's a quote in the book from a British general that actually describes their thought patterns. He said that we just moved through and left nothing alive, not a soul, not an animal, nothing alive. So violence in Kenya has a very ethnic, a lot of their area. One ethnic group had their traditional ancestral lands, and another ethnic group has moved in there, so most of the issues are at the very base of it over land. But this gets bound up with the ethnic group and with religion. So for instance, the Kukuya are one tribe, Luyar tribe, Luyo is another tribe, and these have religious divisions between them as well. I think the Luya, maybe that's the area where the Quakers originally expanded the most, but the Kukuya and others were they Catholic or Baptist, or how did that go? I think the Kukuya are Anglic and are Episcopal, but I'm not absolutely sure about which one is connected with it. Luyo are definitely the Quakers. I think you've mentioned in the book that 80% of the population in Kenya lists itself as Christian, right? That's right. So wouldn't we expect, of course, that they might behave in a Christian way, which maybe means turning to the cheek, but that isn't, of course, what happens either in the other Christian nations of the world, or I guess in Kenya? No, the politics is very un-Christian. So this massive violence came up. Let's jump up to the time of the election. Someone's in control, and that represents one of these ethnic groups. So it's both political power and its ethnic preference, I guess, that's being given in. And in the election, it looks like the results were ignored, that the government says, no, you didn't win, even though it looks like you might have won, no, we won, too bad, something like that, right? Yeah, what happened was the early results, those in control with Kukuya, and the early results showed that the opposition was ahead enough so that the newspapers declared them the winner. I think that was the morning of the 28th, and then they just kind of backed off, and no information was coming out, so that there was a whole day when nobody knew what was going on. And then the afternoon of the 30th, they announced that the Kukuya had won, and immediately, in a secret ceremony, installed it as president, so the inauguration happened, which was very unusual. Normally, that would be an event that's planned a couple weeks later, and international leaders in various heads of various states would come in for the event. But instead, they did it in a closed room, just grabbed the Chief Justice and sworn in, and immediately the country just erupted. There were some places that didn't, but in most of the major towns, certainly in Nairobi, Pabasa, most of the major towns had eruptions immediately. So much so that there's considerable evidence that they were actually planned, and there are four cases in the international criminal court that relate to this planning. But the whole country was shut down, people were Kukuya people, especially, but sometimes other people, too, were run out of their homes, killed houses, burned, businesses burned, so that at least 650,000 people were in some kind of camp, often around the police station in a particular town, or just in open fields. And most of them ran with nothing, so they just did an open field, and Kenya is not warm. I expected to be hot in Africa, but most of the country is the western part of the country, at least it's a pie. I was staying at 6,000 feet, and nights are cool. It's not good to be out in an open field without a blanket. Anyway, that was the status of the country right after the election. You couldn't get anywhere. They were burning cars in the roads, and nobody could get anywhere. There's a number of quotations in the book where you're referring to young people being spurred on, perhaps by government, perhaps by other groups, used as tools to incite violence, because it's largely a young culture. The birth rate has been high, you don't live that long, that a large percentage of the population is on the young side. What's the population of the nation overall? 38 million. So this violence went on, and homes were destroyed, all kinds of properties destroyed, the roads are shut down, certain areas, there's reaction and counter-reaction, right? People attacking Kakuyos, and then Kakuyo people attacking the opposite party, and again, the political party and the ethnic identity were very strongly wrapped in this. So what was the role that the Quakers play in this? They're not Kakuyo, and the other candidate, what is his tribal identification? I think he's collagen, but I'm not sure it could be luau, but not luia, which is what the Quakers were. The Quakers are not a party to the conflict in the direct sense, although some luias got caught up because they were renting a house from a Kakuyo, or worked for a Kakuyo, so that some people got caught up in it, but they weren't the direct target. So in some ways they could be kind of a neutral party, not that anybody was really seen as neutral, it's like pick a side, or else we're going to assume you were the other side, right? Exactly. So initially what happened is that the people in Nairobi, the Quakers in Nairobi, had them meeting their first week in January. They said we'd got to do something. So they pulled together everybody that they could get with transportation being what it was, nobody could get there from outlying districts, but they pulled together with everybody. As long as people could get money into their phones, their phones were still operating some of the time, but not all of the time, so they consulted other people. My favorite part of the book really is the report that came out of that meeting. They called it the pastoral letter. And it was Churchill Kabusu who was deciding clerk of Nairobi yearly meeting, which is a Quaker organization of Quaker churches in the biggest city in Nairobi. And they wrote what I thought was just a marvelous response. Mostly quoted the whole thing