Wednesday, April 26, 2017

The House of Reconciliation and Peace Education

The Emmaus Lutheran Church in the city of Medellin has launched a very exciting ministry: The House of Reconciliation and Peace Education. This last Saturday, April 22, I was able to accompany the inauguration of the initial program of the House of Reconciliation and Peace Education, which is a certificate course called “Conflict, Justice and Reconciliation”. The participants in the course will meet every other Saturday from now until November and study together issues regarding the Colombian conflict, human rights, resolving interpersonal conflicts, peace-building and reconciliation. Here is a link to the website, for those who know Spanish.

This first day of the course, we were grateful for the talk given by Oscar Castaño from the Sabaneta University in Medellin regarding the different dimensions of the Colombian conflict and the fundamental concepts of the peace process.

Oscar Castaño from the Sabaneta University, giving a very important talk on the peace process in Colombia. Photo by Curtis.
The human rights program will go to Medellin three more times this year to accompany the process of this certificate course, helping to lead some discussions and activities as well as design material for the participants.

Angelica Oquendo (member of Emmaus Lutheran Church, and participant in the certificate course) putting together a tree of conflict, The activity was to find examples of conflict in the newspapers, put them as the leaves and branches (consequences or products) of the conflict; then identify the central problems (trunk) leading to these consequences; and finally to identify the root causes of these problems (roots of the tree). Photo by Curtis Kline.
Gloria (left) and Brenda explaining their tree of conflict. The news articles had to do with conflicts over economic issues in Colombia; the trunk (central problem leading to this news) says: Inequality, Injustice, Competition and Negativity. The roots of theses issues were identified as: Indifference, Fear, Inequity, Selfishness, Intolerance and Ambition.