Among the Somalis at Caux in 1993 were Hassan Mohamud and Ahmed Egal, both from Galkayo, one of Somalia’s most violent cities.

For decades the two clans which dominate Galkayo – the Hawiye and the Darood – have been at war. The last outbreak of conflict – in which over 40 died and hundreds were injured – was in 2016. But since then, Galkayo has seen no clashes. ‘Relationships and good neighbourliness have significantly improved,’ reported the Puntland Post in June this year. In part this is thanks to the work of Somalis inspired by Caux.  

Hassan Mohamud belongs to the Hawiye clan; Ahmed Egal to the Darood. Both opposed the regime of the dictator Siad Barre, who ruled Somalia from 1969 to 1991. Forced to flee, they each found asylum in Sweden. There Egal encountered Initiatives of Change. His change in attitude so struck Mohamud that, despite being a clan enemy, he phoned Egal and asked to meet. Long discussions resulted in their decision to work together to reconcile Galkayo.

At Caux in 1993, together with other Somalis, they drew up a list of potential peacemakers from different clans who they wanted to experience Caux. Among them was Yusuf Al-Azhari, also from Galkayo.

In the 1960s Al-Azhari had married the daughter of the Somali Prime Minister and was favoured with senior public service and diplomatic positions. Then came the coup which brought Siad Barre to power. Al-Azhari was imprisoned and tortured to the point of madness: ‘I was full of anger, hatred and depression. I was completely dehydrated, all skin and bones. I lost half my weight.

‘One night I knelt, soaked in tears, and pleaded with the Almighty Creator to give me peace and a vision to guide me. That night I was exalted spiritually in my cell. When I finally stood up, eight hours had passed. My inner voice told me that I had deluded myself. “Be honest to yourself and to those around you, and you will be the happiest person on earth.” From that day, I was freed from fear and despair. Love had been planted in my heart. Hatred evaporated. I realized that I was responsible for my past actions. I vowed to serve my fellow citizens, poor and rich.’

Be honest to yourself and to those around you, and you will be the happiest person on earth.

At the time Somalia was degenerating into chaos and poverty, and after six years Al-Azhari and his fellow prisoners were turned loose. His wife had been told that he had died, and she fainted when he arrived home, emaciated and with a beard that fell to his knees.

In the following years he attempted to fulfil his vow to serve. When Egal’s invitation reached him, he responded immediately. They met, and Al-Azhari accepted the invitation to Caux. His conviction grew that Somalia needed ‘a massive grassroots revolution where moral revival is a vehicle to reform politics, encouraging the clans to live together in peace’. In the following years, he and his colleagues brought other Somali leaders there, and their network grew.

In 2001 Mohamud joined Al-Azhari in Galkayo, and Egal followed soon after. Throughout the following years, together with their growing team, they held forums and workshops on the qualities of a peacemaker, and training courses which enable both men and women to gain employment. They asked the Somali diaspora for support, and built 22 new schools.

Conflict continued in Galkayo, but so did the efforts of the peacemakers. After the 2016 outbreak, a truce was negotiated – and it has held. Since then, international agencies have been better able to provide development support, and employment is growing.

Today people can move freely across the city, and intermarriage between the clans is growing. Now Mohamud and Egal are developing peace programmes for Galkayo’s primary schools.

Violence is not the only challenge in this arid region. In 2017 Al-Azhari rescued a group of over 140 small children from drought and famine and brought them to Galkayo. When he died in June this year, aged 80, he was still looking after 90 of these children. Mohamud has now arranged for one of his clansmen to continue the care of these children.

On a 2018 visit to Galkayo, the UN Secretary-General’s special representative for Somalia, Michael Keating, said, ‘If you can have peace in Galkayo, you can have peace anywhere in Somalia.’ That is the aim of Galkayo's peacemakers.

I realized that I was responsible for my past actions. I vowed to serve my fellow citizens, poor and rich.