in the book. They called on everybody to be peaceful, and in fact they had some suggestions about how to resolve the issue. On the national side, people were coming in to help, and an African group headed by Kofi Annan was working to resolve the situation. And this pastoral letter was sent to Kofi Annan, and people told them later that it was very helpful to the eventual resolution of the political crisis, which was a shared power sharing between the two candidates. Because what happened was, when they did investigate the election issue, it appeared that there was considerable amount of election fraud on both ends. The conclusion of the investigation was that there was no way to figure out who won, so they just set up a power sharing where they had a president and a prime minister. And they enlarged the cabinet so that there were cabinet members from both, and the country dysfunction that way is still in that same frame of mind. There's another election which is scheduled for March 4th, I think, 2013. The pastoral letter is dated 8th of January 2008, and the violence erupted on the 30th of December, and they sat for a whole week putting this together, so they were responding immediately. So it begins, "Receive greetings in the name of Christ Jesus. You are my friends if you do what I command you," John 1514. Righteousness, exultimation, but sin is a disgrace to any people, Proverbs 1434. At this time of pain, horror, sorrow, suffering, insecurity in our beloved country, we, as friends church in Kenya, being a peace church, are deeply concerned with the safety of all canyons. And friends visiting Kenya during this time of political and social instability. May we start by referring to our Quaker values, which have guided us over the past four centuries. Then they go on to discuss the Quaker peace testimony, truth, peace and justice, simplicity, and it ends with life's sacred, stop the bloodshed. As Quakers, we value every person. We believe that there is that of God in every person. Our central faith requires that we should proclaim, indeed, as well as in word that, or is contrary to the spirit of God whose name is love. The same spirit must animate our business and social relations and make us eager to remove oppression and injustice in every form. So that's the pastoral letter. From there, they had already a scheduled meeting where people from the U.S. were going to come before a general friend's meeting. The last week in Jay, the people who were organizing that said, "Oh, please don't come because we can't guarantee your safety and it'll just distract us from what we need to do." So since they had already arranged for a venue for that other meeting, they called for a Kenyan national Quaker peace conference and got people there in Western Kenya. And they sat for four days, 65 liters of the churches in Kenya. And the document that they produced, I'm going to share a little bit from that. But first, I'd like to remind people that you're listening to spirit in action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. I'm your host for this Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website, NorthernSpiritRadio.org. If you come to NorthernSpiritRadio.org, you'll find links to all of our guests for the past seven years. You can listen to or download recordings of the programs of the last seven years. You can find a place to leave comments. Those are very helpful. Please make our conversation two-way. You can also make donations. And donations are so important in terms of helping me continue this valuable service. Again, the person we're visiting with is Judy Lumb. And she's author of a book just come out called Ending Cycles of Violence, Kenyan Quaker peace-making response after the 2007 election. She was just referring to the open letter to the leaders and citizens of Kenya. And it's a couple page document, but I want to grab a couple of passages of it so that you have an idea of what she's talking about. First of all, they talked about how they got together and created this. They said, "We cannot be blind to what is happening in this country and its citizens." During the deliberations and reflections, representatives of the Friends Church realized that the underlying causes of the current conflict must have been present since long before the general elections of December 2007. We note, in particular, economic injustices, youth disempowerment and frustration, and cleavages of religion, ethnicity, class, gender, and age. So they have the first section which says, "To our leaders." They start up by saying, "For instance, we do understand your anguish at this time, and we ask you to approach the situation prayerfully. We urge you to relax your hard-line political demands and dialogue more deeply for the benefit of the country that no segment of Kenyan society emerges as losers, but we may all win in a peaceful society." They have a section that goes on to say, "To our fellow Kenyans, we appreciate the courage and passion that you, our fellow Kenyans, have shown since the beginning of the post-election violence by contributing and supporting the victims of violence. And we urge you to all continue with the same spirit." And there's another seven points there. And then they say at the end, "To our fellow Christians and other religious groups, as people of faith, we must not engage in violence and revenge, because if we do so, we betray our faith in God." And there's a little bit more after that. My question when I read that, Judy, is, "How big of a threat did they face by stepping out and addressing the nation as a whole?" In partially, did that mean they became victims of violence? It's like, "You shut up. Those guys are bad. If you're defending them, then we have to kill you." Did that kind of thing happen? I don't know. I'm sure everybody was afraid because it was a time of great fear. But I don't know of any particular instance where the open letter or the pastoral letter caused them any specific