Spirit in Action

Anna Sandidge - Friends Peace Teams

Anna Sandidge is the coordinator for the Friends Peace Teams after having served with two different projects in Burundi and Rwanda as part of the African Great Lakes Initiative. Anna was raised in the Assembles of God church, but had her first serious break with the church at the age of 12. At 15 she sought out Quakers, finding herself "home" from the start at Friends Meeting. She was a professional organizer in her 20's, but found a leading to more securely connect her employment work with her spiritual work and found that with the Friends Peace Teams.

Broadcast on:: 02 Mar 2008
Audio Format:: other

I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep. No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep. I have no arms but yours with which to hold. The ones grown weary from this struggle and weak from growing old. I have no voice but yours with which to see. To let my children know that I am out and out is everything. I have no way to feed the hungry souls. No clothes to give and to give the ragged and the morn. So be my heart, my hand, my tongue, through you I will be done. Fingers have I none to help I'm done, the tangled knots and twisted chains, the strangled fearful minds. Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. 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. Above all I'll seek out light, love and helping hands, being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. My guest today on Spirit in Action is Anna Sandich. Anna is the coordinator for the Friends Peace Teams after having served with two different projects in Burundi and Rwanda in East Africa as part of the African Great Lakes initiative. Anna was raised in the assemblies of God Church but had her first serious break with the Church at the age of 12. At 15 she sought out Quakers, finding herself at home from the start at Friends Meeting. She was a professional organizer in her 20s but found a leading to more securely connect her employment work with her spiritual work and found that with the Friends Peace Teams. Anna, I'm so glad to run into you here this weekend. Having seen you about a month ago I had no idea we'd have the chance to have this interview. What are you doing here at the Iowa Yearly Meeting Conservative session? Well I had the great pleasure of being able to speak to the Yearly Meeting on Wednesday night. It was a great opportunity to be among conservative friends. I've never been at Iowa Yearly Meeting before so I'm really excited to be here. So you're here as representative of Friends Peace Teams. Is this a ministry for you? Definitely. This is work that I feel called into. I'm still in the discernment process of what the actual ministry now that I'm in a more of a formal role within the organization but it's definitely a ministry for both me and I think the organization. As a Quaker I'm used to banding about words like calling, leading and discernment. Are you Quaker-born? Not Quaker-born, Quaker-convinced. I first came to Friends when I was 15. I was raised assembly of God, very conservative branch of evangelical Christianity and didn't speak to my condition. It wasn't where I was going to grow. Had a wonderful opportunity to go to a Quaker meeting when I was 15. I just continued to work from there. I was home as soon as I walked in the door. That seems really strange. At 15 years old you're supposed to be looking for someone to go on a date with. Is that what took you to Quaker meeting? Was there a boy you were interested in? I know I was the youngest person in the meeting by many, many years. My parents and I don't agree on my current practice of faith and we're finally able to have conversations where they're almost convinced that it's their fault I became a Quaker because all of those teachings about Jesus and love and equality and I believed it. I experienced when I was 12, the church that we were going to was in the inner city of Springfield, which isn't very inner or city, but it was a few blocks from this Catholic mission that was serving homeless people. We were doing this big capital campaign marble steps and the homeless people were sleeping on the steps of our church but then our pastor was calling to have them arrested and this just really did not set well with me and my understanding of Christianity and reaching out and so I spoke out against that. I wrote a letter to the pastor. At the age of 12? Yeah, yeah. It was something that didn't seem right. It was unjust and wasn't in my understanding of how we were supposed to act as Christians and I kind of did it in a probably a too smart alley way. I sent him a thank you note that was probably not worded in the most respectful way and I got in a lot of trouble for that and from that point on it was this constant struggle of believing what I was reading and hearing but then seeing actions in the church that were completely counter to what I believed true and what I was being taught and I met the librarian at my very small school. I think we had 150 people in our school and she happened to be one of the few Quakers around for miles and I was one of her volunteers in the library and I would come in and I would rant about all of the frustration and injustices of the church that I belonged to and one day she just finally said and she'd been listening to me rant for about two or three years and finally one day she said well I go to this meeting. We don't proselytize and I don't want you to think I'm trying to convert you or anything but I think you might find it helpful if you came to this meeting but I really would want you to get your parents permission first so I want them to be comfortable with that. So she kind of explained gently what her understanding of friends were and I went home to ask permission and my parents didn't really know what Quakers were but they thought they were Christian so they thought it would be okay and the deal was go to Sunday school on Sunday morning, stay for your normal church service, have your homework done, stay for family dinner and then be back in time for prayer services on Sunday evening, be at Wednesday night service and if there's a tent revival you have to be at the revival and it was by the grace of God, Quaker meeting was at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and so she would pick me up, I went to Quaker meeting, my first meeting I walked in, there really was about a 20 year age difference between me and everybody in the room but I just, I was home, I mean I just knew it as soon as I walked in the door and so I kept that pace for about a year