Inspiring: Healing the War Machine Media Articles
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When the bell rings at Jerusalem's Hand in Hand school, you hear something that's not common in Israel: the sound of young people's voices rising together in laughter and conversation in both Hebrew and Arabic. Israeli society is largely segregated. The separation begins at kindergarten, when Jewish and Arab children are sent to different schools and experience completely separate education "tracks" or systems. "Arabs go to Arab schools in their neighborhoods and Jews go to Jewish schools in the areas where they live," says Nour Younis, events manager for Hand in Hand. Hand in Hand [was] founded in 1998 by a group of parents who wanted their children to grow up differently. What began as two kindergarten classes in Jerusalem and Galilee has now become six campuses nationwide, with some 2,000 students. The school's eventual goal is to create a fifth track of education within the Israeli school system. Today there are four options: Arab schools and three Jewish tracks — secular, religious and ultra-Orthodox. The students at Hand in Hand campuses are around 60% Arab and 40% Jewish. There is a waiting list of Arab children who would like to attend. Since Oct. 7 ... this school has become a rare oasis of freedom for Palestinians who say they can be harassed or worse for expressing their anguish over the war. "For our students, this is a safe place, a safe environment," says [school vice principal Engie] Wattad.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
Duberney López Martinéz was only 13 when he joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2003. Today, Duberney, 33, lives with his wife and young son after spending more than a decade fighting in the FARC 32nd Front and two years in jail. As part of his reintegration into society ... Duberney got involved in the ecological restoration of the Colombian Amazon. He and another 23 ex-FARC members are promoting the ecological restoration of the Colombian Amazon. The Communitarian Multiactive Cooperative of the Common (Comuccom) ... aims to plant and care for 1 million native trees in order to counteract deforestation from illegal gold mining, cattle ranching, coca-growing and illegal logging. Despite the peace agreement, the conflict is still present in daily lives and memories, according to Kristina Lyons, professor of anthropology ... who has been working in the region. “In Putumayo, armed conflict and antidrug policies heavily impacted bonds among people, communities and their relations with the region’s ecosystems,” Lyons [said]. “The ecological restoration of the Amazon has deep significance for healing relations between humans ruptured by the conflict and among people and their territories. It can be understood as a form of reparation for war crimes and other kinds of violence in the wake of the peace agreements.” “To me, restoring the Amazon is the same process needed for healing the heart of a person,” [said Aroca Sanchez with Comuccom].
Note: Read how tourists in Colombia can now take jungle hikes with ex-FARC guerilla guides. Explore more positive stories like this about healing the war machine.
Tim Phillips, a veteran conflict-resolution expert, helped negotiate some of the most fraught conflicts in modern history — ceasefires of religious clashes in Northern Ireland and the establishment of what became South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid. Defusing an escalating situation ... first requires releasing a brain hijacked by defensive emotion. Phillips says it means saying to your opponent, for example: "I understand how important this is to you; I understand this is core to your identity and your community, and I respect your sacred values." It means reflecting your opponent's humanity back to them. A similar approach, he says, can help reduce toxic polarization. It's effective because in the heat of argument, people tend to demonize one another; counteracting that can neutralize assumptions of negative intent. Phillips says he's seen people emotionally disarm the opposition in a disagreement simply by recognizing their humanity. It can bring together fierce adversaries, and change history. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black congresswoman in the U.S., was battling for the Democratic presidential nomination with political rival ... George Wallace, a fierce segregationist. After he was shot in an attempted assassination, Chisholm visited him in the hospital and prayed at his bedside. "Wallace's daughter later said that that gesture of compassion completely changed her father," Phillips says. Wallace reportedly wept openly, and shifted his stance on racial segregation.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
They are both bereaved fathers, of young daughters. Somehow, against the odds, both have resisted the urge for vengeance. Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, were once united by their anger and grief. Elhanan lost his 14-year-old daughter Smadar when she was killed in a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 1997. Aramin's daughter Abir was 10 when she was shot in the head and killed in 2007 by a bullet fired by an Israeli soldier as she stood outside her school with some classmates. Now they are close friends, refer to one another as "my brother" and share the belief that no amount of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians will lead to peace, just more killing in a "circle of blood." With Israel embroiled in a war with Hamas ... "We have the moral authority to tell people this is not the way," said Elhanan, 74, a former solider in the Israeli army whose father was an Auschwitz survivor. Elhanan has said he still struggles to explain his conversion to a "peace warrior." It coincided with a meeting of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families he was invited to by Yitzhak Frankenthal, one of the co-founders of the Parents Circle. "I saw an amazing spectacle. Something completely new to me," Elhanan said. "I saw Arabs getting off the buses, bereaved Palestinian families: men, women and children, coming towards me, greeting me for peace, hugging me and crying with me. ... From that day on ... I got a reason to get out of bed in the morning." For Aramin, the journey to nonviolence began as he was being beaten by Israeli prison guards. One day ... he was stripped naked and beaten until he could hardly stand. "As I was being beaten, I remembered a movie I’d seen the year before about the Holocaust. At the time I’d been happy that Hitler had killed 6 million Jews," Aramin has previously recalled. "But some minutes into the movie, I found myself crying and feeling angry that the Jews were being herded into gas chambers without fighting back," he said. "It was the first time I felt empathy."
