Spirit in Action

National Peace Foundation - Sarah Harder & Olga Bessolova

Sarah Harder is the President of the National Peace Foundation, and Olga Bessolova is a Russian-born, Soviet-raised activist with the organization. They "Build Foundations for Peace" through a number of programs in Russia, the Middle East, Africa, the USA and elsewhere.

Duration:: 59m
Broadcast on:: 17 Sep 2006
Audio Format:: mp3

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 make it 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 and time. Welcome to Spirit in Action, my name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week I will be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts. I will be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I will 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. I have no way to open people's eyes. Today my guests on Spirit in Action are Sarah Harder and Olga Besolova. Sarah is the president of the National Peace Foundation and Olga is a Russian born Soviet raised activist with the organization. They build foundations for peace through a number of programs in Russia, the Middle East, Africa, the USA and elsewhere. Olga was secretly baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church secretly because her father as a member of the Communist Party could not have anything to do with the religion. She does not feel positive about the overall role that the Russian Orthodox Church plays in civic life, both because of the way they use people and because of the restricted roles that they attempt to assign to women. Sarah Harder has made the transition from Catholic to Episcopalian to Unitarian Universalist, which is her current religious home. Sarah has a long history of activism among women's groups in the USA and Olga provides an intriguing glimpse into life in Russia before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Welcome Sarah and Olga to Spirit in Action. The National Peace Foundation started in the mid-70s. It was initially a group of grassroots activists who were determined to counterbalance as possible the military academies by setting up a U.S. government peace academy. As that 15-year campaign came to success in the late 80s, the result was the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was not in fact exactly what the activists were hoping for. The U.S. Institute of Peace continues to build and to grow, as a matter of fact, it's in the process of having a beautiful building on the mall in Washington, D.C., but it has been much more, I would say, a sort of academic think tank than it has been a real activist or training institute for people who would be peacemakers, in other words, who would deal with conflict resolution and so forth. When I came on the board of what was then called the National Institute of Peace Foundation, it was determined that there was a great deal of dissatisfaction with what had been happening during the Reagan years when the Peace Institute was created. As a matter of fact, it turned into the Institute for the Cold War. I mean, the principles and the focus was very much on Sovietology and things of that sort. And our members, we, in the course of the campaign, had gained some 35,000 activists and contributors, understood that while we wanted to continue through our official status to lobby for the permanent funding of the U.S. Institute of Peace and lobby to make it a more liberal and actual peacemaking center, that they wanted to see more evidence of why they initially dreamed of a peace academy and that was to help to train and to send activists to deal with what we knew were not only academic principles that had made peace building something more than some fuzzy, soft-headed ideal, but also to make things really happen, actually building peace, actually doing post-conflict work that helped to resolve that conflict. As I say, this was just when I came on board and I had just begun my own work in what was then the Soviet Union and I had just become fascinated with the idea of the enemy that I had grown up with as a child first of the Second World War and then of the Cold War, suddenly seeing that the enemy I had been trained to see looked just like me, facing the same struggles internally, to turn the machinery of war into something that dealt with the major social and economic issues at hand. So I began my work then in the Soviet Union and have continued since actually 1989. That has been my role for the National Peace Foundation, but the National Peace Foundation in fact has programs in other parts of the world. We have had a program in the Middle East that brought Palestinians and Israelis youth together. We are now expanding our programs in the Middle East. Our programs in Russia have been thriving. We have programs in Africa and we had, for some time, a program with Cuba, and as you know under this administration, that's become increasingly difficult. We work with Africa University, which is in Zimbabwe. It's in all Africa University and we help them to build a peace leadership program. All of their students now are required to take some coursework relating to peace and conflict resolution, but they also have people who are graduate students in programs that deal specifically with peace building in the context of the very troubled continent of Africa. Thank you, Sarah. I'd like to hear about this from Olga's point of view. Olga haven't grown up in Russia as part of the Soviet Union. I'd like to hear your perspective and why you got involved with this National Peace Foundation. I want to start from 1990, not from my childhood when I grew up in Russia, but I will tell about this too, but I want to start from 1990 when I met Sarah by the Soviet American Summit, which was arranged in the United States and many organizations from the Soviet Union and the United States participated. At that time, I was the deputy director of the biggest aviation research center in the Soviet Union. It's something like NASA in America. But additional, I participated very active in New Women's Movement, which started