problem. They went on and very, very courageously worked as much as they could. The nation poured in, in the midst of a crisis, people are very generous. They poured in some of the Quakers from all over the world to help them. So what they did first was humanitarian assistance. People just went into the camps and clearly they needed blankets. They needed food. They needed clothes and medicine. And for the first three or four months, they just did what they could. Out of that gathering, a group called the Prince Church Peace Team evolved, and they worked in Western Kenya in Nairobi. There were people out of Nairobi yearly meeting, and the church, the main church in Nairobi became an inventor for distribution of food and other things. People were very, very courageous in going in the midst of these situations and trying to bring peace. They often would go into a camp and they'd have a little church service, someone would bring a message. Then they would divide up and interview people in categories like women would go one place, young adult children. They would basically ask them what do they need, what's going on, and you would listen to their stories. And that became a very important part of the whole thing was the fact that they came and they were listening. The needs were overwhelming, really overwhelming, and there were a lot of issues with clouds being difficult to control in the distribution process. These are people that had never done this sort of thing. They weren't professional. They didn't have the fit. They had to learn as they went along how to control the crowds as they were distributing food. There are many stories in the book about these various things that happened. There are very strategies that they developed in the midst of it. The most poignant stories for me were about what happened when the government said, "Okay, we're closing them. "We've got to go home." This was the question of what would happen when they go home. Their homes are gone. They are destroyed. The people who ran them out are still there. They said, "Well, we can't go home. You better go talk to those people and find out if they want us back." The clickers then started working with -- they developed a new vocabulary and started calling people the receiving community and the returning community instead of the victims and the perpetrators. They went to these communities and said, "Okay, these people want to -- the government says, "We've got to come home. "Are you going to be receptive?" Anyway, they listened to the receiving community. At first, they encountered great antagonism, near violence in the reception of the suggestion that they might bring these people back. These hated the people. But after a considerable amount of listening -- I remember Joseph Mami saying, "God gave us the word." They said, "But next time, it might be you. How would you feel about it being run away from your home?" And eventually, the people softened. So then when it came the day that the government said, "Okay, we're going to take a home now and run. But trucks, we're going to take your home." Then they called Quakers to come and mediate the process. They're very powerful stories. I think one of the things about context we should maybe put in place here is Quakers are historically known, or maybe we're only known because of Quaker Oats in the USA. But Quakers, at the time of the founding of this country, were a very significant part of demographics. In Kenya, surprisingly, I think it has the highest percentage Quaker population of any nature in the world. There's maybe 100 or 200,000 Kenyan Quakers, which still is a small number for the very large country, for 38 million people. But that is a more significant effect, and particularly because of the peace work that they're involved in, the way that they've outreached in terms of peace. Was the government receptive to this role for Quakers in the peace and resettlement work? Well, it was kind of mixed. I just gave that example of where they actually called people in to help resettle because the chiefs that were supposed to be doing this had no idea how to proceed to make this happen. But in another instance, at the end of that process, the Quakers decided to, a friend's church piece team, decided to do the survey to help them figure out what to do next. So they went to one of the hotspots who spent a week talking to people, and their report showed how seriously potential for future violence was. It had all kinds of unintended consequences. They were just trying to plan their work, wanted information about the situation to plan their work. But what they learned was so serious that they decided they needed to share it with the government official. So they did. They went to the under destroyed officer, and he said, "Oh, this is very important. I'll pass it off the system." Eventually they learned that he didn't do anything with it. So they decided that the best thing to do was to just get an ad in the paper and publish it themselves because it was too serious for people to pay attention to it for the government. Then when that was came out in the newspaper, then they ordered them to publish a retraction. And what they said was, "They weren't clear to do that, so then the government just kicked them out of that area." They said, "They can't work in that area at all." But not too long after that, that district officer was removed and knew once was sent there, and they were invited back in. So that it didn't last too long, but that was an instance where the government was not happy with the Quakers. Well, that's really getting in his face. I mean, whoever the administrator or the people in control of that district were, they're going right, trying to go over their heads, I guess, to the people and to the higher levels of government. That's pretty risky in a place where people are killing other people at the time. Yes, I have to say that they didn't actually live in that community, so they weren't there