The Plowshares team at MBB, from left to right: Paul Lokho (Peace Coalition of North-east India, India), Phoebe Milliken (Plowshares Institute) Gugu Madlala (Diakonia Council of Churches, South Africa), Cyril Mwandla (Diakonia Council of Churches, South Africa), Bob Evans (Plowshares Institute), Yanyan Yip (Civic Exchange, Hong Kong) and Kadarmanto Hardjowasito (Center for Peace Study and Conflict Transfor-mation at Jakarta Theological Seminary, Indonesia).
Pdt. Dr. Kadarmanto Hardjowasito menjadi fasilitator dalam lokakarya Mediasi dan Transformasi Konflik yang diadakan oleh Plowshares Institute di Bucharest pada 23-25 April 2015. Panelis lainnya selain Dr. Hardjowasito adalah: Paul Lokho, Peace Coalition of Northeast India (India); Cyril Mwandla , Diakonia (South Africa); Yanyan Yip, Civic Exchange (Hong Kong) dengan Robert Evans, Plowshares Institute (USA) sebagai moderator. Dalam acara ini, partisipan diminta untuk berbagi cerita dan menyelesaikan konflik dengan cara kreatif. Ada 200 peserta yang hadir dari berbagai negara di dunia.
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The Mediators Beyond Borders (MBB) Congress, of which Plowshares was a proud sponsor, was a big success. Held in Bucharest, Romania in April it was attended by 200 mediators from around the world. The Plowshares’ participants included our partners from South Africa, Hong Kong, Indone-sia and Northeast India as well as Bob Evans and Phoebe Milliken. Plowshares partners led a day-long training workshop on the case study method and spoke as a panel at a plenary session about their experiences using training events to build relationships among conflicting parties.
The chair of Plowshares international Advisory Committee, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who was unable to attend in person, sent a video address to the Congress which was received with a standing ovation. [The video can be viewed on Plowshares’.website: www.plowsharesinstitute.org/MBB/tutu ]
One of Plowshares’ main objectives in gathering our partners at the Congress was to help them strengthen their relationship to each other as well as facilitate their connection to MBB’s interna-tional network of peacebuilders. The feedback from our partners now that they have returned to their home countries shows us that this objective was met. Our South African partners from Dur-ban returned reinvigorated to engage deeply in trauma healing work with the foreign national population devastated by xenophobic violence. Our Northeast Indian partner wrote to us with a long list of new offers of assistance to the Peace Coalition of Northeast India (PCNI) that emerged from the Congress. He concluded by telling us, “PCNI has decided to raise funds for establishing a small training institute and one training hall will be named ‘Alice and Bob Hall’ or ‘AB Hall’. We all feel that both of you were the first to under-stand our situation, took interest and spent your TIME, ENERGY, and RESOURCES to help start the entire process.”
As always it was a pleasure for Plowshares staff to work with our inspiring partners. We know that the peacebuilding work begun at Plowshare will live on in their capable hands.