and a half when I graduated high school early and then I had a lot more freedom, I only had to go to Quaker meeting on Sunday, I didn't have to do all the other so it was great. What was it that fit for you, what was it that made you feel home, can you put that into words? Well, growing up in the assembly of God, it wasn't something that spoke to me, I had a lot of questions, there were a lot of unanswered things that I saw as truth but I didn't see how it fit in to what I was being taught as well, I mean there were a lot of these holes in the theology that I grew up in, like the whole Noah arc thing just didn't make sense to me, the math was wrong, the you know you had predators and prey and I just, I couldn't buy it and I wasn't really encouraged to question and when I came into the Quaker meeting one there was immediate acceptance just for who I was, they were so happy to see me there not because I was somebody's child, they were just really happy to see me as a human being and I felt that immediately and that was really powerful, just total acceptance for who I was, faults and everything and then the questioning and the querying and the seeking and the searching was definitely encouraged and modeled and opportunities were there for that and it just, that's where I needed to be, it was amazing. So I guess you went to Quaker meeting, it must have been about 15 years ago or so that you stumbled upon it, what have you been doing since and how did you end up with this Friends Peace Teams organization? Well it's been a long winding journey, I made a lot of mistakes, got to learn from a lot of those mistakes, got my undergraduate degree and left halfway through that, came back, came back to Friends meetings, it's a long, I mean that's a long question, it's a really long question. The pivotal point for me was when I finally made it to graduate school, I had been attending the Quaker meeting in Springfield, Missouri and working on my undergraduate degree and then way opened for us to go to St. Louis, my husband and I and I started working on my masters in social work with the community focus and I became a full-time political organizer and I was working with a coalition and organization that was doing demonstrations and we, you know, filed an injunction against the Secret Service, we were infiltrating Tom Ridge Town Hall meetings, you know, we were hard core activist type of group and it was a wonderful experience but it wasn't where I felt, I mean I could do it, it was good, it was exciting, it was thrilling but it really wasn't where I belonged spiritually, my spiritual life and my work life felt sometimes at odds with each other, at best just on parallel paths that never quite intersected. I got invited to participate in a training in Nova Scotia, Canada at the Pearson Peace Keeping Institute where I learned how the UN does international peace keeping operations and while I was there, I walked into the classroom not really knowing what to expect but kind of expected I would be with NGOs and diplomats and those type of people and the majority of the class were in military uniforms and they were School of the Americas graduates and I was really not prepared for that. There was another person who was there who was the editor of Peace Magazine, Meta Spencer and she was a hardcore non-violent activist and had been working closely with Gene Sharp and Meta was really a great presence for me because in my daily life and my work life I was on the streets, I was an advocate, I was a challenger to the system and on my soapbox all the time but in this setting that just really wouldn't have been good but Meta picked up that role and she was the person who was challenging the group and really highlighting the possibilities for non-violent intervention and the whole structure of the class is that you're given a case scenario and you plan a UN international peacekeeping operation from military insertion strategy to government building humanitarian exit strategy. The first few days military officers know exactly what they're doing and they're planning where the checkpoints are going to be and what to do with the arsenals and then we get a couple of days into the workshop and the facilitators say okay now you have 25,000 refugees that you have to deal with and the military officers were kind of like what do we do now and we started having these amazing conversations around human rights and humanitarian assistance and how military can sometimes interfere with that but also how sometimes the good intentions of humanitarian workers can make it more dangerous for the people and it was this real give and take exchange and there was this moment of stepping back and just really hearing what they were saying and giving validity to their concerns and it was a real eye-opening experience for me if I didn't have to be on the soapbox that I had so much to gain from listening and there was one gentleman who was interiorly owned as a UN peacekeeper and it was very difficult for him. He was challenging this non-violent belief the most and in one of the sessions where Metta was really in her role and up there uplifting non-violent resistance he started banging his fist on the table and she was really shaken and she said what are you doing that's so incredibly rude and he said well every time you're out there organizing some rally or non-violent resistance I'm hacking somebody with a machete how are you going to stop me and the conversation kind of just ended right there how do you respond to that by this a valid point it was an incredibly valid point so we started having conversations in the evening and I started hearing his story and what that experience must have been like for him and I had to say I don't know if you could stop something like that non-violently and just really be honest with him that week went on and had dinner with another person who'd been part of the kachacha process in Rwanda and how just uplifting and excited he was about this possibility of in a country where there had been mass genocide that communities were able to elect judges to come together and look at a restorative justice model and that that was really what peacemaking was all about and he had been an officer in Rwanda during the UN peacekeeping mission and so that was really uplifting and exciting and by the end of the two weeks after all of these conversations and exercises and looking at human rights and humanitarian assistance and all of these different components that they hadn't really given a lot of attention to we had an officer from Mexico say I don't think I can finish my military