on a daily basis. So if someone was going to come kill them, they'd have to travel before they did it, I guess. They'd have to go find them, yeah. But it's risky. Well, one of the things that's really exciting to me about the work that's done, and more so in Rwanda. Now, again, I was in Rwanda in 2008, and I guess it was 14 years or so before, that they had the genocide that happened there where all the people were killed. There were almost a million Rwandans were killed by their fellow man and woman. It was massive slaughter across that country, just the thought of going to Rwanda in 2008 when I went. I was still hesitant. I mean, it must be a seething cauldron of hate and recrimination and anger, and that's not what I found when I was there. Of course, I was traveling amongst Quakers, Peace Church. There's a different orientation. But in general, in the Rwandan populace, I found a country that was perhaps more peaceable than what I see here in Wisconsin in 2012. So in Kenya, just in this period, your friends, your neighbors, your family have been killed by people you know, you know who killed them, how do you move forward? And the trauma work and the AVP, the alternatives to violence program, the AVP program, stuff that they did was daring and I think pretty effective. Can you talk about some of those efforts? Yes. What happened that the alternative to violence had come to Africa for Rwanda, and earlier in 2005, I think they said, well, we should have some alternative to violence in Kenya. So they had a few workshops so that there were, I think there was many of 65 people already trained as alternative to violence facilitators, AVP facilitators, so then they could go on their own and facilitate a workshop for other people. Once the humanitarian process was winding down, they started with alternative to violence workshops. They called together as many people as they could for a weekend to figure out how to do this, and they worked out a method and ended up with some 30 people that were the counseling committee that went around to these various camps to counsel people. And then in addition to the alternative to violence program in Rwanda, they realized that it wasn't just conflict resolution that they needed, but the healing trauma. So there they developed a system called healing and rebuilding our communities called Iraq. So we also have this level of trauma in Kenya, particularly in the area of Mount Elgon. People were particularly traumatized, so they'd been using back and forth the AVP or the Iraq workshop. So where people are just too traumatized to do anything or really need to heal the trauma first, they bring together people from both sides of the conflict in a workshop. They're more than 20 people and give people sharing at a very personal level so that they become human instead of just an inhuman target. It's very effective. I was in an Iraq workshop in the middle of April in Mount Elgon and watched this process most amazing. Can you give any insights into what they do, how it works, because the reports I've heard are people forgiving people who've killed members of their family and willing to go forward. It's kind of amazing and I don't know if maybe people in the US would be more reluctant to give up their anger. Is there something different going on there that we just have no idea about? Well, one of the things they talk about trauma, they say, "Okay, what are the symptoms of trauma and what's happening with you?" So then people start talking about how they feel and it became very clear from the beginning that it's not just the victims that are traumatized, but the perpetrators as well. So when they get to the level of what's happening to you, I can't sleep. I generally jump at the light and slide on angry with my children. At that level, everybody's the same. As they also work on team building, naming, they do a trust walk. The information, like what causes trauma and that sort of thing, it mostly comes from the group. They talk about the tree of trust and the tree of mistrust. And using the tree in the metaphor, they say, "Okay, what are the roots? What causes mistrust?" And then what are the fruits? What's the result of it? That's done in the group where people are the ones coming up with that kind of information. So when you put all this together and it's just over two or three days, people develop and they will not take more than 20 in a group. So they keep the group at a marriage of old five and the facilitators are very, very well drained. They're very effective at all this. I think it would work anywhere. But I think that the system, because it was put together under these extreme circumstances in Rwanda, I think it's a very effective system and there are various hero training systems that are offered by the African Great Lakes Initiative. I think there's one in New York, but it's possible to go get trained if any of the listeners are interested in pursuing this. It's a good time to mention that you'll find links on my site, NortonSpiritRadio.org, so you can connect up to Getting the Book, Ending Cycles of Violence, Kenyon Quaker, Peace, Make and Response after the 2007 election by Judy Lum, who's with us here today for Spirit and Action. You'll find links about AVP alternatives to violence program and other things that we've mentioned in the program. So you think it would work in the USA. One of the things that I suspect is true is that people who are pushed to the true edge, you know, they've lost their homes, they've lost family, that in some ways they're open to change in a way that those of us who are kind of well installed, maybe smugly satisfied with ourselves, are not open to change and to opening and to healing and to the kind of modification of our government to the oppositional thing. It seems very entrenched here in the USA, and none of us are really suffering to the point where we're going to say, "Well, we've got to do something." A lot of people are still saying, "I'm