• Read Refugees Think Big on Ahmed Hussen Egal (by Gunnar Wieselgren, 2003)
• Read Somali Peacebroker on Yusuf Al-Azhari (by Michael Smith, 1996)
• Read A Story of Somali Peacemaking in Diaspora (by Peter Riddell, 2013)

____________________________________________________________________________________________

This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• Photo top and teaser: Lul Kulmiya
• Photo with Khadija Mohamed: Bashir Mohamed
• All other photos: photographers not known

In July 1992, 80 Americans arrived at the Initiatives of Change Switzerland conference centre in Caux with an urgent question: how to address racism, poverty and alienation in US cities. Rob Corcoran who worked for Initiatives of Change in Richmond, Virginia, at that time, remembers.

Three months earlier, Los Angeles had exploded after the acquittal by a largely white jury of four white police officers who were caught on camera beating a Black motorist, Rodney King. Four days of riots, violence and looting had left more than 50 dead and 1,100 properties destroyed.  

Just a month before the events in Los Angeles, a group from several US cities had met in Richmond, Virginia, and agreed to work towards a public event which would directly address the issue of race, under the auspices of Hope in Cities. Still in its early stages of development, Hope in the Cities was a grassroots initiative, based in Richmond – capital of the Confederate states in the American Civil War – and inspired by Initiatives of Change. My wife, Susan, and I hosted a home where the group often met.

Richmond’s mayor, Walter Kenney, led a delegation of 22 community leaders to the conference in Caux. They included Howe Todd, a senior white city administrator, and Collie Burton, a Black community organizer who had strongly opposed Todd on policy issues. The two men had built an unexpected friendship and their new approach had stirred city-wide interest.  

At Caux, the Richmonders met with young community activists and racial equality officers from the UK, leaders of the favellas in Rio de Janeiro and former gang members from Los Angeles. They heard from Bernard Gauthier, the former chief of police of Northern France, and John Smith, an Australian Methodist minister whose ‘God Squad’ bike gang reached out to street kids, drug addicts and others in youth subcultures.

If it can’t happen in Caux, where can it happen?

At times the conference sessions were confrontational. Many participants were raw from experiences of racism. Audrey Brown Burton, who had worked in New York’s Department of Corrections, was outspoken about the issue. ‘Our criminal justice system is criminal,’ she declared, noting that Black Americans received, on average, longer sentences than whites for the same crimes.

In the face of such blunt talk many whites turned silent. Black caucuses formed and there was even a walkout in protest at one speaker. An alarmed white Britisher said to me, ‘This should not be happening in Caux.’ My response was, ‘If it can’t happen in Caux, where can it happen?’

Over the days, silence and confrontation gave way to honest conversation. Melanie Trimble, a white student from the southern US said, 'I want to ask forgiveness for my prejudice and indifference.' She said she had had good Black friends in school 'but we just didn't talk about race solutions much and I've never myself been in a place where whites and Blacks were working on race directly and being honest about it’.

One day, many of the Americans gathered to reflect on what they had experienced. Melanie urged the group to focus on themes of ‘racism, reconciliation and responsibility’. At the end of the meeting, we stood in a circle and committed ourselves to the healing of racism in America. Many of us knew that we were making a lifetime commitment.

Mayor Kenney invited the conference delegates to Richmond the following year. The Americans stated their commitment to facing ‘the agony of race, which stems from the original sin in our national soul – slavery’.

In June 1993, 500 people from cities across the USA as well as Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, Australasians and Europeans, joined Richmonders for a conference on ‘Healing the Heart of America: An Honest Conversation on Race, Reconciliation and Responsibility’. Melanie Trimble took on the formidable task of organizing logistics for the highlight of the conference: Richmond’s first walk through its history of racism and slavery.

Many of us knew that we were making a lifetime commitment.