career I don't think they're gonna like some of the opinions I'm bringing back and the officer from El Salvador said you know everything I do really makes a difference not just what I do in my work he said that's powerful but how I purchase things who I relate to how I treat people that has a global impact and there was this amazing awakening and the soldier who was banging on the table at the very end he said you know I don't get this non-violent stuff I really don't but I'm really glad there are people who are working on it and it was just this incredible change in me of the need and the power to be a loving presence to really love unconditionally and to admit that I might be wrong about a few things that was the turning point that started opening the doors to get me to Burundi this Pearson peacekeeping Institute that's up in Nova Scotia is that something that happens every year is it regular is it ongoing training type process or were you just one of the lucky ones Anna that you got in on it when you did it's a bit of both they were doing a joint project with the University of Wolfville in Nova Scotia and the United Nations to offer this training they also got funding from the Canadian government they were having some major funding cuts and they weren't sure that this course was going to be offered but it was called the Peace Operations Summer Institute and the goal of the course was to train future UN peacekeepers military officers who would be leading missions and understanding the whole process of UN peacekeeping so that they could put their role into the bigger picture as well as bringing diplomats who might be working on behalf of governments in the United Nations as well on understanding what this whole role might be like and then NGO directors who would need to understand how they fit into the bigger picture I just happened to get to tag along so the opportunity is there but I think it might be dwindling with funding but they offer other trainings as well so you said that that end up leading you to go to Burundi tell me about that saga I was first invited by the African Great Lakes project of friends peace teams I didn't really think I was going to go Dave Sarumka asked me if I wanted to go and my first response was no not really I think there's something else that I want to do and the doors kept closing for that something else he asked me again and I said well no not really let me think about it again then he asked me a third time and the door still hadn't opened and I said okay well let me think about it I went through the clearness process and then it was okay sure I'll do that and then he said okay go raise the money and so I had six weeks to raise enough money to support me to be there for three months and I went over initially with the work camp where we did construction the African Great Lakes initiative has work camps where they work in Rwanda Burundi Uganda Kenya and they are starting some projects in Congo and I went over with three other Americans we met a Ugandan while we were there who joined the work camp and then we were partnered with six to ten Burundian work campers and at the beginning of the work camp we did alternatives to violence project training as a team and then after the AVP course we went out and started the construction process and so my first month there was to just be a member of the work camp to be present with the Burundian friends that I would be working with after the work campers went home and to just start being a presence there and the goal was after the work camp was over that I would stay and work with the healing and rebuilding our communities director Adrian Young-Abo and then the from its women's association director Cassile Nattamara and I know I just mispronounced her name terribly but working with Cassile to help them look at where their organization was there were a partner organization of the African Great Lakes initiative we were supporting them are they all Quaker you said that you were working with some Burundi friends that's Quakers and is this whole organization Quaker groups that we're working with in all the countries right now are linked through EFI Evangelical Friends International so we are working with Evangelical Quakers in Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and Kenya and there are some FUM friends in Kenya that we are working with as well Friends United meeting so we're working with Quakers in those regions I was working with Adrian and Cassile looking at the organizations that they have Adrian is the director of healing and rebuilding our communities which offers trauma healing workshops for Hutu and Tutsi bringing them together into an experiential workshop that looks at symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder ways of dealing with the symptoms ways of helping family members and community members who might be suffering from symptoms of PTSD looking at ways of practicing listening together bringing people together in a safe place to start sharing their stories to rewrite their story from the individual trauma to the community healing in the workshops they look at what are the roots and fruits of the tree of trust and mistrust how does that tree of mistrust start growing and how do those roots come down and then what fruits do they bear also looking at well if that's possible then how do we start planting the tree of trust and what do we need to lay down to let those roots grow and then if we do them then what fruits will they bear that metaphor has a really powerful meaning for the barundians and brawandans we work with because it's a very agricultural based society and so that was something that really resonated with them so we do that in the workshop and on the final day we pair a Hutu and a Tutsi together and they do a blind trust walk and so a Hutu is blindfolded and is led on through a series of hills and obstacles by a Tutsi member and then in reverse the Tutsi is led by the Hutu then we come back to the circle and we start sharing the experiences of what it was like to really surrender yourself to the trust of someone who you saw as an enemy or if you hadn't seen them as an enemy before why you hadn't seen them as an enemy and just start that conversation and we share meals during midday so we have Hutu and Tutsi sitting down and breaking bread literally together and seeing the possibility of that the communities can be readnet and that it's possible to sit down together again and did you really see it being possible to do that kind of connecting and trusting and all that kind of thing i guess eight years ago there were