Peristroika Time, this garbage-off came, and Peristroika gave to us new possibility for to create new organizations. It's interesting when we started our first, what we call, Women's Club. The head of our local Communistic Party Committee asked me, "For what do you need this organization? We already have one in Soviet Union. Maybe you can understand by this very short note how far we were from democracy. We already have one women's organization, why you need another." But if we're talking about Soviet Union, of course, I was 40 years old when I met my first foreign friend. It was not Sarah. It was Khaled Shulman from New York who came to Moscow and we met by some conference too. I was 40 years old because I lived in a very close city and I worked in a very close university. And for me, of course, I couldn't compare our life in Soviet time as ghetto or not because we were very active and my childhood was very interesting because I always was a leader in pioneers' organization, children' organization, and Soviet Union, then it comes from all, and then I was a member of the Communistic Party. It's interesting that I came to the Communistic Party when Carvachev became the head. When many members of the Communistic Party lived party because they started disappointing this, but I decided that I want to support Carvachev when I become the member. I had very active life. I was a sportmaster in archery. I had many friends. I want to say that when I was maybe 20, at home, we had very big radio equipment with name Mir. It was very strong radio, and we could listen the voice of America in Russian. At one side, it was a very big opening of the world. For instance, the voice of America read Solzhenitsyn, who we could not read at home, or Bullhark of Masters and Margarita, the famous novel about beginning of Soviet time, and again we could not buy these books. Sometimes now, when I'm coming to a clear, I like the mostly what I like to go to borders, and so I can't understand how I can spend at borders hours and hours. Now in Russia in Moscow, we have very big bookstores where it's possible to buy everything. But maybe it is my hunger from my childhood and young years when in bookstores, it was many shelves of Lenin and material marks, material of the Communistic Party, and when I buy in 1965, Cylinger, I don't know how they published teaching Cylinger, "Catching on the right". I tried to send you the message about the situation, or the mood in which we lived. It was active, wonderful life, very close from the world, but at the same time, we got through some strange ways, the race from a different world. For instance, what I remember from my childhood, one of the friends of my older brother, he was a musician, and he went to the United States with circus orchestra from Moscow, and he turned back, and I was maybe 6 years old, and he brought a lot of science of America, guns, cigarettes, these beautiful pictures, yes, some pictures, magazines, and again, it was like something from another planet. We didn't know that it's possible, and when we met with Sara at the summit in 1990, we decided that we can make some projects in Russia. At first, it was local projects which connect with the Titus Women's Movement until 2000, when I was a deputy director of this psyche, which is like NASA, the Institute. We worked with women's organizations across Russia. It was always volunteers for me and for our experts, but then, since 2000, I was invited to be the first director of Human Resource Department for a new Russian company, a huge company who produced Aluminium, Siberian Euro-Aluminium company. It was more than 60,000 employees in 20 plants which located in different regions of Russia. There, we started our new international project, which connects with addiction. You know, this problem of alcohol addiction, and drug addiction is a new problem for New Russia. Of course, we had drug addiction in Soviet time, but it was so local, and it was so much by control, because Soviet Union had very strong boards. FTP-istroika, and during Peristroika, when we opened our boards, it was good for people, but in the same time, we got all bad things which existed in the world, and it flew to us by any possible ways, like pornography, like bad movies, like bad products, and sometimes I tell to Sara that when I'm coming to the market, of course, I say that for me, it seems that all world weight when Russia will open the doors for everything what keeps the storeages maybe during 100 years, and now it's on our markets. May there always be sunshine, may there always be blue skies, may there always be sunshine, may there always be blue skies, may there always be summer, may there always be me, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be purple, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies, may there always be blue skies. That was, may there always be sunshine, performed there by Mary Knish, it's actually a song, the bass of which was written by a four-year-old boy back in 1928, four-year-old Russian boy, you're listening to an interview with Olga Bisolova and Sarah Harder, both members of the National Peace Foundation. One thing I wanted to explore with you, Olga, a number of people in this country have the opinion that the reason that the Soviet Union fell apart was because we had so many arms here, we won the arms race that made the Soviet Union collapse and give up because they couldn't match the number of bombs we had. Is that your impression from having lived within the Soviet Union? Is that what you thought happened? I really not inside of this subject, but I think that it's not the reason why Soviet Union collapsed. I think it's mostly connect with people's opinion about freedom, maybe strange, but you know, the first time it was very difficult for Soviet power, the first time when Soviet soldiers went to Berlin, and they suddenly looked that the life in Europe is not the same what they knew from Soviet propaganda. And when many soldiers, they return back to Soviet Union, I think it was the first sign that not everything