going to stand by my principles." Does that make sense to you what I'm saying? That maybe being on the edge that the Kenyans who are participating in these programs were ready for some kind of healing because they knew they needed change. Yes, that makes sense. Unfortunately, the politicians in Kenya are still functioning in the very same way. The campaign for the next presidential election has been on. It took a long time to decide on the date, but now it's been divided. But they're still using that ethnic divisive -- basically, they're not campaigning on any issues, but just using that divisive ethnic -- it's subtle, but everybody knows what they're saying. So it's not clear what will happen with the next election. Well, you do mention in the book some of the work that they've done to try and help reform the political process or to bring communities together so that they could be ready for the next election. Do you want to mention any of those efforts? Well, yeah, the interesting thing is that Kenya has a new constitution that's really a remarkable one. One of the issues is the centralization of power. I had never thought of states' rights in the U.S. as being that big a deal. But I see now what happens if you don't have that kind of decentralization of power. Basically, whoever was president in Kenya had control of everything. The whole police force everything so that if they didn't like somebody's politics, then they could just put them in jail or have them murdered and nobody would ever be prosecuted for the murder or whatever. But basically, the president held all the power. So the new constitution has put much power into the counties, 47 counties. Besides the constitution itself, there was a whole lot of laws that needed to be made to implement the constitution. And of course, the people in power, making the laws, are the ones that are going to lose power under the new implementing system. So it's been a little bit rough doing the implementation. In the midst of it, we've got a campaign going on, too. It's a very forward-looking constitution, and if it works, everybody kept saying if it works, it will be wonderful. But to make it work is the critical thing. So the Quaker response to this is to have workshops to train people to train the population about the new constitution. One problem is that it's a wonderful constitution, but the people don't know what it can do. What it can do is give them hope because they can have some say, they can have some power in their lives and they don't have to resort to violence. So the civic education about the new constitution is very important. So the same AVP facilitators are being trained on the new constitution, and then they're all going out to train people about the new constitution. The general response is, "Well, I don't need to worry about that. My representative knows all about that. That's legal stuff. I don't need to know about it." But they do need to know about it, and in the process, this is one of the things that needs to happen before the next election. One issue is they have a lot more people to vote for now. They have a local representation. They've got a governor of the county before they just used to vote for their member of parliament and the president, and that was it. But now I think they're going to have eight different positions that they have to vote for, so civic education to prepare for the next election is very important. Well, I'm glad that they're working on that front as well, as we know in the USA, even though we have many, many advantages, civic education is not an easy thing to do. And to do it with heart and spirit present is maybe all the more challenging. Maybe I should ask you a little bit about the role that religion played in peace work and relief work. Your book focuses completely on the Quaker peacemaking response. Quakers are certainly not the only group. As a matter of fact, they're not even nearly the largest group who were trying to take care of needs. Are there other groups besides Quakers who have been concentrating on the peacemaking work and maybe the civic education? Are there other folks involved in that as well, religious or non-religious? Well, Quakers had collaborated with other group and Nairobi. There was a combination between Quakers and a Catholic group that worked. And also in Nairobi, there's some Mennonites that they're working with very closely. Mennonites evidently have some funding, but not the people on the ground to do the work, so they've been getting some Mennonite funding for some of the Quaker work. Funding of this civic education and the Iraq follow-up is a problem because the money that came roaring in the midst of the crisis has run out. And people are much less generous to fund things to prevent crisis than they are in the midst of a crisis. Again, the Anglican Church, I think, has a large presence there, probably Catholic Church to some degree. Each of these churches has at least a stream of their practice, which is oriented towards peacemaking and which would be on the side of trying to bring peace to the nation. Do Quakers and maybe the Mennonites stand out as the peace workers, the AVP and that kind of program, the Alternative Violence Program, or the trauma healing? Aren't there other groups who are doing that kind of work in addition to just feeding people? I didn't see anything in the media, TV or newspapers. Occasionally, the heads of Anglican or Catholic or various different denominations would come out with a statement about becoming election. And one of the issues was that the churches were involved in that ministers were preaching the ethnic violence from them, not directly, but it settled. But one was quoted in a sermon as saying, "They've stolen our president. What are you doing about it?" Now, I'm sure this was what going on that I just wasn't aware of. There's one more thing from the book, "Ending Cycles of Violence, Canyon and Quaker Peace Making Response," after the 2007 