about i think 800 000 slaughtered by one another and here you are doing a blind trust walk together with them that seems a incredible leap how do they get there i mean you must have been part of the chemistry that made it happen no we weren't i wish i could say we were we were invited in to help facilitate this program some of the barundian and Rwandan friends had experienced the alternatives to violence project through various encounter groups and friends peace teams had sent in a delegation in 1999 to see what we could bring and help to this region it was from the experiences with a vp going to south africa to do some training with reconciliation workers that was facilitated by quakers in south africa that adrian and concealed and other barundian friends just really felt called that they needed to be addressing issues of trauma conversations around forgiveness and reconciliation couldn't move forward without addressing all of the harm and hurt that happened and it really was their leading that pulled this forward they just invited us into the process to help lift up their strengths with what we had to offer as resources and financial support and just to be clear at this point you are a member of a friend's peace team when you're out there right that's what your role was i was working as a team member on behalf of the african great lakes initiative of friends peace teams one of the things that friends peace teams tries to do is the person in the field is just one member of the peace team my support committee my clearness committee the people who fundraised to make sure that i could get there they were all members of that team not just in name but making sure that they stayed connected to the process that they offered input to the process so i was just the hands going out into the field but the whole team was made up of everyone who made it possible for me to get there and i think that's really important to hold up and i was also a team member with the baryndians who were doing this work alongside me they were also team members going back you were raised essentially pentecostal i think assembly of god is pentecostal so you're raised in this kind of fundamentalist christian church you hopped over to a quaker meeting an unprogrammed meeting amps assuming so this is kind of this liberal different kind of religion than what most people know and then you're going over there and when you connect with these efi quakers and these fum quakers these branches of quakers which are more christian more mainline was that a comfortable fit for you or did their language uh rankle with your how did you adjust to all that well i had a lot of opportunity to reconcile my past religious experience with where i was and where i am now i understood the language and so being able to reframe it in my understanding of christianity and my experience of of christ and of god it wasn't the touchpoint that it used to be it was it was much easier to accept and i think also knowing that and having experienced that at a very early age it wasn't frightening for me they danced in the churches that i grew up with and they drummed in the churches that i grew up with and glossolalia was very common in the churches that i grew up with speaking in tongues so to be worshiping with a group of friends who had very core beliefs that i believed as an unprogrammed friend but expressed it with very boisterous joy i wasn't frightened by it because i had experienced but i got to also see this wonderful marriage of my beliefs with an expression that i grew up with but i saw the depth and the sincerity that i felt like i didn't see when i was younger doesn't mean it wasn't there i just wasn't able to see it so it wasn't the difficult experience i thought it was going to be it was really kind of refreshing and nice so and i just spent three months there on your first trip there what happened from there what year was that that was last year this is 2006 so that was 2005 i was there in july august and came home at the end of september after i got back from barundi in the end of september i was actually clerking mzuri valley friends conference i got home that weekend had two days and then i drove up to laurins kansas where we were having mzuri valley friends conference i also had malaria so that was an amazing experience so it's kind of a blur after that i just really took advantage of being unemployed i was actually looking for the opportunity to work in africa i'd fallen in love with being in barundi and i was looking for any opportunity to be there full-time my husband was open to that and again we just didn't open for that to happen and davis arimca came back to me and he said you know in january would you like to go back to barundi and do this project on behalf of the african great lakes initiative and this time i didn't have to be asked three times i said yes so they asked me to go back to barundi in january of this year of two thousand six to collect stories of war survivors some of which had been through the healing and rebuilding our communities program my husband who is an alternative to violence project facilitator was invited to go along and conduct a vp workshops with the guardian dalepe which were community members mostly young men 15 14 some younger some older who were in the communities that were recruited by the barundi in government to be the home militia so they were armed not trained told to protect the communities during the civil war that was happening and then during the disarmament demobilization and reintegration process were not invited into that process and so they had seen themselves as soldiers they were armed as soldiers but then they didn't get any of the benefits of soldier who was commissioned so there was a lot of tension around that and that was still being negotiated in the peace process and a lot of them were feeling left out of that process and so the avp barundi project thought that this would be a really nice opportunity to bring in some extra funds and do some work with the guardian dalepe so tom got to do that while i was collecting stories of survivors so while he was going around barundi we flew in together we spent the first night in bujumbura together and then i don't think we saw each other till we got back into the main city to fly out together so for three weeks he was traveling along the countryside having a great time and i was going to four different communities in barundi and our initial goal when we set this up was to do a program evaluation of the healing and rebuilding our communities program and we had these wonderful list of questions