Martha Merritt
Associate Director

Brimming with stories and new understanding, 15 M.A. students in peace studies returned in January from their five-month field experiences in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the United States. Their activities ranged from interviewing refugees to studying reconciliation practices and testifying before parliament. Based on the students’ reports, we are fine-tuning the field experience with the goal of bringing the insights of peace studies closer to the “field” of practice.

The institute’s field experience differs in significant ways from those of other graduate programs. We intend for future students to return to the same locations and organizations in order to build a sustained Kroc presence and to gain deep familiarity with particular conflicts. The idea is that each group will bring greater expertise to their host organizations as they add to our collective knowledge. In integrating their first year of academic study with practice, students should come to see approaches to peacebuilding as an important part
of navigating a new culture. Finally, in their last semester, students are responsible for a master’s project
incorporating research and revelation from their field experiences.

Our hope is that students will not only learn new cultures, but also how to learn new cultures. Host organizations accept students eight months in advance, which gives students the spring semester at Notre Dame to prepare for the field experience. Students study history, politics, culture and language as their interests and opportunities allow. We want them to construct personal “tool kits” that will be lifelong resources for informed and respectful entry into other cultures.

During their 2005 field experiences, students covered even more terrain than we anticipated. Zamira Yusufjonova interned at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and was invited to be a member of an observation team for the November elections in Liberia. Within two weeks of Sarah Park’s arrival at the Refugee Law Project in Kampala, she was at the Uganda-Rwanda border, using her French language skills to interview refugees. From South Africa, Diana Batchelor documented reconciliation initiatives in four East African countries for a book being produced by her host organization, the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. To assist future interns and other scholars, Diana also compiled collections of resources on traditional reconciliation systems in Sudan, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda.

Part of the Kroc Institute’s goal in having students enter or reenter the world of work is to stimulate their ability to integrate peace studies and pressing real-world problems. They learn how to gather information and craft solutions from what can be a hodgepodge of resources.

Few felt that tension more keenly than Burcu Münyas, who interned with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Shortly after her arrival, a partner organization needed to know what youth in Cambodia — 69 percent of the population after the genocide of the 1970s — had learned about their country’s traumas. Burcu taught herself questionnaire design from the Internet and a hastily sent copy of David Gray’s book Doing Research in the Real World. She and her Cambodian partners surveyed or ran focus groups with a total of 202 young people in five provinces. Burcu thrived in managing the project and remarked that she "felt liberated to be conducting my own research outside of the university environment.” The paper that resulted, “Genocide in the Mind of the Cambodian Youth,” has been well-received by the Cambodian peacebuilding community and by prominent scholars. Burcu’s findings also led to the design of a workshop for young people on genocide education.

In Indonesia, the tsunami that ravaged much of South Asia had an impact on Sana Farid’s work with CRS in Jakarta. During her internship, Sana’s homeland of Pakistan also suffered a devastating earthquake, so her personal concerns converged with the challenges she faced as a peacebuilder. Sana emerged from both experiences with newfound confidence in her ability to adapt and to be a proactive peacebuilder. In the Middle East, Elizabeth Serafin found herself designing courses in conflict resolution and Spanish — an important language for communication with the Palestinian diaspora — as she matched her skills to evolving needs at Wi’am, an NGO in Bethlehem dedicated to building cordial relationships in the Palestinian community.

Interns’ assignments often reflected a growing recognition among peacebuilders that advocacy is a necessary part of successful practice. One of our staunchest regional partners, Myla Leguro of the Philippines, is among those convinced that grassroots peacebuilding must be paired with advocacy in order to address inequality and other forms of structural violence. Kroc student Sammy Mwiti Mbuthia joined Myla and her peacebuilding team just in time for a meeting of the Catholic Peacebuilding Network (CPN), held in Davao City last July. Mwiti has a strong journalism background, and within days of his arrival was coordinating media coverage of the meeting and serving as the kind of advocate the CRS program had long desired. He closed out his internship as editor-in-chief and writer for the newsletter Mindanao PeaceLens. Calling the issue "Charting New Frontiers in Mindanao Peacebuilding,” Mwiti addressed many of the themes raised at the CPN meeting.