In the following years, Hope in the Cities developed an approach to dialogue which was taken up by cities across America. Richmond created a Slave Trail Commission and is now developing a museum and heritage centre on the site of its former slave market. In 2007, Governor Tim Kaine led Virginia in becoming the first state to apologize for its role in promoting and defending slavery, and 5,000 people, including representatives from African countries involved in the slave trade, celebrated the unveiling of a reconciliation statue by Liverpool sculptor, Steven Broadbent. The universities, museums and libraries have formed a consortium to tell Richmond’s history honestly and inclusively.

I worked closely with Dr Gail Christopher of the WK Kellogg Foundation as she developed the concept for a national Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation initiative. In 2013 she brought 20 leaders of racial healing and racial justice organizations to Caux. As we walked along the terrace, she said to me, ‘This is a place where healing can take place’.

This is a place where healing can take place.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Rob Corcoran is a trainer, facilitator, writer and racial healing practitioner. His book Trustbuilding: An Honest Conversation on Race, Reconciliation, and Responsibility has been described as a ‘visionary, compelling account of healing and change'.

More about Hope in the Cities here.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Watch the recording of the Healing the Heart of America initiative (1993).

____________________________________________________________________________________________

This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• Photo top showing Dr Robert Tayor (left), John Smith, Audrey Burton in Caux, 1992: Rob Corcoran
• Photo Richmond's first walk: Rob Lancaster
• Photo Tee Turner at statue: Rob Corcoran
• Photo team & unveiling of statue: Karen Greisdorf
• Videos Healing the Heart of America: Initiatives of Change International

The 680 women – and some men – who packed the Main Hall of the Caux Palace for the launch of Creators of Peace 30 years ago came from 62 countries and a mind-boggling variety of backgrounds: a Mohawk clan-mother and a Russian contralto, the Queen Mother of Lesotho and a Cypriot TV actress turned politician, the First Ladies of Botswana and Uganda, a child psychologist from El Salvador, an American expert on conflict resolution.

Woman after woman spoke of the challenges facing her country – war, poverty, indigenous deaths in custody, domestic violence – and her determination to make a difference, whether at government level or the grass roots. Participants had set up schools, feeding programmes, initiatives to encourage women to vote, efforts to build bridges between host and immigrant communities. 

The initiator of this ferment of worldviews, experience and action was a Tanzanian cabinet minister and womens’ leader, Anna Abdallah Msekwa. She had been one of her country’s first female District Commissioners. In an interview in 1990, she told Ailsa Hamilton how people would complain to the Regional Commissioner that the District Commissioner was out of the office. He would say, ‘The Commissioner is there’, and they would reply, ‘But there’s only a woman!’

Later, as the country’s first female Regional Commissioner, she presented herself as a ‘visual aid’ in communities where girls were not sent to school. ‘In over a quarter of the region I went on foot, because there were no roads, and when the rains made large areas impassable, we went by canoe. I used to take my children with me sometimes just to prove I was a real woman!’

I used to take my children with me sometimes just to prove I was a real woman!

As Regional Commissioner, she championed women’s cooperatives and land rights, and recruited women for district administration. ‘Because women could now go straight to the Regional Commissioner, they developed a habit of not fearing the government.’

By 1989, when she first came to Caux, she was in the first of many Cabinet posts – the last being Minister of Health, from which she retired in 2005.

‘I have always been an outspoken person,’ she told Ailsa Hamilton, ‘but sometimes I would keep quiet when I knew I should speak out. I would think, “Why should I quarrel with so and so?” Then I went to a Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) conference, and I realized that I had a duty to use my talent. If there are things to be said, they must be said.’ 

I realized that I had a duty to use my talent. If there are things to be said, they must be said.

The idea of Creators of Peace stemmed from her experiences at international women’s conferences during the UN Decade for Women (1975 to 1985). She had come away feeling that they did not go deep enough. ‘We forgot we were women,’ she said. ‘We didn’t talk much about peace, we just expressed our country’s political views.’