and we had our formal evaluation form that we were going to use and i sat down on my first interview and i realized that that's a nice framework but that's really not why we're here i worked with my invitation and the stories just poured out the individuals that we spoke with took it where they needed to go and they shared what they needed to share the information and and the love that we got out of that process was just incredible a story i like to share which is pretty depressing at one level to me is incredibly amazing is the story of chisa can seal chisa had not been through one of our trauma programs she hadn't had the opportunity to experience that yet when chisa heard that we were going to be in the area she wanted to come and share her story and that's how we ended up getting all these different voices we had voices of some people who had been through the program some who were family members some who were facilitators and some who didn't even know that we were there but knew we were gathering stories she walked over three hours to tell us her story and so we met in this little side room at the catholic mission in burasira she came in did the formal greetings she sat down she's very stoic very very solid woman and she begins to tell her story about when the war began she fled to her mother-in-law's house when she just got to her mother-in-law's house the people came they took her mother-in-law and they killed her and then as she was fleeing back to her home she heard that they had burned her mother-in-law's body and she was devastated because she loved her mother-in-law she got back to her home and her husband and her son were being dragged away just as she was coming home and she saw them beaten very badly just before her eyes and the mob carried them away and she wasn't sure if they were alive or if they were dead and so the next morning she got up very early she heard and assumed that they'd been taken to the prison in engosie they had been accused of committing some of the crimes that were happening and this is in the middle of all of the chaos and the horror that's happening between Hutus and Tutsis so the next morning she was going to meet them at prison to take them food and a neighbor came up to her and gently said don't bother they were killed last night and in her story she stops and she says that was the second bad thing that happened to me and so after her oldest son and her husband was killed she fled to her mother's house which was in a different province and her children were coming with her and sometimes they would stay and it was kind of a sketchy moment in that story of knowing exactly where the children were in the process but she fled to her mother's house where her mother then was taken and beaten and killed before her eyes devastated she comes back to her home not feeling safe i think she'd been home for a while and a man from the internally displaced persons camp by this time tutsi soldiers were gathering tutsis up to live in camps for protection so they could protect them better and Hutus were either forced to flee into the bush or to flee across the borders for safety those who were left in between were kind of at the mercy of both groups as their identity was in question where you tutsi where you Hutu and there's a lot of stories of families who a Hutu wife was married to a tutsi husband and neither party wanted to invite them into safety or saw them both as enemies and therefore were targeted by both groups and so there was a lot a lot of that happening as one friend said they'd been marrying together for over 300 years of course there would be mixed marriages but Chiza came back to her home looking for a little bit of safety and a man from the internally displaced persons came and he beat her and he raped her and again she's telling me the story and she's not crying she's just just telling it as this this is life this is what happens she told me that that was the first time she told that story in 10 years that she had never told anybody that she was afraid to tell anyone she said that she had health problems she was afraid that she had AIDS but she didn't want to go to a clinic because then she was afraid that would add more shame and sometimes it was better just not to know she expressed over and over again this deep sense of shame and all I could do was sit there with her and hold her hand and just try to encourage her that oh she was incredibly strong to have survived this and to be the woman that she was and it was really a hard place to be I felt a lot of guilt Chiza went on to tell her story her children the ones that had still lived one of her children who was going to school couldn't finish school he went blind and she was hoping that it was his education that was going to help pull the family out they're lost their house during the war and she's been trying to rebuild and the children have decided that they can't live with her anymore that it's too shameful to live with her so they've become street children and she just had all of these horrible burdens and the suffering was just really immense and after she told her story we sat in silence holding hands we sat in silence and then she turns to me and she just has this amazing look on her face and she says thank you so much for hearing my story I was blown away that's all I did and that's all she wanted she wasn't asking for anything else she never asked her anything she just wanted to tell her story and we asked her what she had to share with the United States was there a message that she wanted us to know and she wanted us to be mindful of what war can do and to pray for them and be present with them and to not forget them and I was in that moment that Chiza taught me that it doesn't matter how much power and privilege I have there's just some suffering I can't do anything about that doesn't absolve me of not being present with it and that she was offering me this amazing gift of love and forgiveness she was forgiving me for my limitations and she was offering me the gift to take on her burden for a little while so she didn't have to carry it so I could take it back and share that with friends and share that with people in the United States who might not be aware of this type of suffering or aware of how personal war can be it was an amazing gift Chiza keeps coming back to remind me the importance of this work isn't necessarily bringing great programs but being that loving presence offering a safe place reminding friends and survivors and brothers and sisters that we all have value I think that's the amazing work that's happening in Burundi