Note: War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.
While the sad reality of violence and division dominates the media, countless grassroots organizations are working tirelessly to bring peace and reconciliation to the Israel-Palestine conflict. As the region continues to be ravaged by violence, Standing Together, Israel’s largest Arab-Jewish grassroots organization, brings together Jewish and Palestinian volunteers. They labor relentlessly to assist victims of continuous violence while also campaigning for peace, equality, social justice, and climate justice. Their message is clear: the future they envision is one of peace, Israeli and Palestinian independence, full equality, and environmental justice. The Parents Circle – Families Forum, which includes over 600 families who have lost loved ones in the conflict, is a symbol of reconciliation. This joint Israeli-Palestinian organization encourages conversation and reconciliation through education, public gatherings, and media participation, presenting a ray of hope for a future of coexistence. Integrated schools in Israel, where Jewish and Palestinian children attend classes together, serve as an example of a more inclusive future. Hand in Hand promotes understanding by bringing parents together for debate and shared study of Hebrew and Arabic. They are sowing seeds of oneness. Jerusalem Peacebuilders brings together Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans with the goal of developing tomorrow’s leaders. Their work highlights the futility of violent war and the critical need for nonviolence.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
In 1968, at the age of 42, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton sat down to write Death in Life, a book about his experiences interviewing survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the course of his career, Lifton studied not only survivors of the atomic bombings but Auschwitz survivors, Vietnam war veterans and people who'd been subjected to repression by the Chinese government. The COVID pandemic prompted him to reflect on what he'd learned about mass trauma and resilience – that telling stories about trauma, and even trying to influence policy, can often help people recover. Now 97, Lifton has just published his 13th book, Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the Covid-19 Pandemic. "I interviewed people who had undergone the most extreme kind of trauma and victimization," [said Lifton]. "And yet some of the very same people who had so suffered from trauma have shown what I call "survivor wisdom" — they transformed themselves from helpless victims to agents of survival. If ... storytelling can include the transformation from the helpless victim to the life-enhancing survivor, then the storytelling is crucial. The storytelling we most encourage is that kind that enables the formerly helpless victim to be transformed in the story, to transform himself or herself, collectively transform themselves into life-affirming survivors. That's the key transformation, and that's the story we [listeners] seek to help them achieve."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
In Liberia, two brutal civil wars have produced a generation of traumatised young men. Anthony Kamara likes to use the analogy of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. It’s an old story, he admits, but useful in reaching through the years of compounded shame that form the exterior skin of Liberia’s lost and marginalised young men. “I tell the men that their true colours are there, hidden within them,” says Kamara, 32, a former street drug user and a facilitator for a radical Liberian mental health nonprofit Network for Empowerment and Programme Initiatives (Nepi). Nepi targets Liberia’s most marginalised men – street dwellers, petty criminals, chronic drug users: traumatised ex-combatants and their sons with anger issues and little to live for – in an effort to ripple benefits across Liberia’s population, 68% of whom are living on less than $1.90 (£1.60) a day. Nepi offers a tailored combination of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and cash transfers to young people who are at the highest risk for violent behaviour, in a programme called Sustainable Transformation of Youth in Liberia (Styl). Styl has since helped tens of thousands of young men in Liberia, with studies on the project finding that men receiving therapy with cash were half as likely as a control group to engage in antisocial behaviours, with beneficial impacts concentrated in the highest-risk men.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