Peace, she realized, was more than the absence of war. ‘What peace can exist in an environment of abject poverty? We must create the positive element called “peace”. And that means beginning with ourselves. Women are the missing link. We see things differently from men. Even if you are on the winning side, if you have lost your children, your husband, there is no cause for a woman to rejoice.’

Women are the missing link. We see things differently.

On that first visit to Caux, Anna Abdallah Msekwa floated her vision of a women’s initiative to create peace, beginning with a conference in 1991. Women from many countries rallied around her, determined to make it happen. Amina Dikedi Ajakaiye, now the President of Creators of Peace International, remembers working with other young women in Lagos to raise money for the conference through a fashion show and singing competition. Once in Caux, they led many of the conference meetings. 

Since 1991, Creators of Peace has held ten international conferences in Switzerland, India, Australia, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa. Today its main tool is Peace Circles: small groups of women who meet over a weekend or a series of weekly meetings to explore their potential as peace creators, share their stories and plan individual or common action.

In Kenya, women from warring communities have come together; in Burundi, peace circles include development education and help women (and men) address past trauma; in Nepal, they are reaching young people in the country’s least developed areas; in Syria, they have offered a haven during war and now focus on rebuilding. Creators of Peace Circles have taken place in more than 50 countries and increasingly, since the pandemic, online.

At that first conference in Caux, Anna Abdallah Msekwa challenged the women present to 'create peace wherever we are, in our hearts, our homes, our workplace and our community. We all pretend that someone else is the stumbling block… Could that someone be myself?’ 

• For more information visit Creators of Peace International.
• Discover Creators of Peace videos on YouTube.

In the summer of 1990, six months after the overthrow of Communism in their country, 30 young Romanians came to Caux. It was their first time outside the Eastern bloc, and they had been hesitant about coming, not sure what they would find. They were overwhelmed by the place. 

A few days after their arrival, we asked if they would like to meet the exiled King of Romania, who had often visited the conference centre at Caux with his wife, Queen Anne, and their daughters. Their enthusiastic response showed us how popular King Michael was among some of those who had grown up under Communism. Several of these young people came back year after year to help in various departments at Caux.

The Romanian royal family’s links with Moral Re-Armament (MRA, now Initiatives of Change) dated from well before World War II, when Frank Buchman met King Michael’s grandmother, Queen Marie, in Bucharest.

King Michael met Buchman again in the 1950s, after he had been deposed by the Communists. ‘With my sadness and unhappiness at having lost my country, my bitterness had grown because of a feeling of not belonging,’ he said. ‘After our meeting, I felt this great load was taken off my mind and soul. I realized that no problem was too great or too small for Frank. The greatest or the smallest problem in someone else’s life received the same loving care from him.’

I felt this great load was taken off my mind and soul.

After that he and his family made frequent visits to Caux from their home near Geneva and took part in various MRA activities. Queen Anne felt more at home lending a hand in the Caux kitchen than in meetings and there are a number of stories of her fellow cooks’ shock when they realized who she was.

Michael became King of Romania in 1940 aged 18, when the Prime Minister, Ion Antonescu, forced his father, King Carol, to abdicate and allied the country with Nazi Germany. King Michael could not prevent this, but his opposition to any systematic round-up of Jews meant that Romania’s large Jewish community suffered less than in any other of the Axis powers.

In August 1944 the reserved young king suddenly shot to international prominence in a coup d’état that took Romania over to the Allies’ side. Knowing that the Romanian army was loyal to the king, even though it was commanded by Antonescu, King Michael summoned Antonescu to the palace and demanded his resignation. When he refused, the palace guard arrested him.

‘Antonescu screamed the place down,’ King Michael told me in an interview in 1992. ‘They took him to the first floor, while he threatened them with execution, and they locked him up in the walk-in safe that had been built to house my father’s stamp collection.’

