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June
11, 2007
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Marie-Andree Dufour and I met
in Moshi, Tanzania in 1966 where she was a Quebec (Canada) volunteer with
L’Association de l’Assomption. I was teaching in the Tanzania Cooperative
College as a Peace Corps volunteer. She had just come back from visiting
her cousins who were working in a secondary school in Rwanda. Marie had
hitchhiked through Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda to get there and had come
back very upset by the poverty she had witnessed. Somehow our
relationship grew from these overlapping paths and experiences, and today
after 37 years of marriage, we are preparing for my trip over there.
Marie will stay home for this one. However we have shared work in
Zimbabwe (3 years), China (1 year), Quebec (8 years), Germany (1 year)
and a few years in the US, and we dragged two children Dominique and
Jacques along for the ride.
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For
the past nine years I’ve been a mediator in Springfield, Ohio. I work for
the Clark County Common Pleas Court Mediation Center mediating cases where
children are involved including truancy, delinquency, divorce and child
abuse. The Court has graciously given me a leave of absence to go on this
trip.
I’ve
been fortunate to learn mediation from a lot of dedicated and experienced
people. But the connection to Africa has always been at my center. I had
been wondering if there were a way to bring some of the skills I’ve learned
to a continent that may have need to find better ways to resolve personal
conflict. The opportunity appeared through a chance “forward” of an
internet inquiry about mediation. It had come from a college student in
Rwanda, Christophe Nkunda. He was looking for information from a mediator
in Ann Arbor, MI. She sent it on to a list serve of mediators. I contacted
Christophe and we talked about mediation and how he might get some
training. He was unable to get a visa to study here in the U.S. , and it
occurred to me that maybe I could go there to train him and his classmates.
Continued
searching on the internet led me to the African Great Lakes Initiative , (www.aglionline.org) a Quaker
organization serving in the countries of Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Kenya. I had initially been trained by a
Quaker organization called the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) back
in 1991. It was a series of workshops designed by prisoners and Quakers to
help prisoners deal better with incarceration and violence in their lives.
More about that in a later entry.
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Itinerary
George's
Route
Archive
Aug 21, 2007
Aug 16, 2007
Aug 14, 2007
Aug 12-13, 2007
Aug 10, 2007
Aug 6-8, 2007
Aug 5, 2007
Aug 1, 2007
July 30, 2007
July 29, 2007
July 23-25, 2007
July 24, 2007
July 22, 2007
July 20, 2007
July 15-17, 2007
July 12-13, 2007
July 13, 2007
July 12, 2007
July 8, 2007
June 30, 2007
June 12, 2007
June 11, 2007
Mediation Classes
and Case Studies
Nairobi
Kakamega/Lubao
Bujumbura, Rwanda
Kigali, Rwanda
Goma, Congo
Photos
1960's Africa
Germany
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