what we are doing is the best in compare what we knew about Western countries, Western style of life, we knew that it's very bad life for children because we don't have kindergartens, we don't have free education, but we had it in Soviet Union. And the life of people here is very bad in comparing Soviet life. But suddenly the soldiers discover that it's not so, they see rich cities, they see many people, many families who lived wonderful without Soviet power. It was the first moment. And then when the global cooperation started in airspace area and scientists go to different countries and return back, suddenly more and more scientists, actors, writers went outside. And I think this, how can I say correct, this mass of new knowledge, new opinion, growth and growth and growth, and people become doubt. And I know about me, one of my friends, when I was 20, he studied Moscow University and then he went from one year to Poland, even not to America to Poland. And from Poland here sent to us, not sent, he went here on back for vacation, he branched to us magazines and some books, even in Russian, which we could not adhere because it was not published here. And he told about life there, and then he decided even to stay there and KGB and the moment kicked him back. Even for me, I grew up in very good families, very, very Soviet family. And I become doubt that our life is the best life. And I think many, many people started to think that maybe we need change, maybe we need another kind of life, maybe we need more open life. I want to be clear about this. Growing up, you weren't dissatisfied. You basically were happy with your life growing up. I think that's what I heard from you. Yes. Yes. You know, my father was the top manager of Big Main Call My Company in Soviet Union. And I grew up in this small city with two brothers, with my mother and my grandmother. And my father was enough families there. You know what it means, top manager in Soviet Union or in Russia, it's not what is here. It means that this person has responsibility not about employees when they are working, not about their life, about housing, about medical care, about kindergarten for them, about swimming pools and so on and so on. We had such structure and we still have such structure, but all social sources connect this enterprise. I remember that every evening, some poor people came to our home and talk with my father about their life and I saw this, and I think all my deep social volunteers' work was born from what I saw that time. It's strange maybe, but one time my father came and brought the book. It was a book which again couldn't buy Soviet time, but some priest gave it to him as present. Of course, the connection with priests was impossible to party members, but my father was enough top for to have some connections with people. In this book, called Three Hundred Years of Russian Tsar Ramana Family. And I opened this book, it was a huge book, many, many, many pages, and I opened this book and found the picture of the last Tsar's son, who was a boy, my ages, this time. And in this picture I saw the boy who was killed, I knew that he was killed, but I knew from the history of lessons that the family were killed because they were very dangerous. It was very dangerous to keep this family after a leg and came, but suddenly I remember this moment. When I look on this picture, I couldn't understand why this boy could be dangerous, why he was killed, that time I was maybe eight years old. It started my doubt about everything. I never was a dissident because my life really was very interesting in activity, but at the same time, what I want to tell, that even for me, which lived not in big city but in small city, this smell of open walls was in my nose, too. I think it was maybe the basic reason for a collapse. Of course, I am sure that we had economical reason, but even now, after my very good education, not only in technical university, but then in economical academia, I cannot understand the difference. In Soviet time, we had big tube of oil and all Soviet Union lived by this, selling this oil. Now, we have the same tube, but for this oil, it lives only small group of people. And I cannot understand. Now it's more and more active people start to think. Why we are so poor. Which brings me back to the National Peace Foundation and how you got connected with them. You said you were not a dissident when you were a young woman, you were pretty satisfied with your life, but you had the smell of freedom, the smell of this different way of living. Why did you become a peace activist of all things? And of course, I'm going to ask the same question to Sarah in a moment. Since Peter Struecken, we started to have conflicts, and I saw this conflict. And you know, the route of my father and my family came from Caucasus. My father was from North Sea City. And I knew from literature and from real life how different the life there in mountains were many different small nationality lives with different languages, and how it was difficult to bring peace there by Soviet time. But Soviet power broke this peace, but since Peter Struecken's conflict started. And I saw that it's something wrong in my life and in Soviet life. We really didn't see the difference between the scenario, who was from which family who was Jewish, who was Armenian, who was Russian, it was absolutely not important for me. But suddenly it become to be so important, you are from Georgia and you are from South Sea City. I didn't know that the difference cultured there, and there had not natural connection in one state. Suddenly we discover that Armenian and Azerbaijan, who always lived so close and so friendly, they become to be enemy. And I knew women from Azerbaijan and from Armenia, who started to tell about each other that they occupied the territory. And one part of this group said, okay, in 17th century, our families came to this part of Caucasus and it is our land. Another group started to say, but in 15th century, our family came to this. It was so strange, and I think it's absolutely