The fascist government were summoned one by one, and arrested as they arrived. The army were ordered to stop fighting, and a provisional government was formed. The country was partly saved from destruction, but another struggle had begun. After the war, as part of the post-war division of Europe decided by Churchill and Stalin, a Communist government took over. In 1947, they demanded King Michael’s abdication, threatening to shoot 1,000 students and young people if he refused.

He left Romania with nothing and had to work to support Queen Anne and their five daughters. He started a market garden in England, then worked for an American aircraft firm, before moving to Geneva, where he started an electronics firm and also worked as a stockbroker.

‘I couldn’t dream that the exile would last so long,’ he said. ‘I thought that it would only be a matter of months. The west dropped me like a hot potato. But I never gave up hope. Evil cannot last indefinitely.’

I couldn’t dream that the exile would last so long. But I never gave up hope.

In Geneva, the family received a steady stream of Romanian visitors. Then, suddenly, in December 1989, the flow became a flood, and the media wanted to know what the King felt about the revolution taking place in his country. Millions watched on television as the Communist regime was overthrown.

In the new Romania, King Michael was recognized as a former head of state and given a pension. Royal property was returned to the family. An opinion poll in January 2012 placed him as the most trusted public figure in Romania, far ahead of the political leaders. That October a square in Bucharest was renamed after him, in celebration of his 91st birthday. He died in 2018.

Read an article by Princess Margarita of Romania: Romania was our home

Ulrike Ott Chanu visited Bucharest with Andrew and Eliane Stallybrass in October 1990, 11 months after the fall of Communism. She wrote:

My first impression of Bucharest is darkness. Light bulbs are not available at the moment. Sometimes the orange bulb is missing from the traffic lights – some resourceful citizen has ‘privatized’ it.

A week’s visit does not make us experts on Romania, but at least we begin to understand what it means to live there: the queues outside the shops, the hints dropped in conversations. Parents’ fear that the younger generation will leave Romania to live abroad. The frustration of a young leader because change is slow. The disillusionment of a newspaper editor facing corruption. ‘We older people are a bit tired,’ says my hostess. Others are more optimistic: 'The young people have the enthusiasm and the energy, we older people have the experience.'

We meet three elderly men who attended a conference of the Oxford Group (later Moral Re-Armament and now Initiatives of Change) in Lausanne in 1937. They have only now been able to re-establish contact. One of them tells us in perfect French (‘I haven't spoken it for 50 years’) about the impact that conference in Lausanne has had on his life.

On my departure, I get stuck at Bucharest airport for over six hours due to heavy fog. Plenty of time to reflect on the past week – full of new experiences, conversations, discoveries and encounters.

We have been welcomed with boundless, warm-hearted and generous hospitality, laughed a lot, learned a lot and made wonderful friends. And I know that this will not be my last visit to Romania. A country is not just a geographical or political entity: it is people.  

Ulrike, Eliane and Andrew went back to Romania several times after this first visit. They are still in touch with the friends they made in 1990.

Adapted from Caux-Information, 1990/91

____________________________________________________________________________________________

This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• Photos black and white: Initiatives of Change (photo top: Rajmohan Gandhi, Dalai Lama, King Michael, Queen Anne
• Photo King's Palace and Romanian friends: Eliane Stallybrass
• Photo University Square, street scene, picnic, church, host family: Ulrike Ott Chanu

In spring 1946, when the first small group of Swiss visited the derelict hotel in Caux which was to become the Initiatives of Change (IofC) conference centre, they realized its ballroom could become a theatre. Within a few years, its conversion was complete, with a scene dock and workshop, fully equipped stage, fly gallery and raked seating. 

Hosts of plays have been produced in the Caux theatre, and small armies of actors and stage crews have laboured here. In 1989 one of its many stars, Michel Orphelin, was back with his one-man show about St Francis of Assissi, Poor Man, Rich Man. Its French version, Un Soleil en Pleine Nuit, had first been staged in Caux in 1980.

I’m just a worker. I do what I can.

