TABLE OF CONTENTS

At age seven, Chido became the sole provider for her younger brother and her blind grandmother when her mother died of AIDS. Unprotected, she was now at the mercy of emotional and sexual needs of her uncles and boy cousins. When she was eight, she had a dream that she would someday empower orphans. At age 11, Chido fortuitously received a scholarship to learn how to grow mushrooms which opened up a whole new world to her.

True to her dream, Chido has now established the Future of Hope Foundation where she teaches orphans how to grow mushrooms and other important life skills, empowering them to care for themselves and become valuable, contributing members of society.

Having been adopted as a child, Rachelle only discovered her indigenous heritage later in her life. Once this was known to her, she became the carrier of sacred objects for both Native American tribes and for the Maya Council of El Salvador.

She founded the Morning Star Foundation whose mission was to support the needs of native/Indigenous elders, women, and youth in order to protect sacred traditions and resources of these people. Our interview took place shortly after Rachelle and other Native American elders had spent three days in jail for praying at the Water Protectors’ peaceful protest at Standing Rock, North Dakota.

A daughter of Russian and Jewish immigrants, Judith grew up in Nevada, in the western United States, where there were no Jews, in fact no foreigners at all. This taught her by personal experience what it felt like to be an outsider. For nearly two decades, Judith held summer camps for war-torn children in Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland and inner-city Los Angeles. In these camps, she offered American volunteers the opportunity as counselors to contribute deeply meaningful work while learning to see the world through the eyes of the war-torn children.

Irish-born, Sr. Sarah stumbled into her peace work during her days as a nun teaching art to Catholic school students in London. She ended up helping Irish prisoners in British jails who were entangled in the merciless acts of political warfare between Ireland and England.

Living in a constant state of terror herself, she drew upon her power of gratitude, her belief in Jesus, and her undaunted dedication to justice to sustain her through 50 years of serving these prisoners and their families.

During her military duty as a young woman in Israel, Ruchama lived in the midst of endless Arab-Israeli conflicts. After becoming a psychiatrist, she gathered a band of medical professionals to tend to the wounds of victims on both sides. In the process, these professionals discovered human rights violations committed by both sides of the conflict.

Unable to let these violations go unattended, Ruchama pressed for justice and reparations to the victims. Her organization, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, now with over 1500 volunteers, continues to administer free medical assistance throughout Israel to those who are not otherwise eligible for health care services.

Connie’s peacemaking was sparked when she looked in the eyes of a Vietnamese woman painfully dying of cancer where there were no medical supplies to ease her pain.  Connie returned home, collected unused medical supplies to send to Vietnam and eventually founded Friendship Bridge, an organization that made micro loans and training to the poorest of women in Viet Nam.

Later, taking her loan program to the Mayan women of the Lake Atitlan area of Guatemala, Connie continues to identify the need to not only empower the mothers, but also to educate their children. With her new program, Starfish, skills and support are provided to the young Mayan women to break out of the generational poverty cycle.

Muffy was high on the list of young American skiers bound for the Olympics until the day she hit a tree that left her paralyzed from the waist down, confining her to a wheelchair. After a dark period of depression, she had a dream one night in the rehab hospital, where some kindred spirit assured her that the accident had a purpose. This left her in a place of peace from which she began a journey to help others who had become disabled.

With her story, her optimism, and sometimes with physical equipment, she helped them begin to see a path forward for themselves. In the meantime, she started winning Paralympic medals, rafted down the Grand Canyon, and fell in love. I met Muffy and her husband, Jeff, while they were on a six-month tour around the world, uplifting bodies and spirits along the way.

Sr. Mary knew she wanted to be a Maryknoll nun for most of her life. When she fulfilled this dream, much of her first 26 years was spent teaching, often with the Maasai youth of Tanzania. She was asked to work on a research project that looked into the current situation of Maasai education.  Sr. Mary was struck by the seriousness of the endangered future of these people, especially the dismal state of education for Maasai girls. Deeply moved, Mary single-handedly embarked on a journey to systematically overcome each challenge that was keeping these girls from realizing their potential in the world.