a wrong position. And when I met Sara, I think she gave me the first knowledge about conflict resolution, and she invited me to participate in the first Transcope Crisis dialogue of women. And it was very important for me. I told by this meeting, by the one of the first meeting with this women from Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, that inside myself, I have so many nationalities. My mother, from Ukraine, my father, from the city, my Babushya is Russian, and my grandfather was from Poland, and how can I live inside myself? My soul is like whole country, but I try to find a way to live, because I see sometimes my behavior in his very causes, typical causes tradition, but sometimes it's very Russian. At my daughter, whose father is from Germany, she is even more complex. I try to find consensus between these different traditions in myself. It means we need to do the same for countries and for people who live in different countries. Well Sara, it sounds like you are part of Olga's transformation. What transformed you? I was an activist in the U.S. women's movement for 25 years, and came quite improbably as someone who lived in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I became a national leader. I was president of the American Association of University Women, which in the late 80s was a formidable organization, through that we created a Council of Presidents of National Women's Organizations, which still exists as the National Council of Women's Organizations. So I was very active in coalition building, bringing people from different organizations together to lobby and to determine their priorities and state capitals, and then to work together using their respective strengths to achieve those goals. So that was the work that I was principally involved in in the women's movement. My question was always about power. What is power? And I in fact created a term during the years that the feminization of poverty was a term very much in currency. I didn't like the term because it certainly represented women as victims, and I created the term the feminization of power. And for me, the feminization of power meant essentially looking at power, not as something that excluded or imposed, but in the metaphor, let's say, of electricity that turned on rural America or the photosynthesis that generates the growth in plants. It is the power that cannot in any way be dependent on a single person or a hierarchy. It only works when people come together and share the strength, regenerate one another's lapses in hope or belief or dreams, and can together agree upon a goal and figure out how to use our talents collectively. So in any case, that principle I guess had been the sort of the center of my work in women's organizations, and it was the Cold War that brought me into the role of peacemaking. As Olga had told you, I helped to co-chair something called the Soviet American Women's Summit in 1990, and it was held just before the summit of Bush and Gorbachev. It grew out of another organization, very strange one, called Women for Meaningful Summits that had been created some years before. It was women's organization. The first of all started taking out ads in the New York Times and the Washington Post and other big publications before the major summits of Reagan and Gorbachev and then Bush and Gorbachev saying, essentially, look you guys, here you are, you hold the fate of the world in your hands and you're struggling about this or that nuclear weapon which can blow us all up or clearly work on that, but there are so many other issues. In other words, make this a meaningful summit, so this organization, which was really another coalition of many Washington-based women's organizations that had international issues as part of their focus. It was under these auspices that I first went to the Soviet Union. It wasn't until 1989, but I happened there at a moment of history. Tiananmen Square happened in China while I was there and it had a big impact on people. I was invited by the Soviet Women's Committee with a group of women who represented both NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Alliance and the Warsaw Pact, which was its Soviet equivalent, and so there were women from 26 countries and we were there to speak about women, ecology and peace. But the other thing that happened just accidentally while we were there was the meeting that Gorbachev held with the Supreme Soviet, the first one where he told the truth about the reality of the Soviet Union or at least closer to the truth than Soviet citizens had ever before heard about the challenges that they faced ahead. And he made the mistake of saying at the end of his speech, "I'd like to hear from you what you think about this, if any of you have any reply, you're welcome to make it." And I asked you to only limit yourself to 20 minutes. Well, he was speaking from the Soviet experience where only one person spoke and the people in the audience nodded, you know, the people who were part of the congregation. But in this case, everyone had something to say, it was an amazing phenomenon because what had been planned to be a three-day Supreme Soviet meeting was stretching into its second week when we arrived in the Soviet Union. And every Russian that we could see was walking with a radio to his ear or looking inside a window to see the TV because they were hearing things that had never been spoken beyond the kitchen table. It was in this setting that the idea for our Soviet American Women's Summit was born. And in fact, we brought the first ideologically diverse delegation that ever left the Soviet Union to come to the United States, ideologically diverse because it was the Soviet Women's Committee, the one women's organization all the spoke of, that chose half the delegates and made it possible for them to get to the United States. And we insisted that the other half of the delegates be selected by people like Collette Schulman that Olga spoke about as her first American contact, women from America who had had a great deal of