election. You mentioned, as we were interviewing, that sometimes when they'd go deliver food, they would give a little talk, a little sermon, a message, something of some religious sort. But in general, I think they weren't seeking converts, particularly as they went and did things like alternatives to violence program. But in your book, you quote, "Tretoric Amwaka," and he relates about something that happened with respect to AVP, the Alternative Violence Program, where they're not bringing Bibles and they're not doing religious teaching, they're talking about peacemaking, forgiving, finding, healing, and these kinds of things. He relates how a woman in that session gets led to profess Jesus Christ when none of them were talking about that. Now, Kenyan Quakers are very clearly Christian-identified for the most part, which is somewhat different than the average liberal Quaker here in the United States. What did you think of that and how much did you think that the work that they were doing was overlapped this recruiting for members versus just doing good in the world without seeking good for oneself? I don't think there was any thought of recruiting members at all. It was just doing what they were led to do. I did an interview after the book came out, which I'll put in -- I'll do a revision of the book once the election -- the next election has happened, and we see what happens, and I'll include this interview in it. In this community, Eldorette, a young man that was telling me about it, in that case, they do have a lot of people who have joined the local Friends Church because they said you were the ones helping us, and that means that that particular church has a much more diverse ethnicity. That was very, very interesting. I haven't heard that from other places. In other situations, it wasn't that people from a particular church working in a particular community so much as the team, which was from elsewhere. But in this case, that church was housing the displaced people and working very directly with them, and so it was associated with a particular church so that people have joined that church. Next time there's violence, those people will be the one serving. And before we sign off, I think I need to find a little bit about your background. I understand you're Quaker now. Amongst one of the many things that you do, I think in the world in terms of publishing, is you're a co-editor of What Can't Thou Say, which is kind of a newsletter thing that comes out several times a year. What can't thou say is Quaker-oriented? Are you Quaker going back quite a ways? How did you grow up religiously? And why do you care about peacemaking or you were in South Africa for the Climate Change Conference? What's your big motivation behind these things? Well, my biggest motivation really has more to do with the climate change, and most of my work has been environmental. This book is sort of a departure from my usual, but I'm very, very much aware of the connection. What can't thou say is what we call a meeting for worship in print. A meeting for worship in the Quaker style is group gathering in which people sit in silence and wait for the spirit to move the messages that come in the meeting for worship. So what can't thou say is what people might have said in a meeting for worship, personal stories, personal experiences of mysticism. It's been going on since 1994. The readers and writers are pretty much the same. There's a website whatcanst thou say.org? I've also been involved with Quaker Earth Care Witness, which is obvious by its name and the Quaker Institute for the Future. So I've been editing periodical with editorial teams for what can't thou say on the mystical side, and we call it Quaker Eco Bulletin on the more practical environmental side. Now we have three E's. It's been clear for a long time that economy is a big part of the issue, and more recently equality has been, we've got environment, economy and equality, and we're working on how to make changes to make the world a better place to be. And your background religiously? What has that been? I grew up congregational that became United Church of Christ. I always had a great spiritual need, and there just wasn't enough there for me. I always thought that if I grew up Catholic, I would have become a nun, but there wasn't anything like that available. I always admired Quakers because I thought they were one of the few people living out of your enemy, which I thought was the most profound teaching, you know, the Christian teaching, but I always thought that it was something you were born into. And then my Presbyterian youth group wanted to study some offbeat religions and chose Quakers and Evangelical on the other end, and I found out that there's such a thing as convinced a friend. And then I was home. I didn't have to make do anymore. When you were pretty young? I was just 30. You evidently, after being raised congregational, you were Presbyterian for some period in there? Well, I was always making do, and Presbyterian Church was nearby, and they were doing good things. It was very socially active church, but once I went to this silent meeting, I just couldn't go back to a church service, just too much noise. It's a very interesting book, Judy. Again, we're talking about ending cycles of violence, Kenyan Quaker peacemaking response after the 2007 election by Judy Lum. She's been with us joining us today from Belize, where she lives. You do travel around the U.S. I hope that when you're here, we get to hear you talk about your book and hear about the rest of the work. You've got good stuff going on down there in Belize as well. Thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Well, thank you for your work. My Spirit in Action guest today was Judy Lum, website JudyLum.com, or just follow the NorthernSpiritRadio.org link. See you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website. NorthernSpiritRadio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)