She started Emusoi, a place where young Maasai women could come, discover their own worth, and pursue education for themselves. Mary gave them a safe place to build their skills so that they could participate in the public schools and vocational programs, not only for themselves but for the whole Maasai community. Beginning with 6 girls, Emusoi is now supporting over 250 Maasai girls, as well as girls from hunter/gatherer communities.

Chona’s life began as one of 11 children in a poor, happy Mayan family near Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. At 13 she lived with the sisters of Notre Dame at the St. Lucas Toliman Mission for four years until she began to cook and work for Father Greg Schaffer, the American pastor of the Mission where she would remain for 35 years.

During these years, this area of Guatemala experienced the prolonged wrath of “La Violencia,” a concentrated genocidal effort by the government to “eliminate, exterminate and annihilate” the entire Mayan culture in Guatemala. During these years, many boys were abducted to become soldiers, many women were raped, and many men, including Chona’s husband, were killed or “disappeared.” Chona’s peacemaking work tended to the needs of the orphaned children and the widowed women of San Lucas.

As a child, Inge watched as the Nazis invaded her Austrian village, arresting her mother on three occasions. After World War II she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in America, which sent her to Colorado for her college education. While there, Inge fell in love with Sao, another foreign student from Burma.

Once married, as they traveled to live in his home in the Shan State north of Rangoon, her husband told her that he was, in fact, a Prince of the Shan State, which automatically made her the Princess of the province. Her name was no longer Inge, but Thusandi. Once she got over the shock of becoming instant royalty, Thusandi and Sao became a beloved ruling couple, making many progressive improvements in their land. Thusandi, specifically, upgraded the child birthing practices, resulting in greatly decreased infant and mother mortality. She made similar advancements in the school system.

One day Sao simply did not return from a political meeting. This ushered in a very dark period for both Thusandi and her two daughters, as well as for the whole of Burma when a malevolent military dictator assumed control of the government. Fearful for their lives, Thusandi was able to escape with her two children. She returned to the United States where she raised over $1 million to support the thousands of Burmese refugee victims of the dictatorship.

By the time Shahla was thirty years old she had lived through three wars in her native country of Iraq. The last of these devastated her beloved Baghdad and sent her into a depression.

Things turned around dramatically for her when she answered an ad in the newspaper to work for Counterpart International, an American non-governmental organization that was doing reconstruction work in Iraqi communities devastated by the war. Short on experience but long on willingness, knowledge of the local customs, and deep love for her country made Shahla a perfect fit to lead a team of locals. As a woman, her hardest job was gaining the trust of the male tribal leaders.

In four months, Shahla’s team completed 26 reconstruction projects, all under the radar of the active American military forces, the unpredictable insurgents and terrorists, and the Ba’ath Party officials of Saddam Hussein. Other legacies she left these communities were 1400 new jobs, valuable training in conflict resolution, and a strong sense of pride and hope for themselves and their country.

While working in the spinning and ironing room of a large cotton textile factory, Somboon lost 52% of her lung capacity from the cotton fibers in her work environment. The first person to sue a Bangkok employer for inadequate safety conditions in the workplace, she led 350 workers in a class action suit, which held employers responsible, including reparations for the damages sustained by the workers.

She created a self-help network for people afflicted with occupational illnesses which also acted as a lobbying group to draw national attention to issues that had thus far been considered taboo in Thailand.

Theo’s form of peacemaking is revealing information about a kind of oppression that is invisible to most of us: damage to our endocrine system caused by petroleum products in our environment. She accomplished this by being one of the first scientists to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines to examine each other’s work and collectively realize the damage done on humans and many other species by petroleum products.

Theo and her team became an ongoing detective force revealing current scientific research on the harmful effects of specific petroleum products in our daily lives, and also harms of the “fracking” process by which the products are extracted from the earth. One of Theo’s specific goals was informing the world about the impact of these products on the human fetus. Her tools for informing the world of her findings included publications, films, public speaking, and a brilliant interactive website.