experience in the Soviet Union. And so we set before ourselves a rather modest task. We wanted to come up with a consensus document on what should happen at the next summit between Bush and Gorbachev that was going to happen one month later in Washington. What all we started with was a title from disarmament to daycare, Women's Vision for the 21st Century. And if you know, these summits are managed very, very carefully by Sherpas who do all the groundwork on both sides, figuring out what in fact can be agreed upon and what cannot be agreed upon, and then really it turns out that there might be one issue left that when the two presidents get together, they debate. They typically, in other words, are pretty much formalized. Well in our case, all we had was a title and the recognition to ourselves that we had a press conference scheduled three days later. And Isvestia signed up for it, Itar TAS signed up for it, all the major Soviet news agencies turned up for it. So suddenly the Soviet group, no matter how diverse it was, was determined that this had to be a success. And I think the same was true of the organizations on the American side. If it was going to be a press event, we couldn't say, well, we couldn't decide, folks. And so we created a consensus document with basically eight principles that dealt with the participation of women in high-level positions. It dealt with health rights, human rights. It dealt with ecological principles and standards. It dealt with the issue of non-military intervention into another country or another province, but military intervention simply should not be used. So it still looks, 20 plus years later, very impressive as a document. Actually when we look back on it, when we share it with other people, they say, well, gee, that still sounds like it would work. But it became clear to me that if we were, as our document claimed, the two remaining superpowers, that we really had a lot that we could and should learn from one another and a lot that we could do together, and as a matter of fact, another of our purposes, we met at the United Nations in New York, because one of our purposes was to try to figure out how these only two superpowers could work together to improve a lot of women around the world. So that was how we started. My first, I suppose, active peace building that Olga also mentioned was with the trans-caucasus women's dialogue. I'm not even sure how hooked into helping to start an Armenian women's organization here in the United States, and what they wanted to do was to work with Armenia, who was in an active war with Azerbaijan. And so we organized a meeting for women leaders in Armenia, and they objected to the fact that they had really invited women from their enemy Azerbaijan and from Georgia, and none of these women had been allowed in Armenia over the new borders that were set up. How could, in fact, any peace building happen if all the borders were so high and the fences so tall that no one could meet each other? So that was what led the National Peace Foundation to form the trans-caucasus women's dialogue, working in the South Caucasus, and we moved into work in the North Caucasus with another excellent women's group that we met on the way, women of the Don region, who became committed to dealing with the consequences of the war in Chechnya. And so Olga and I moved, actually we brought together the women that we'd worked with in the South Caucasus with people from the North Caucasus, and we've really managed to focus people, and we now not only work with women, not on differences, but in finding what they share in the way of problems. And once that discovery is made, once people discover how much they are like one another, and how much what they consider the major problem in their lives is like the major problem in the life of their "enemy." It is quite easy then to move to trust building activities and to ask people, now put your most pragmatic headpiece on and try to figure out what is a fundamental issue that we can address together that could make a real difference. Jesus, the bread we break, love is the river all in life is a chance we take when we make this earth our home, gonna make this earth our home. Feel the cool breeze blowing through the smoke and the heat, hear the gentle voices, and the marching feet singing call back the fire, draw the missiles down, and we'll call this earth our home, pieces, pieces, the bread we break, love is, love is the river all in life is a chance we take when we make this earth our home, gonna make this earth our home. Once you've got the melody down feel free to try some harmony, and don't be afraid of harmony, harmony is any note that your neighbor isn't singing. We have known the album, the power and pain we've seen people fall beneath the killing rain. If the mind still reasons and the soul remains it shall never be again. Jesus, the bread we break, love is, love is the river all in life is a chance we take when we make this earth our home, gonna make this earth our home. Peace grows from a tiny seed as the acorn grows into the tallest tree many years ago I heard the soldiers say when people want peace better get out of the way. Peace is the bread we break, love is the river all in life is a chance we take when we make this earth our home, gonna make this earth our home. Thank you all very much. That was "Peace Is" by Fred Small. Fred happens to be a Unitarian Minister amongst other things. We're listening to an interview with Sarah Harder, President of the National Peace Foundation and another National Peace Foundation member Olga Bosolova. I guess I've got a real important outstanding question. I guess it's not surprising Sarah considering your long-standing work with women and women's groups. You form these connections in Soviet Union with women. Still when it comes to war men are usually the ones who are at the helm. Are you making the inroads into this male population, these testosterone driven conflicts? Maybe you've gotten women so that they don't get at each other's throats but what about really