From an undisclosed place and time--#1

I'm writing from a place I need to keep undisclosed and at a time I'll not specify.

A friend and I were greeted by our local hosts, and we quickly traveled to a community that had been torn apart by a terrible outbreak of ethnic violence in which vigilante gangs of men from one ethnic group systematically attacked communities of a rival ethnic group in the city while the police and army did nothing. The death toll was horrifically high, and many thousands of people were displaced.

A local pastor took us on a tour of the two major neighborhoods which were targeted in the "war" (the pastor's term). Huge stretches of houses were burned and demolished. The destroyed neighborhoods had been fairly prosperous. Now many people live in UN tents inside their old compounds or small one-room homes. Some places are completely abandoned. Many UN agencies are working here; we saw a massive World Food Programme storage facility at the city airport to assist the displaced people along with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees tents.

The pastor, who is not from the targeted ethnic group, took us to visit some personal friends who are from that group. We talked to two adult sisters. They had hidden in their basement, a small dirt cellar, but their house was burned down around them. The mother and uncle were killed, but the sisters got out. One sister was then caught outside and was severely injured on the head. Her attackers left her for dead in the street. The sisters showed us the hole in the ground with charred debris where their mother died. They showed us documents and photos of their loved ones. They could only gather their mother's bones recently, months after the attack. Piles of bones had been left in the morgue unidentified and all mixed together. I asked if I could pray for them, then I did using phrases about God's compassion and mercy that echoed with their own religious traditonal prayer phrases.

On Friday we began the training. My colleague made a presentation about peace. Then I got into the dynamics of group difference and mainstreams and margins. We have people from many different ethnic groups in the training. They are all pastors or church leaders. There is a lot of energy in the group and a high percentage of people participated in the discussions.

Saturday we continued, focusing on the story of Rizpah in 2 Samuel 21. Once again this proved to be a story that unlocked so much for the participants. We unpacked the dynamics of becoming a victim of trauma, the ways some victims become aggressors creating new violence, then they process of breaking out of these destructive cycles and moving toward healing and reconciliation. Later as we were doing some small group brainstorming about practical ways pastors and church leaders and student ministry leaders can apply what we'd been working on for the two days, I was deeply moved when participants from the dominant group came up with some concrete ideas related to justice for the group victimized by the violence. They demonstrated the mainstream listening to the cries from the margins in a very contextual way, which let me know they were getting what I'd been teaching about.