By the time the sun casts its first beams on war-ravaged Yemen, hundreds of men will have taken their positions across the park, and the workout begins. Enthusiastic chants of “Ahsan Fareek”, or “Best Team”, boom across the park as members of this daily, free, open-to-all sports club begin a set of 33 exercises designed to work the whole body. For the next hour, they temporarily put aside the stressors they’ve accumulated from the devastating eight-year civil war that has claimed 377,000 lives, touching their toes, standing on one leg and reaching for the sky. By 6.30am the crowd disperses, and everyone goes about their day, rejuvenated and energized, ready to meet again the following morning. “It is a sports club for everyone, but it’s particularly vital for the elderly, who suffer from illnesses and anxiety and for whom treatment is unaffordable,” says Najy Abu Hatem, co-founder of the initiative. “Being part of Best Team lifts their morale and gives them free exercise classes in a healthy and social setting.” In a country of 33 million people, there are only 59 psychiatrists – one psychiatrist per 500,000 people – and the total number of mental health workers is just 304. Although Best Team can hardly tackle this huge, ongoing mental health crisis, the twin benefits it provides of camaraderie and physical exercise – under the guise of a more socially acceptable men’s sports club – is nonetheless quietly improving people’s mental wellbeing across the capital and beyond.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
A former U.S. Special Forces officer and ordained Christian minister, [Dave Eubank] ... is a diehard humanitarian who has risked his life time and again to help the most vulnerable in a forsaken place that most Americans can’t find on a map. [He] started the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) in the late 1990s to provide medical care and aid to people resisting the Southeast Asian nation’s military junta, a brutal dictatorship that has crushed dissent and oppressed ethnic minorities for seven decades in what is the world’s longest-running civil war. Eubank [leads] an all-volunteer staff of ethnic minorities and foreigners — many of them ex-military, teachers, students, engineers, poets, and shopkeepers — working on the front line. On missions, the Rangers bring gifts and entertainment to brighten the lives of the children living in harm’s way. With his own wife and kids in tow, Eubank set FBR apart with a relentless commitment to go places other humanitarian groups would not. And that’s built FBR into a movement that fields teams and tracks human-rights abuses across Burma’s front lines and beyond, from northern Syria to Sudan. “You could be a murderer. You only have to say ‘I don’t think that’s the best behavior, and I’m trying not to do those things,’ and then you can join us,” [Eubank] says, adding that FBR includes atheists, agnostics, and spirit worshipers. Eubank insists that love is the force that drives him to take extreme risks, and also what makes FBR so effective. “[You will] run forward through the bullets, even if you don’t know the person you’re trying to save,” he says. “If I’m shot and I’m bleeding out on the trail and dying and I can’t see my wife and kids again — if I’m not doing that for love, what a disaster.”
Note: Check out their powerful work in action on their Youtube channel. The Free Burma Rangers are featured in our latest video on healing the war machine.
The U.S. military is facing its worst recruitment crisis since the end of the Vietnam War. We Are Not Your Soldiers is a project of New York City-based nonprofit World Can’t Wait. The organization sends military veterans into schools to share honest stories of the harm they have caused and suffered. In doing so, they hope to prevent young people from signing up.Susan Cushman is a professor at Nassau Community College ... where military recruiters have a heavy presence. She hosts veterans from We Are Not Your Soldiers to help her students “think about alternative ways to achieve an education and get a pension and get a job and travel, without feeling the only option is to join the military.” In order to counter both the narrative and incentives that military recruiters offer young people, veterans try to share the truth about traumatic personal experiences as well as practical information. In addition to the military’s preparedness for counter-recruitment, there’s also the issue of simple math. The Pentagon has a multibillion-dollar budget for recruiting alone. By contrast, We Are Not Your Soldiers has an annual budget of $25,000. With these challenges in mind, [the nonprofit] NNOMY produced a video called “Before You Enlist!” The 16-minute video seeks to lay out a case against military service that preempts the military’s psychological recruitment tactics. With veteran stories and statistics, the video debunks perks, such as “free education” and job training, that the military uses to appeal to potential recruits.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