affecting peace on a worldwide level? Have either of you seen significant changes in inroads into that culture of war? No, but for me peace is not a softheaded principle. It is not something that can be achieved easily and it's not going to be achieved easily as long as we have as many institutional structures both in the United States and still in Russia and everywhere else in the world that are in fact focused on war. So where do we choose to work? We choose to work with groups of people to work with them together to figure out solutions to those problems and I think what we're doing is not solving the issue of world peace. But what we are doing is to build and reinforce the democratic structures that help people to see that they can work with others to determine new ways of doing things and in fact those new ways can become new institutions, alternative institutions. I'm ultimately believed that it is solving those fundamental issues, those political, social, economic issues that is the basis for war. Our work in the Middle East now increasingly looks at those same issues. It is water that is the major issue in the Middle East and it is of course economic disparities and power disparities between Palestinians and Israelis. I do believe that the way we will ultimately get at these with volunteer workers and a small staff is in fact to try as much as we can to replicate ourselves. Once people have become involved in those issues at a local level we can see that at least in communities there is a greater sense of hope, of possibility and of peaceful connection with one another. Because for these massive institutional structures the United States and its military industrial complex which has only become more entrenched and rigid with the Iraq War and with the Soviet administrative structure that still exists in Russia today under another name, they call it democracy, I can't see at this point that we can change this. In our work we can see change and we can see people who believe in themselves and believe in possibilities and hope to make their lives different and who learn through our work with diverse groups to be more tolerant of one another, learn to understand that an Armenian and an Azeri have a lot to offer and to bring women from Beslan together with women from Russia or women from Chechnya together with Russia. Olga, I'm used to thinking that religions and spiritual movements in the United States are a significant force behind many of the positive changes that take place as well as some of the negative ones. I don't think that that is so clearly the case where you come from. I'm assuming you grew up non-religiously but I could be wrong. Does that play much role in your society there now? A religion plays more and more big role in Russia. Russian Orthodox Church is very strong and it's really a place, very big role. Many new churches, they build it across Russia and now in each small village where we have priests and people who are coming to church and try to find help there, but I hate it. You know, it is like a so strange term from the atheism that nobody must don't believe in church, to religion when everybody must believe. I don't want to talk about God and religion but when we are talking about Russian Orthodox Church, it's very strong political and economical structure which I think use people for to be more strong politically, more strong economically, more rich. And I don't see that give real support or real help or real changes in human lives. Of course, I don't talk about several people who are priests who are very honest and very deep religion and very bad. In common I think it's a structure, it is a part of government structure who don't respect real human rights and the choices of people. Unfortunately, maybe I'm wrong because I really not religion in this man. You see, I am born across and when I was a child I was baptized. Of course my father didn't know it because it was impossible for him to know that but my grandmother didn't for me because she was enough religion for to believe that child for future life needs to be baptized. Maybe I'm wrong and I apologize if I'm wrong about this, that what I see is the political structure of all this government game which is going now in Russia. I'm just checking this to make sure that I do understand the influence you see of religion in your area is that the Russian Orthodox Church is really a power structure, it gathers wealth and it's not really making a positive difference in people's life at least on the material plane. Again, we need to talk Russia so big, it's very big. For instance, in the lost region where you are all when you are working. I think Wadika Vikanti who is the head of the regional church, he started the social service for poor people and he accepted that addicted people needs help and he created a special center for such people and I think it's very positive but I see it, it's only in one region and maybe it's depend from this great person, the head of the church in common what I see by TV, I cannot say that some positive changes initiated by Orthodox Church. They declare only we were the only one right religion for all people and for me it's Bolsheviks, it's strange but you know not Communists but Bolsheviks, Bolsheviks who were absolutely believed that all that they are a right party for all population. What's your experience with this is a positive or negative fourths Sarah, particularly you've been a woman's activist for much of your life and certainly Catholic Church and many other religions have worked very hard to hold women down over the centuries. Have you received positive or negative effects and support from religious establishment? I grew up a Roman Catholic, I left the church and became an Episcopalian and I have since moving here to Wisconsin become a Unitarian. I find what I have done personally is to move from religions that at the time I was involved with them were very restrictive in allowing people to make choices and very prescriptive in what was right and what was wrong. I find in my relationship with