Thinking out loud

Would you still want to kill me? After the war in Sarajevo, Amra Pandzo started working with MCC. After some peace training, she decided she wanted to devote her life to help build peace in her country. By day, Amra is a librarian, but she also started a small organization called Small Steps to work in the public school system. Children receive religious public education at school, but because children are separated for this education according to their background – Catholic, Orthodox or Muslim – the religious education contributes to deepening religious and ethnic divides. Amra has since created a Handbook for Religious Muslim Teachers . She told me that her goal for the handbook was to do for the Koran what Mennonites have done with the Bible – to look at the Holy Book from a peacemaking perspective. She has helped to train 1,500 Muslim teachers who are teaching religion in the schools. More recently, she organized interfaith meetings for religious teachers. The ...

Naš put je mir (our way is peace) Traveling north from Sarajevo through Zenica, we traveled three more hours through beautiful country to the town of Sanski Most. Here, MCC partners with the Center for Peacebuilding, a group begun by two Muslim imams, Mevludin Rahmanovic and Vahidin Omanovic, co-founders and co-directors, who are working for inter-religious peace in their community. The goal of the center is to rebuild trust and to nurture reconciliation among the people of Bosnia – Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and others – and to support peace wherever people have suffered from violent conflicts. Both men have horrific stories to tell of many family members who were killed in the war. Mevludin told me how he had to go through a personal jihad (fight) with himself to decide not to hate, but to work for peace. A memorial in the downtown area of Sanski Most commemorates more than 700 people in the community who died during the war. Mevludin remembers one man who o...

Only 75 kilometers north of Sarajevo just off the one toll road in the region, the city of Zenica has a story to tell. All of its 17 schools were filled with refugees during the war here 20 years ago. The huge steel mill which employed up to 30,000 workers during the time of the former Yugoslavia now employs less than 1,500. "We had a safe country and it was functioning well before the war and suddenly, overnight, nothing seemed to work anymore," Venira Alihođić, director of MCC partner organization SEZAM told me. After the war Venira formed SEZAM to work with children traumatized by what they had experienced during the war. A flood of refugees, more than 50,000, fled here during the war. When it was over, the refugee camps were dismantled, but some of the refugees remained. Venira and longtime worker Emir Džiđić show me a book of children's drawings of the world of fear and grenades, of shelling and tanks, that these children still imagine surrounds them. ....

How long, O God? Will you forget me forever? (Psalm 13:1) Earlier this week, I arrived in Lebanon from where MCC staff work with a dozen partner groups in Lebanon and Syria. It has been several years since staff has been able to work from Syria or even travel there, but we continue to support relief and peace building work in communities in both countries through partner organizations. Lebanon has a total population of only 4.5 million people but hosts about 2 million refugees, primarily from Syria. You can imagine the enormous strain this has put on the infrastructure of this small country. The director of our partner, Permanent Peace Movement (PPM), tells us that MCC was the first outside organization that understood what they were doing and supported them in building peace in Lebanon. Another partner, Popular Aid for Relief and Development (PARD), works in refugee settlements with women, children and families. We visit a Syrian family in the Daouk settlement, ...

  In your presence there is fullness of joy (Psalm 16) It is a blessing to have the opportunity to step out of one’s own culture for months at a time, to experience another culture and to see one’s own culture in a fresh way. For the next several months I will be living and working in Sarajevo and traveling from there to visit MCC’s programs in Iraq, Ukraine, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. My first week in Sarajevo is largely filled with orientation with MCC Europe and Middle East area director Amela Puljek-Shank and with the Eastern Europe country staff. I’ve settled into a small apartment and have begun exploring the city. Sarajevo has a rich faith tradition history. While the city is 95% Muslim today, there are Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox traditions present here as well. Yesterday, I was able to visit some of the oldest places of worship in the old part of the city for all four faith traditions. I am quickly learning that the deep conflicts in this regi...

We think of Thanksgiving and Christmas as a season for giving. More and more though, we also remember that Thanksgiving commemorates a time of taking, when several hundred years ago, my ancestors took land from people who already lived on this continent.  A month ago, as my wife and I thought about the season of giving that was approaching us, we decided we wanted to try a giving experiment. During the month of November, we would give $20 to everyone who asked us, whether that was on the street, through mail or email, in church, or anywhere we were, if someone or some organization directly asked us for money, we would give them $20.  When the month of November began, I wondered how many thousands of dollars we would give to others during the month. After all, we recognize November as a gearing up month. It is getting cold outside and organizations are getting ready, preparing for the Thanksgiving to Christmas ask when non-profits receive a high percentage of the total ...

God executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and loves the strangers, providing them with food and clothing. Deut. 10:18 10,000 steps every day. That's just over five miles.  I have a dogged determinedness to reach my goal each and every day. And I've reached my goal every day since the beginning of last June.  In late October I was in O'Hare international airport in Chicago on my way to Indonesia. I knew I would have difficulty reaching my daily goal if I didn't do some serious walking in the airport terminal. Too much sitting in airplanes was ahead. And so I was moving at quite a clip through the O'Hare concourses trying to get in as many steps as possible before my flight boarded.  Then I passed by a family that, even at the rate I was moving, I noticed looked quite out of place. From Africa, the way it looked. All five family members had on heavy winter coats. This on what was a mild October day in the Chicago area. And so I stopped, steps or ...