Michel is a French mime artist, singer, cabaret performer and actor, engaged in what his son François calls ‘the theatre of poverty’. The true avant-garde, Orphelin believes, lies in great simplicity. ‘What is often missing in complicated productions is that they no longer know how to speak to the heart.’

Theatre, he feels, is about creating and transmitting a relationship of love. It should deal with reality; be simple, without being simplistic. ‘I’m just a worker,’ he says. ‘I do what I can.’

As a young person, he never dared to admit to himself or his parents that he wanted to become a performer. So he went to hotel school. There he and two friends formed an act, Les 3 Horaces, and eventually launched out as professionals. For 12 years they toured together, appearing on television over 70 times. But he still felt a lack of meaning in his life. 

Things began to change on a holiday in Brittany, where at a time of emotional turmoil, watching the sun set in the sea, a sense of certainty flooded in. ‘God exists,’ he says. ‘I’ve met him. He was there for me.’ 

He found that his new faith did not automatically resolve long-standing problems of relationships in his work, and with his mother whom he loved, but with whom he fought continually.

It was through seeing a play in the theatre on his first visit to the conference centre in Caux that he found his life purpose. ‘It was as if I saw the Cross on stage. It was a call to transmit a luminous Cross to people.’ He rebuilt his relationship with his mother, who also found a faith.   

Then friends asked him to play in the musical revue, Anything to Declare? which took him to India. He accepted, though it was not easy being away from his wife Marie-José, a violinist, and his son and daughter.

Image

He has a vivid memory from that tour of a young man coming to one of the cast after a performance to say that he had given up his plan to kill the person he blamed for the death of his cousin. He had been moved by a sketch which dramatized the real life experience of forgiveness of Irène Laure. Few actors can know, as he does, that they have been in a production which has saved a life.

Few actors can know, as he does, that they have been in a production which has saved a life.

Poor Man, Rich Man was written especially for him by Hugh Steadman Williams, a British playwright engaged with IofC. Michel performed the play in a dozen countries during the 1980s, frequently bringing it back to Caux in the summers.

The tours, with their frequent travel and late nights, had their lighter moments. In one small town, the musical director ordered a piano from a music shop, and on delivery found that some of its strings were broken. ‘But are you absolutely sure you need to play those notes?’ asked the delivery man.

Wherever it went, the play touched people deeply. After one performance, a nun said, ‘You have helped me to rediscover my calling to poverty.’  

In Belgium, a couple came to him with a dilemma: they had adopted three children – should they adopt a fourth? Some nights later, in another town several hundred miles away, they were back again. They had taken the plunge, they said, but instead of one child, they had been asked to adopt a brother and sister. They were going to name them for St Francis and his female counterpart St Clare.   

Like the saint he portrayed, Michel has always been clear about the source of his gift. That’s why he has never been foolish enough, he says, to imagine he is the water himself.

‘Who am I to touch people like this?’ he says. ‘I’m just a pipe for the living water of the Creator to flow through to a thirsty public. All I can do is to try to be a clean pipe. It is essential to have pipes, but they are only pipes.’

Read the French script of Poor Man, Rich Man

Discover the programme of Poor Man, Rich Man

Read an article on the play

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Watch a video of the play (1985)

Watch Michel Orphelin acting in the theatre in Caux (6"00')

____________________________________________________________________________________________

This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• Video Soleil en pleine nuit (Poor man, Rich man), Westminster Productions,1985: Initiatives of Change
• Photo Michel top in article: David Channer
• All other photos and leaflet: Initiatives of Change
• Film Caux 1980: Initiatives of Change

The Caux summer of 1988 at the Initiatives of Change conference centre began with a Mediterranean Dialogue, attended by people from all over the region, followed by a 10-day ‘youth training session’. One of the largest groups to attend these events came from Lebanon’s Christian and Muslim communities, who had been engaged in civil war since 1975. 