Suicides across the active duty U.S. military decreased over the past 18 months, driven by sharp drops in the Air Force and Marine Corps last year and a similar decline among Army soldiers during the first six months of this year, according to a new Pentagon report. The numbers show a dramatic reversal of what has been a fairly steady increase in recent years. The shift follows increased attention by senior military leaders and an array of new programs aimed at addressing what has been a persistent problem in all the services. The numbers provide a glimmer of hope that some of the recent changes — which range from required counseling visits to stress relief education and recreational outings — may be working. According to the data, the number of suicides in the Air Force and Marine Corp dropped by more than 30 percent in 2021 compared with 2020, and the Navy saw a 10 percent decline. The Army saw a similar 30 percent decrease during the first six months of this year, compared with the same time period last year. The National Guard and the Reserves both saw a small dip in suicides, from 121 in 2020 to 119 in 2021. And there were also fewer Guard deaths in the first half of 2022, compared with last year. The Guard has worked over the last year to reduce suicides through outreach and other changes, including policies to destigmatize getting mental health help and a program that provides firearms locks for service members who keep weapons at home.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
In 2018, the military, struggling to meet enlistment goals, began invading gaming communities as part of a larger, digital-first strategy. Recruiters who had once stalked school assemblies and shopping malls began streaming games on social media and competing in tournaments to court new enlistees online. Since then, the military’s online recruiting strategy has expanded to the Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch, which attracts 140 million active users per month. The Army, Navy, and Air Force churn out hours of Twitch content per week, including streams of popular first-person-shooter games. The Armed Forces claim their gamers ... aren’t technically recruiters. But anti-war advocates say they might as well be. To counter this, [Marine veteran Chris] Velazquez became a community developer for Gamers for Peace (GFP), the first peace organization formed to mirror the military’s online recruiting practices: While streaming popular games like Halo and Rocket League, its members—many of them veterans—offer career advice and mentorship to teens, talk politics, and discuss the realities of war. They also share information about online military recruitment tactics at in-person gaming conventions such as PAX Unplugged. These initiatives, members say, give prospective recruits the tools and knowledge to see other options and reconsider enlisting. The group has already accrued nearly 600 Twitch followers as well as 400 members on the popular messaging service Discord.
Note: The latest US Air Force recruitment tool is a video game that allows players to receive in-game medals and achievements for drone bombing Iraqis and Afghans. For more on this topic, read an article we've summarized about how one of the best-selling video games, Call of Duty, is a carefully constructed piece of military propaganda.
At the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 146 years ago, my ancestors defeated the US army’s Seventh Cavalry led by George Armstrong Custer, who had previously massacred Cheyenne people. I want to share with you the story of how my people and my family survived through generations – despite many attempts to exterminate us. We are peace chiefs – we never provoke war, our main role is to steward our people and way of life. My father’s grandmother, Quill Dress Woman ... witnessed Cheyenne matriarchs push sewing awls into Custer’s ears so that next lifetime he would listen. They did this because after the Washita massacre in 1868, where Custer had attacked a peaceful Cheyenne camp resulting in the killing of many women and children, our Cheyenne chiefs still made peace with him in a sacred pipe ceremony. The Creator wants us to love each other. Looking at the wars, mass shootings and genocides happening around the world right now, and reading about what has been done to my people above, you might ask: how can people do this to each other? In 1946, Albert Einstein made a call to “let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels”. We will never end war and genocide unless we change the mindset that created it. War cannot defeat war, only love can stop war. My love and my forgiveness do not depend on you. I want to forgive you for what you have done to my people, the genocide and the eradication process. This might be our last chance to put an end to this genocidal and suicidal mindset. I love you, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Note: This article was written by Heove ve 'keso (Yellowbird), Chief Phillip Whiteman Jr, traditional Northern Cheyenne Chief. He is part of an organization, Yellowbird Lifeways, that organizes a run in which Cheyenne children follow the footsteps of their ancestors. During this event, they run 400 miles across four states, enduring the harsh conditions of winter. Explore more positive stories like this about healing the war machine.