Yvone grew up in a Rio de Janeiro that was stratified into four classes: upper, middle, lower, and poverty, with big gaps between these classes. Although Yvonne grew up in the middle class, she made a choice to work with the children of the poverty class which was divided into the favela/shanty town children and the street children.

It was these children that became the prey of the drug lords, using them for their drug dealing purposes. This made Yvonne’s work extremely dangerous. Undaunted, Yvonne dedicated herself to teaching these children, sometimes with her daughter by her side. She taught the children the basics of life, including that they were valuable, that they had rights, and that they could learn.

Two decades later, in a favela of 130,000, Yvonne has established Projeto URERE, a school where her personally trained teachers work with over 400 children between the ages of six and eighteen, with a goal of making these little persons with great big problems strong enough to survive their everyday life and build some hope for their future. Her curriculum and teaching methods have now been adopted in many Brazilian schools.

Elissa was content to be a medical lab assistant in her hometown of Staten Island, New York, until she began to hear news of the Bosnian War. While asking a diplomat if she could help, she was handed a letter from a Bosnian boy that had lost his arms and a leg to a grenade. In the letter, he pleaded for “God and all merciful people to help me getting prosthetics.”

Elissa became that merciful person bringing young Kenan and his mother to New York where she arranged for volunteer hospitals and doctors to provide him new prosthetics and a new life. Elissa then established the Global Medical Relief Fund which has now helped repair the lives of over 250 children from around the world. These children have lost the use of limbs or eyes; have been severely burned, or have been injured due to war, natural disaster, or illness.

The author asked each woman what advice they would give to someone who wants to be a peacemaker. This chapter includes their answers.

I have been gathering the stories of Women Peacemakers for over twenty years. Over time, I have seen similar patterns in the women’s approach to their work of, how they go about doing it, how they deal with obstacles, how they find sustenance, perseverance, and joy in the process. I share some of their patterns  of wisdom below. They are useful in doing peacemaking work as well as pursuing almost any goal.

1. Be awake when the opportunity presents itself.
2. Develop your service in response to people’s expressed sense of need. When
listening for this be sure you are listening to understand their needs rather than
listening to validate your preconceived ideas of what is needed.*
3. Never lose sight of your goal and never get attached to how you get there.
4. Learn who the local peacemakers are and be respectful of their peacemaking
traditions.*
5. Every day, revisit the wisdom of, and your willingness to continue this work.
6. Operate from unconditional caring, not from sentimentality.
7. Making a difference in the world might be your primary form of compensation.
If you need money to do your work, be creative about sourcing it.
8. Work under the radar of oppressors when called for.
9. Work “with,” not “for.” Work alongside those who request your services.
10. Acknowledge, validate and nurture the strengths of those with whom you work.
11. Work simultaneously at both the individual and the systems level.
12. Pace yourself: Make a little peace, make a little dinner. Know that your work
might not be completed in your lifetime.
13. Be aware peacemaking may be dangerous, but does not have to be dangerous.
Provide for your safety.
14. Be willing to hang out on the margins of society without taking it personally.

15. Practice patience and persistence; employ them both simultaneously.
16. Most of your learning will be on-the-job training or osmosis from other peacemakers. Observe what your mentors do and don’t do, and why.
17. First go small and deep with your work. Then think about the wisdom of
going bigger. Many peacemakers stay small and deep.
18. Sometimes anger works as a good motivator, but never use it as a plan of action.
19. Rising up out of a depression can launch amazing acts of peacemaking. Likewise, doing an act of peacemaking can dispel or disappear depression.
20. Do not use violence of any kind, including to yourself.
21. When making choices, choose what keeps you in integrity with your goals and your conscience.
22. Pray.
23. The amount of outside pressure you may feel from those that disapprove of  your work may be great. Meet it with a greater amount of inner resolve, integrity, and grit.
24. When overwhelmed by what you can’t do, refocus on what you can do. Then proceed with the next right thing.

The reader is invited to commit to an act of peacemaking, and describe, in an email on the author’s website, the effects of these peacemaking endeavors on both themselves and the recipients of their work.