Even getting to the airport to fly to Switzerland had its dangers. ‘I had to go through several checkpoints and some of them belonged to our so-called “enemies”,’ remembers Joe Hakim, then 22 years old. ‘It was not so safe for me. But I was convinced I had to go because Initiatives of Change had started changing my life.’

This was Joe’s first trip out of Lebanon. He found himself making friends from many countries. ‘Coming from a situation of war, you feel as if you are the centre of the world. But I started seeing things in a different way: Lebanon and I were no longer the centre. I realized that I did not need to pity myself. I am not a victim. Rather, I am responsible.’

I realized that I did not need to pity myself. I am not a victim. Rather, I am responsible.

In Caux, Joe got to know a Muslim Lebanese, Munir Al Khatib. ‘Once we got home we started with my friends and his friends to build bridges. It was risky at many levels. We gathered people from different backgrounds and communities, to discover the other person who was at some point the enemy.’

For Marie Chaftari, the visit to Caux came at a dark period in her life.  For ten years, she had been a communications officer for the Christian militia: her husband, Assaad, was second in command of its intelligence unit. Then, in 1985, a split in the Christian militia forced them to leave Beirut with their baby son. ‘Overnight we went from being called heroes to being called traitors,’ she says. They lost their home and found themselves living among strangers, in constant fear of assassination.

In 1988, a priest asked Marie when she had last been to confession. ‘What have I got to confess?’ she snapped back. ‘I’m the victim.’ She told him how much she had sacrificed for the cause of Lebanon’s Christians. ‘He said, “What about love? The only cause is love.” Something turned in me, and I began to cry.’

That encounter led to Marie’s visit to Caux that summer, accompanied by her three-year-old son. ‘I came back to myself there,’ she says. ‘I asked myself, how can I be a Christian and hate? I began to look again at my opinions.’

Back in Lebanon, the change in Marie had an impact on her husband, Assaad. He went along to an IofC meeting with a gun hidden under his belt and two bodyguards waiting outside. The meeting challenged him to look back over his life. ‘All I saw was a path full of blood.’

Two years later Assaad took part in his first dialogue with Muslims. He went armed with a list of grievances – and was disconcerted to find a Muslim had brought an even longer list. ‘I discovered many things at those meetings. I discovered Muslims had real names, they had families, dreams, and expectations and that if we did not have the same political opinion we could at least still respect each other.’

I discovered Muslims had real names, they had families, dreams, and expectations and that if we did not have the same political opinion we could at least still respect each other.

In 2000 Assaad wrote an open letter of apology in the Lebanese media for his role in the atrocities committed during the civil war. The New York Times described him as the one major participant in Lebanon’s civil war who had ‘truly apologized’. He and other ex-combatants, Muslim and Christian, founded Fighters for Peace, which works to convince young people that war is not the way.

Image

Before 1988, Marie says, ‘the Other’ for her was the Muslim. Now one of her closest friends is a Shi’a Muslim, Lina Hamade. Together they founded Linaltaki (’let’s meet’), an organization which brings together women and runs summer camps for children from different communities.

Joe Hakim, too, has devoted his life to building bridges. Now the operations manager of a large company dealing with intellectual property, he says that volunteering in the Caux dining room taught him the meaning of servant leadership.

‘I learnt how to support, help, serve, listen, understand, appreciate – how to work together with people from different backgrounds, communities, perspectives, ages, generations.’ He feels a particular calling to help young people find their purpose in life. ‘I offer my friendship, my fellowship – and this helps me at the same time.’

In the dark days that Lebanon is going through once again, flames like these, lit in Caux over the years, provide sparks of warmth, hope and light.

I learnt how to support, help, serve, listen, understand, appreciate. I offer my friendship, my fellowship – and this helps me at the same time.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• Photos Marie, Linaltaki, Fighters of Peace: John Bond (photo top: Marie Chaftari (right) with Iman Al Ghafari from Syria and Lina Hamade)
• All other photos: Joe Hakim

Mother Park Chung Soo, a Won Buddhist nun, has been called the ‘Mother Teresa of South Korea’. She was already involved in humanitarian work in Korea when she came to the Initiatives of Change conference centre Caux in 1987, but an encounter there added a new dimension to her vocation.