and Rwanda and the other programs one woman that I spoke with said this division that came between us god doesn't divide this division came from man she said that if we remember we are all children of god we'll never be divided again and there's this hunger and this depth for reconnecting as a community and the programs help facilitate that they create opportunities for that to happen but it's not anything we're doing we just are able to be present and bear witness to it I believe we are a great big we are washed by the very same rain we are swimming in a stream together some in power and some in pain we can worship this ground we walk on cherishing the bees that live beside nothing spirits forever we're all swimming to the other side I am alone I am searching hungering provinces in my time I am balanced at the break and wisdom I'm impatient to receive a sign I move forward with what sentences open imperfection be my crime in humility I will listen we're all swimming to the other side we are living with a great big river we are washed by the very same rain we are swimming in a stream together some in power and some in pain we can worship this ground we walk on cherishing the bees that live beside nothing spirits will live forever we're all swimming to the other side on this journey thoughts and feelings finding intuition my head my heart I am gathering the twos together I breathe there into my heart all of those who have come before me band together and be my guide loving lessons that I will follow we're all swimming to the other side we are living with a great big river we are washed by the very same rain we are swimming in a stream together some in power and some in pain we can worship this ground we walk on cherishing the things that live beside loving spirits will live forever we're all swimming to the other side when we get there we'll discover all of the gifts we've been given to share have been with us since life's beginning and we never noticed they were there we can dance at the brink of wisdom never recognizing that we've arrived loving spirits will live together we're all swimming to the other side we are living with a great big river we are washed by the very same rain we are swimming in a stream together some in power and some in pain we can worship this ground we walk on cherishing the things that live beside loving spirits will live forever we're all swimming to the other side we are living with a great big river we are washed by the very same rain we are swimming in a stream together some in power and some in pain we can worship this ground we walk on cherishing the things that live beside loving spirits will live forever we're all swimming to the other side loving spirits will live forever we're all swimming to the other side so Anna I guess there's a piece of this I haven't quite got in perspective how are you affording to do this well I was really fortunate on two accounts I had a spouse that was working full-time and very supportive and considered this an extension of his ministry something that he could do in partnership with me and the fundraising I don't like to fundraise I hate to ask people for funding which is probably not good considering my current position but it's really easy to fundraise for something one that you believe in that you see the truth and the value in it and what I realized was I wasn't asking people to support me going over I was asking people to support the work of barundians and Rwandans who were ready to start taking care of the peace building process themselves but sometimes you need a third side coming in to help create some safety and sometimes you need a different perspective to help you see things differently and I had so many people say to me I'm not at a place in my life where I can go and do that although I think this is really important work but I'm so glad that I can send you in my stead so it really was this community effort I was going on behalf of hundreds of people who financially supported it and made it possible it really was just things falling into place and spirit making it happen and I've heard that experience with other friends peace teams members who felt called to do this work whether it was join a work camp go facilitate ADP help assist in the friends women's association aids clinic whatever they felt called to do the money came it does require a time commitment but again it's how you're called so you have to figure out what's going to work best with what you have the flexibility and the freedom to do that and I think that's one of the nice things about friends peace teams is that they understand the realities of life but also understand that if you're called then way will open and helping facilitate that is an important part of their mission way way way back at the beginning somewhere Ana you mentioned about sitting with a clearness committee to discern this I think that clearness committees are something that a lot of folks in general population have no idea what you're talking about you want to say what you actually did sure on a clearness committee you invite people that you believe are going to have some multiple perspectives people that you trust in Quaker circles it's usually friends of a meeting who know you or have had experience in what you are seeking clearness about and in seeking clearness it's trying to figure out if this is really what I'm supposed to do is this a good idea is this an idea that has a divine purpose is this just a good adventure and sometimes good adventures are okay and and finding clearness on how you're going to operate if you go over what do you feel called to do do you feel called to have an adventure and experience and do something positive while you're there or do you feel called into a ministry and what would that ministry be while you're there and this group of friends whether they're Quakers or just people that you trust help you answer some really difficult questions some of the places that friends peace teams go to are not always physically safe there have been bombing and shelling and gunfights in the streets and some of the places we go and so you need to discern that am I willing to go into a dangerous situation what are the things what are the fears how will I handle it if this arises and it's kind of a combination place of figuring out if this really is where I'm belong as well as okay once I get there how am I going to deal with all the things that might come up and and it's really nice to have those different perspectives and experiences because they're going to think about things that you wouldn't think about