the Unitarian Fellowship here very positive, I like the social activism that is at its center, I like the non-judgmental attitude, the teaching of tolerance, the honesty with which it approaches the education of children. I'm not an every Sunday goer but I'm a continued supporter of the Unitarian Fellowship here and the Unitarian faith in the country. As far as our work in peace building, we have found that there are many what I would call mainstream Protestant churches that have been great allies for our work, the United Methodists, the Church of Christ, many such churches, the National Council of Churches. On the other hand, of course, when religion moves to the totally prescriptive, we are the only one mode, I think it becomes a very destructive force and certainly that has been the case. I think for a large part in Russia I agree with Olga there. The Russian Orthodox Church has done everything it can to eliminate the possibility of competitors. They even have laws now that restrict proselytizing by any faith that was not a part of for a hundred years past or something. They're doing all that they can to restrict that. On the other hand, I would say that we find in the people that we work with that evangelical Protestant faiths are growing quite against the wishes of the Russian Orthodox Church. Although one of the interesting things that we've done is to bring together leaders of addiction centers run by recovering addicts with Orthodox priests who are also running treatment centers. So again, I think it proves to us further that to the extent that you can bring people together around a common interest, the differences are minimized and the rigid institutional do's and don'ts become much less important than what can we do together. Maybe one more thing about the Russian Orthodox Church. I understood now when I'm talking with you why I don't like it because, you know, in this religion, the role of women is very special. It's the role of wife and mother at home and new Russian Orthodox Church. I leave this role and talk about this very much because the population of Russian people raise down and women must don't try to be leaders in political or economical, but they must what they call return back to family. But I think it's absolutely a wrong message, wrong and even cynical. Mostly families cannot do it because it's impossible to live for the salary of one person in family. I've kept you a pretty long time already and I'm sure we all need to move on, but I think it would be unfortunate if I went away without giving people some idea of how to contact you and some of the programs they might get active in. You've got programs certainly in Asia and Russia, you've got stuff in the Middle East. I think you just got a grant from the State Department to do some resolution and bringing people together there. You've got stuff going in Africa. So how do people get involved in this if they care about kind of developing peace from the bottom up? How do they get connected with you and can they go off next year and help out in some way? Well, the principle of the National Peace Foundation when we call ourselves building foundations for peace, I think we are speaking of the kind of foundations that Olga and I are speaking of. And we don't believe in a top-down structure. What we try to do is to bring together to inform and engage people who believe themselves to be activists and who want to do something real about peace. The National Peace Foundation has a website, of course, it's www.nationalpeace.org. And for our Middle Eastern programs, I would suggest another website, kathysoulton.org, because Kathy, who is a member of our board of directors, has written two recent books on the Middle East, one on Lebanon, one on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and it is she who has inspired us to do the broader work. Olga, I know you're here visiting with a friend and maybe doing some of your work. How much longer are you likely to be here, Olga? One more week here, and then I will return. And Sarah, where do you go from here? As the president of the National Peace Foundation, does this mean you have meetings all over the world? No, we are a National Peace Foundation and our bases in Washington, D.C., and I will be traveling there in the near future to work on our organizational business. But I will be returning to Russia in September. I generally work there about four months out of each year. As a volunteer, I am myself retired from the University of Wisconsin, and I feel a real responsibility, an absolute responsibility, to use my time constructively and productively for others. And it also happens to be the greatest fun I've ever had in the world. Well, doing work for peace as fun certainly sounds like a noble aspiration. Thanks to both of you, Olga and Sarah. Bye, Siba. Thank you. It's been a great pleasure. Last night I had the strangest dream I'd never dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. I dreamed I saw a mighty room, the room was full of men. And the paper they were signing said they'd never fight again. And when the paper was all signed and a million copies made, they all joined hands and bowed their heads, and grateful prayers were prayed. And the people in the streets below were dancing round and round. And swords and guns and uniformed were scattered on the ground. Last night I had the strangest dream I'd never dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. I dreamed I saw a mighty room, the room was full of men. And the paper they were signing said they'd never fight again. Last night I had the strangest dream I'd never dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. That was Pete Seger and last night I had the strangest dream. You've been listening to an interview with Sarah Harder and Olga Basolova of the National Peace Foundation. You can listen to this program and other programs via my website, northernspiritradio.org. And find helpful information on that site as well. 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. Let's make this new. [Music]