To heal you must love - so believes a woman who not only forgave the man who killed her husband 28 years ago during Rwanda's genocide, but allowed his daughter to marry her son. Bernadette Mukakabera has been telling her story as part of continuing efforts by the Catholic Church to bring reconciliation to a society torn apart in 1994 when some 800,000 people were slaughtered in 100 days. "Our children had nothing to do with what happened. They just fell in love and nothing should stop people from loving each other," Bernadette told the BBC. [In 1994] thousands of Hutus ... began well organised killings - turning on their Tutsi neighbours. One of these was Gratien Nyaminani, whose family lived next to Bernadette's. After the massacres ended, with a Tutsi rebel group taking power, hundreds of thousands of people accused of involvement in the killings were detained. Gratien was taken into custody and eventually tried by one of the community courts, known as gacaca, set up to deal with genocide suspects. At these weekly hearings, communities were given a chance to face the accused and both hear and give evidence about what really happened - and how it happened. The final reconciliation happens in public where the accused and the victim stand together. The victim stretches their hands towards the accused as a sign of forgiveness. In 2004, Gratien told Bernadette how he had killed her husband and apologised - and at the same hearing she chose to forgive him. This meant that he did not have to serve a 19-year jail term, but a two-year community service sentence instead.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
Each link of that paper trail carries a handwritten message of love and kindness. These 360,000 chain links were created with used paper — homework assignments, old tests, artwork, paper bags, cereal boxes — by students from schools in all 50 U.S. states and on all continents. You get the gist of this colossal undertaking by Kids for Peace, a global nonprofit based in Carlsbad. Instead of stretching the paper chain from Carlsbad’s Pacific Rim Elementary School to Westfield UTC, however, they arranged the strands into a giant heart on the football field. This paper chain project, more than 18 months in the making, came to fruition on Nov. 13, World Kindness Day. “It was started because of the pandemic,” explains Jill McManigal ... who co-founded and heads Kids for Peace. Students, isolated for months at home, needed to find ways to connect and to remain optimistic during this uncertain time, she says. “By doing this paper chain, they were symbolically connected.” The recycled paper “love links” were written in several languages, including Chinese, Farsi, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swahili and Tagalog. One message read “love” in Braille. Messages sent from other states and from abroad were stapled and assembled into chains by local student volunteers. Among thoughts shared were: “You’re loved,” “Kindness matters,” “Have faith,” Care for each other,” “Have a good day,” “All we need is hope,” “Stay Strong!,” “Be the source of someone’s joy” and “Learn to dance in the rain.”
Note: Don't miss the pictures of this incredible event at the link above. Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.
Ten days after 9/11, Rais Bhuiyan was shot at point blank range by a white supremacist. The near-death experience inspired him to set up World Without Hate, dedicated to breaking the cycles of violence. "As a result of the shooting, I ... lost my home, my job, my sense of security and my fiance," [said Bhuiyan]. "I focused on rebuilding my life slowly getting into restaurant working as a waiter. Many kind and caring Americans came forward to help redo my life. Forgiving my attacker was a multiple-step process. I realized by executing him we were simply losing human life without dealing with the root cause. I began to see him as a human being like me, not just as a killer. And I remember what it feels like to be on the brink the death, begging to God for a second chance. I learned about the verse in the Holy Koran chapter 5, verse 32 where it says that saving a life is like saving the entire mankind and taking a life is like taking the life of entire mankind. I was extremely convinced I needed to go the extra mile to save the life of the man. When we launched our global campaign to save the life of my attacker he heard from his lawyer that’s one of his victims was running a campaign to save his life. And he told his lawyer, I do not believe it, I never said sorry, I never apologized and destroyed their lives, especially his life, and now he forgave me and is running a campaign to save my life, he was released to tears, he said I don’t deserve that, I’m someone unforgivable. He wrote a letter to me from death row and in one paragraph this is what he said, that my stepfather taught me some lessons that I should have never learned. So when he learned about our campaign he went to tremendous transformation and talked about world peace, mercy, justice, peace, hate crimes and how he was wrong, what went wrong in his life, and how he ended up killing people. He was in peace before he was executed."
Note: Watch Bhuiyan's powerful 17-min PBS interview. For more, watch our latest 20-min video on what can transform a divided world, where you’ll hear the powerful words and stories from those at the edge of death, leaders who reached across deep divides, and even a former neo-Nazi who left hate. Explore more positive stories like this on human interest stories and near-death experiences.