my sense of the clearness process is that it's got this ineffable portion of it which is the divine thing that you're talking about I guess anybody could write up a list of pros and cons and maybe you did that and you wrote up your pros and cons I should shouldn't but then you sit with this group of friends who help you focus spiritually did you have some experience of transcending the pro and con columns yeah I mean when you're looking at going into an active war zone the con column gets awfully long I think it was through sitting with friends in a very worshipful place lifting up those concerns and then realizing knowing that all of those concerns that lie there did not alleviate the concern to go and it was through that corporate discernment it was through that corporate worship that it became clear that I wasn't going by myself and when I was there I wasn't going to be alone if this was truly a spiritual calling then I was going to be accompanied by all the friends who held me in prayer while I was there that spirit would not let me go unattended and I had that more reinforced while I was in Burundi than before I went I continually ran into folks who prayed with me people that I didn't know would come up and asked to pray with me there were some prayers where I felt anointed there were prayers of gratitude and there were prayers sending me forth to do work there were prayers that called me out of myself and reminded me that this was not of me and that I was there to do something more or be open to do something more and if I hadn't done the preparation before I went I would have never seen that I would have been doing a nice humanitarian mission of organizational capacity building and building a school and I would have done all the nice social work things but I wouldn't have had the deep spiritual experience that being in that spiritual discernment process allowed me to I have a couple pictures of you in my mind I see Anna beforehand as a political organizer I see you rapping heavily on the door and I hear you calling out people and rapid fire telling them maybe this is totally my imagination but now I see a kind of an ome Anna going and listening with eyes and heart open am I making this up or was there some real transition like that that did happen for you the door wrapping Anna existed but it really wasn't it wasn't me and that's where that disconnect between work and my spiritual life was so present that I couldn't ignore it I did that I did the door knocking going door to door are you in support of this war tell me why you're in support of this war canvassing that was where I needed to be then I needed to experience that to know that that's not who I was and to know that there are people who are called to do that and who do that well and that there is an important place for people who can do that but that wasn't where I was called it was the experiences in Canada it was my experiences in Oslo with the disarmament conference it was my experiences in Quaker meeting all of that led me to see myself differently when I was in Burundi there were a lot of social and cultural things in Burundi women don't have a lot of equality they don't have equal voice there's a lot of homophobia there's a lot of acceptance though I had to be really conscious of why I was there I wasn't there to take up women's rights I wasn't there to do all of these other things that will happen in time so there was this transition I don't know that it was in aha moment but there was this transition of realizing that I have a lot more to give by being quiet than by knocking on the door so you learned how to be quiet and then you became coordinator and I have the sense that a coordinator doesn't get to be quiet very much I think they have to be on the phone constantly what do you do as coordinator for the friends peace teams this is a brand new position for friends peace teams we've been an all volunteer staff with the exception of our African Great Lakes program that's been a part-time staff person at daisa rim has been coordinating that since 1999 friends peace teams as an overarching organization has been volunteer our latin america program we have a small budding program in columbia is staffed by a volunteer at this time so we're still kind of in this phase of trying to figure out what does it mean to go from an all volunteer organization to one that has a full-time staff person and a part-time staff person how are we going to take all of the things that have been scattered across the united states and in a couple of other continents and bring that into one organized office so right now it's a lot of real basic office work setting up the computer trying to get all of the books into one system print our newsletter so that it's one newsletter just real basic mundane things eventually I think the vision of the coordinator is to be a support for the two programs that we have now and then help foster the growth of future programs making sure that they have the administrative support they need as well as that the program growth and development continues to knit into the overarching mission of friends peace teams of being that long-term presence in communities in conflict and that it's part of our mission to use Quaker process in all the work that we do and so I think it will be the role of the coordinator to help facilitate that to call us back to that when we get locked down into the day-to-day machinations of running this type of work and fundraising is a really big component of the coordinator's position to make sure that the work we do is fully supported financially as well how big of an organization is this is it three of you or with all the volunteers is it thousands covering the globe well if you include the volunteers it's thousands covering the globe and they work very hard to make friends peace teams what it is if you look at the paid staff underneath the umbrella of friends peace teams we have myself as a full-time person we have Dave Zaremka the African Great Lakes coordinator who is a part-time but puts in more hours than any part-time person I've ever seen and then Don Rupert is an assistant for the Africa program and Val Live Oak is currently working on a volunteer capacity and she's the coordinator for the Latin America Caribbean program so officially a staff person but not on the payroll I think that Christian peacemaker teams preceded the existence of friends peace teams in fact Tom Fox who died in Iraq was a Quaker member of Christian peacemaker teams so Quakers were involved with other religious groups like Mennonites and Brethren in the Christian