Mica Cayton, an attorney, brought her legal experience to the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative in Kampala at a time when the Ugandan president was campaigning for a constitutionally prohibited third term in office. Mica testified before the Ugandan Parliament, among other advocacy work; she found herself reflecting on Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s suggestion that government should be measured by the capabilities of its citizens. Xiaomao Min worked for the Asia Society in New York City, where among other duties she helped to host Sri Lanka’s president in cooperation with the United Nations. Xiaomao was impressed when President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga said that, though she had been unable to resist the lure of politics, she envies those with more opportunity for intellectual reflection.

Jonathan Smith, who before coming to Kroc spent two years in Palestine teaching conflict resolution, moved to an advocacy environment at the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office in Cape Town, South Africa. For his master’s project, Jonathan met with key religious figures and members of the African National Congress, as well as human rights advocates, in Cape Town, Pretoria, and Johannesburg. One of his research papers, on right relations between religious groups and the state in promoting peace and social justice, was featured on the front page of the South African Catholic weekly, Southern Cross. Jonathan summed up his experience by saying he gained important interviewing skills and a broader perspective on promoting change.

Interns were encouraged to integrate past and present experience in their field journals. Here in South Bend, Nicholas Mambule Bisase of Uganda interned at Refugee and Immigration Services and could compare our city’s programs with his previous work in Kampala for the Uganda Human Rights Commission. Isaac Lappia, who for six years was director of Amnesty International in Sierra Leone, worked at the Africa Peace Forum in Nairobi. He moved comfortably among diplomats and other prominent figures as he drew on his background in West Africa to analyze security challenges in East Africa. What he found uncomfortable, and surprising, was the lack of personal security for the homeless in Nairobi. Taras Mazyar, working at the US-Ukraine Foundation in Washington, D.C., found strong support for his research focus on democratization in his native Ukraine.

Deciding how to represent the field experience was in some ways as challenging as the living of it. Tom Arendshorst, an ophthalmologist who interned with Nairobi Peace Initiative, launched a second career as a writer with his “Kroc o’ Peace” journal entries. A wide e-mail audience received 55 detailed accounts of work and other adventures as Tom and his wife Sharon grew to know and love East Africa. Damon Lynch maintained a photographic record of his geographic and spiritual journey wherever he went in Israel and Palestine. His pictures feature everything from a Jewish settler’s wedding to contested water sites, the latter relating to his Jerusalem-based internship with the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information. (You can view his photos at http://pbase.com/dflynch.)

Both the success of the field experience and the maintenance of a Kroc presence depend heavily on teamwork. The program’s field site coordinators for 2005 — Bob Dowd, Alan Dowty, Tom McDermott, Rashied Omar, and John Paul Lederach — gave a week’s on-site orientation and a great deal more. Tom was in residence in Kampala for the entire term and had a way of materializing on doorsteps in Uganda and Kenya when needed. Another who shared his time and energy was Kroc Faculty Fellow David Burrell in Jerusalem, who drew upon his decades of experience in the Middle East. From the Kroc Institute side, Justin Shelton, graduate program coordinator, offered logistical support and comfort that was particularly important during the early months for this first group in the field. Bill Hoye has been a steady partner in providing counsel from Notre Dame’s legal office.

Life did not stop, of course, while the students were away from Notre Dame. Damon learned at the end of his internship that his mother’s cancer had returned and flew directly from Tel Aviv to New Zealand to be with her. We plan to welcome Damon back in spring 2007. Mica and her husband, Kroc alumnus Marco Garrido, will have their first child this summer. Conveniently due after Mica’s graduation in May, the baby will have an outstanding peacebuilding pedigree and, we hope, benefit from the collective wisdom of Mica and her classmates.

What will we do differently in future field experiences? Jaleh Dashti-Gibson, director of academic programs, has already drawn upon the first round to design a semester-long program to prepare students for the field experience. It incorporates research design, regional expertise, and health and safety issues. Jaleh and Larissa Fast, who teaches Kroc’s capstone seminar in which students complete their master’s projects, refined the writing assignments from the field to focus on how the internships capture challenges for peacebuilders. We also have decided to tighten the program’s geographic focus. This first time we monitored 11 different locations, four in the United States alone. In 2006, the second group of students will bring back their stories and insights from six field sites: Kampala, Cape Town, Jerusalem/Bethlehem, Davao City, Phnom Penh, and Washington, DC.

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Home > Publications > Peace Colloquy > Issue 9, Spring 2006 > Notes from the field experience-pioneering peace students return to Notre Dame