The story of two enemies cuts through the darkness. It begins on a battlefield in the Iran-Iraq war, and ends 20 years later in a waiting room in Vancouver. The Iran-Iraq war began in 1980, and ended eight years later. It was the longest conventional war of the 20th century, claiming at least a million casualties. Najah Aboud was nearly one of them. Najah was severely wounded. He crawled off to a bunker, where he saw corpses from both sides and prepared himself to die. Zahed Haftlang ... was assigned as a medic. After the Iranians recaptured Khorramshahr in May 1982, Zahed was ordered to go into the bunkers and treat wounded countrymen. It was then that he ... spotted Najah near the back. Both men were suspicious of each other. Zahed thought Najah's body might be booby-trapped. Najah thought Zahed might kill him. Then Zahed reached into Najah's breast pocket and pulled out a photograph. It showed Najah, with a beautiful woman, and infant son. It was at that very moment that Zahed decided to save Najah's life, even though it meant risking his own. Najah was taken to a prisoner of war camp, where he'd remain in unspeakable conditions for the next 17 years. While reading magazines in [a Vancouver] waiting room, Zahed noticed the door open as another man entered the room. The two men erupted into shouts, hugs, kisses and tears. Their spectacular reunion happened two decades years after the battle of Khorramshahr and on the other side of the world. "Najah is like my family … he really is my angel, because he gave me life. After he got a new chance at life, he gave me a new chance at life. He is the dearest and most precious thing in the entire world to me."
Note: Don’t miss the powerful 16-min documentary about Zahed and Najah. Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
Lual Mayen sits in a modern office space, set in a trendy Washington, D.C., neighborhood. As a newborn in his parents arms, Mayen endured a 225-mile trek from his war-torn home in South Sudan to a refugee camp in Northern Uganda. Mayen was born into war, but his mission is peace. Now 24 years old, he is a video game developer residing in the United States, leading his own company and using the experiences from his past to inform his products: games aimed at peace-building and conflict resolution. He created the first version of Salaam, which means peace in Arabic, while still living as a refugee. In the games new version, players adopt the role of a refugee who must flee falling bombs, find water and gain energy points to ensure the characters survival as the players country journeys from a war-torn present into a peaceful existence. If the players character runs out of energy, the player is prompted to purchase more food, water, and medicine for their character with real-world money. The funds go beyond the game to benefit a living refugee through Junubs partnerships with various NGOs. Mayen is aiming to have Salaam ready to launch in December, determined to grow the category of social impact gaming to give back to his community. Peace is something that is built over time, Mayen said. Its not about people coming together and signing cease-fires and so on. Its a generation of change. Its a change of mindset. Its a change of attitude toward each other."
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It happened 25 years ago - up to 800,000 people in Rwanda killed - mostly from the minority Tutsi community, all of that over the course of just a hundred days. Today the hundreds of thousands of people who carried out those killings live among their victims. Journalist and author Philip Gourevitch has witnessed the unique way Rwandans have defined and navigated forgiveness after the massacre. There was a lot of agency in the local level. And the experience of the genocide was extremely localized. People were killed by neighbors. It was intimate. They knew each other. And to simply ignore that wouldn't work. In order to navigate the aftermath of the genocide, the Rwandan government set up this nationwide reconciliation process. So they set up a system of community courts - without lawyers - to sort of repurpose a system that really had only been used for small claims mitigation in traditional Rwanda, called gacaca, and have open, communal - what we might call a town hall - format for trials. And then the idea was to hold people accountable and have a system of punishment. And this system banked very heavily on encouraging confession and rewarding it. But the confessions were supposed to be also verified by the community. The motto of the gacaca courts was, truth heals. Forgiveness doesn't require trust. Forgiveness simply means letting go of the idea of getting even, forgoing the idea of revenge. Right? Now, even that's a big ask. But it means accepting coexistence. There's never been as comprehensive a reckoning with such communal violence or mass atrocity. It was an ongoing, multi-year confrontation with the past in the communities.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
To casual observers of either military service or the practice of yoga, the path from Oorah to Om may not seem obvious. But the intersection of yogi and veteran is natural if unexpected. Many members of the military now often include yoga ... as an element of their workout routine, and veterans turn to the practice for therapeutic applications. The Department of Veterans Affairs has successfully used yoga to help treat opioid addiction and post-traumatic stress. A lot of vets have post-traumatic stress, said Thierry Chiapello, who served in the Marines and now teaches yoga at the National Defense University in Washington. By lengthening the exhalation of breath, this gets people out of those fight-or-flight instincts that drain you, he continued, putting them in a mode of rest and recovery that definitely is associated with less aggressive behaviors. Christian Allaire experiences the service-driven life of yoga through his work for the Veterans Yoga Project, which provides yoga to roughly 1,000 veterans and their families per week as well as trains prospective teachers. We will have four or five people in a conference room at a V.A., he said. There might be an Iraq war vet in his 20s, a Korean War vet in his 80s, some can barely move, some may be missing limbs and the teachers job is to create space. Maybe all they can do is raise their hands above their heads, but we are creating a ritual.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
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