peacemaker teams why friends peace teams as opposed to just being part of Christian peacemaker teams I think that's a question that we continually need to reflect back on ourselves what are we going to do that meets needs that there are many wonderful accompaniment and peace team organizations there's Peace Brigade International there's the Christian peacemaker teams there's the Muslim peacemaker teams which grew out of Christian peacemaker teams there's non-violent peace force fellowship of reconciliation the list is endless of teams that go in and do accompaniment work organizing work one of the things that we want to hold up for ourselves is that we are a Quaker centered organization and that we want to make sure we engage in Quaker process not only in the business of the organization but in how we develop and create programs we want to make sure that the partners that we work within country are equal partners so they're not working under us they're working with us and so we're making a very conscious decision not to have that with CPT we have been a member of their board and so we have a relationship with them and one of the things that we're helping with a full-time staff person that we can do is to start re-examining what work CPT is doing because they're in Columbia they've had team members in Congo what work is non-violent peace force doing that we can hold up and how can we in good relation support them and enhance the work that they're doing and also have the work that they do enhance our work as well my personal opinion is that we're not different but we are different we're called to do the same work we're called to work in communities and conflict we're called to hear and meet the needs that we can sometimes our visions are a little different and sometimes one vision meets the need better than another vision so where would someone go if they wanted to find out more about it maybe they're interested in becoming a volunteer and going being part of this peace process for the world how would they contact you how would they read about you well they can contact me personally at our friends peace teams office which is in st. louis mizzuri we have a website of www.friendspeaceteams.org and there they can link to an email if they're not on the internet they're more than welcome to give me a call at my office which is 314-621-7262 we're really excited to start hearing what friends want to do what non-friends want to do the opportunities are really endless there's a process if you're going to become an official team member we ask that you contact us start sharing with us your thoughts your ideas your leading there's an application process that's just a series of queries and questions of why are you called to this what do you want to bring what do you want to gain out of this experience what gifts do you bring what gifts do you hope to lift up then we ask you to find a clearness committee and we'll help you with that process we'll help facilitate that and then coming up with your own leading or ministry or project is a bit overwhelming we have work camps in the african great lakes region which are for four weeks every summer you again go through the same application process but there are work camps in Rwanda Burundi Uganda Kenya and hopefully soon in Congo you'll be doing everything from making mud bricks to hauling bricks to carrying trees construction skills aren't necessary it's just really about being present and being willing to exchange ideas and cultures just to share your experiences I have absolutely no construction skills and it was a great experience for me language skills are not that important we have mixed teams most of the team members speak english if they're from the country of origin we invite other regional african friends to join as well and so it's a new cultural experience for them on my work team in Burundi we had a friend from Uganda didn't speak French didn't speak Karundi and so it was this wonderful cultural exchange as well it's not all Quaker so we had friends who were Methodist we had friends who practiced Islam we had friends who joined the teams who didn't have any particular faith but were just happy to be there and participate so it doesn't have to be a Quaker experience well it is a Quaker experience but you don't have to be Quaker to experience well Anna I wish you a lot luck learning your new job that you're creating it's really inspirational to me to hear how you went through that transition the awakening or the awareness at 12 years old even and willingness to speak up and to put yourself where you've known butchery has just happened so recently it's inspirational to see someone step forward and take the risks with their heart wide open oh thank you I'm finding that if I'm just willing to say yes amazing things come along and I just get to be there when it happens anybody can do this it doesn't take anything special thanks very much not by my and not by power but my spirit alone shall we all live in peace not by my and not by power but my spirit alone shall we all live in peace to charge ready one two three and two three and two three and the children and the children and the children and the tears may fall but we'll hear them fall and another song will rise another song will rise not by my and not by power but my spirit alone shall we all live in peace not by my and not by power but my spirit alone shall we all live in peace two times ready one two three and children sing the children dream and the tears may fall but we'll hear them fall and another song will rise another song will rise not by my and not by power but my spirit alone shall we all live in peace not by my life and not by power but my spirit alone shall we all live in peace not by my not by power you've been listening to an interview with Anna Sandage of Friends Peace Teams you can hear this interview again via my website northernspiritradial.org where you can find this program other programs and helpful information and links about each program music featured on this program has included swimming to the other side by magpie and not by might not by power by Debbie Friedman the theme music for spirit in action is i have no hands but yours by carol johnson thank you for listening i welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit you can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net may you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light this is spirit in action i have no higher cause for you than this to love and serve your neighbor enjoy selflessness to love and serve your neighbor enjoy selflessness you