For 35 years, from 1910 to 1945, Japan occupied Korea. Mother Park was born in 1937 and had painful memories of Japan’s attempts to erase Korean culture. ‘We were not allowed to use our own language,’ she said. ‘We had to change our family name. We worked hard in the fields but we were not allowed to eat what we produced. Instead we had to eat pine tree cones and the husks of the beans.’

When she arrived in Caux, Mother Park was touched by the care her Swiss hostess, Sylvia Zuber, had put into making her room welcoming, with flowers, chocolate and cards. ‘I could feel with my whole body that this had all been prepared by Sylvia with her love for us,’ she wrote later.

Sylvia persuaded Mother Park to have lunch with two young Japanese, Kiyoshi Nagano and Yuki Miura. ‘Kiyoshi Nagano tried to speak in Korean,’ she recalled. ‘His attitude removed the feelings of hatred in my heart.’ 

‘With tears she told us of all the suffering she had gone through in the Japanese colonization of Korea,’ remembers Kiyoshi. ‘I was translating for my Japanese friend. We all began to weep. “These tears have washed away my bitterness,” she said to us.’

His attitude removed the feelings of hatred in my heart.

‘The two young Japanese asked forgiveness for the mistakes of their ancestors as if they had committed them themselves,’ Mother Park wrote later. She realized that she was feeling pain at hurting them. ‘A new door began to open to accept them like a close brother and sister.’ 

Mother Park had entered the Won Buddhist order at the age of 19. ‘When I was nine, my mother used to tell me that I have to help people throughout my life,’ she said. ‘That was my calling. The journey has been beautiful, if not easy.’

In 2010, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and reached the top ten in a field of 237. Her humanitarian work, through the Relief Foundation which carries her name, spans 55 countries.

When I was nine, my mother used to tell me that I have to help people throughout my life. That was my calling. The journey has been beautiful, if not easy.

In Korea, her work has focused on training blind people in life skills for independent living, supporting leprosy sufferers in St Lazarus Catholic village, and setting up two boarding schools – one for teenagers excluded from mainstream schools and the other for teenagers who have escaped from North Korea.

She visited North Korea three times, to see the living conditions there first hand, and sent relief to flood victims and refugees there.

As Cambodia emerged from decades of war, she raised US$100,000 towards removing landmines, sent many container loads of clothing and medicines, and funded water pumps and wells. She worked with the Red Cross to provide artificial limbs for the victims of landmines in Afghanistan, and sent medical supplies to 15 African countries.

In 1992, she established a boarding school in Ladakh in northern India, for students who previously had to travel hundreds of miles to the south for education and were therefore forced to be away from their parents for long periods. By 2017, it had 835 students.

Despite being one of India’s largest districts, Ladakh only had one public hospital, in its capital city, Leh. Patients were often referred to Delhi or Chandigarh – a long expensive journey which few could afford. In 1996, Mother Park provided the initial funding for a charitable hospital, which serves patients in Leh and provides medical care to remote villages.

Her experience in Caux gave Mother Park a vision for what Japan and Korea could together give to the world, which she expressed at an Initiatives of Change conference in Japan in 2002: ‘If both Korean and Japanese people could open their hearts, we could become good friends. It would be wonderful if our two countries could cooperate more closely in peacebuilding for the developing countries.’ Her speech inspired young Japanese and Koreans to start a project to promote dialogue between their contemporaries.

Watch an interview and video extracts with Mother Park (by Arirang on YouTube)

With input from Yeonyuk Jeong and Kiyoshi Nagano

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

Photos courtesy of Yeonyuk Jeong, Kiyoshi Nagano and the Ven. Mother Park Chung-Soo Won Buddhist Relief Foundation