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Preview of 14th Annual Westheimer Peace Symposium
Constructing Peace: Voices of Hope 10:00 a.m. - Keynote Speaker, Sarah Chayes
Keynote Speaker: Sarah Chayes
From 1996, Ms. Chayes was Paris reporter for National Public Radio. Her work during the Kosovo crisis earned her the 1999 Foreign Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi awards, together with other members of the NPR team. She has also reported from Algeria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Serbia and Bosnia, as well as covering the International War Crimes Tribunal, and the European Union. Before that, Ms. Chayes free-lanced from Paris for a variety of radio and print outlets, including Monitor Radio, Radio Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherlands, and The Christian Science Monitor. She began her radio career in 1991 at Monitor Radio’s Boston, MA headquarters. Ms. Chayes graduated in History from Harvard University in 1984, earning the Radcliffe College History Prize for best senior thesis written by a woman. She served in the Peace Corps in Morocco, then returned to Harvard to earn a master’s degree in History and Middle Eastern Studies, specializing in the medieval Islamic period. She was born in Washington DC, in 1962. She has three sisters and one brother. Ms. Chayes has published op-ed articles in the New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor. She is featured in the Sundance documentary "Life After War," which was aired on Frontline World as "A House for Haji Baba;" she has appeared on "NOW with Bill Moyers," the "Oprah Winfrey Show," "ABC News," and CNN’s "Good Morning America," NPR’s "Fresh Air" and other programs; she has spoken at the Harvard Kennedy School "Forum," the National Defense University, the School for Advanced Military Studies at Ft. Leavenworth, Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and the Commonwealth Club of San Fransisco, among other venues. She is writing a book with Penguin Press, tentatively titled The Promotion of Vice (and the Punishment of Virtue). Afternoon Speaker: Alicia Partnoy, Ph. D.
Born in Argentina in 1955, Partnoy was herself kidnapped by the government and held a concentration camp for five months, and later spent another two-and-a-half years in a jail for political prisoners. She wrote of her experiences in her memoir, The Little School in which she explained that the military dictatorship held people captive for long periods before killing them, because families of the kidnapped could be controlled if they had some hope that their loved ones might still be alive. Partnoy currently teaches Spanish and is chair of the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She is co-editor of "Chicana/Latina Studies: the journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social." Education
Books
Dissertation
Afternoon Speaker: Gene Stoltzfus
Gene Stoltzfus has been the director of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) since its founding in 1988. CPT trains and places violence reduction teams in high conflict situations like Iraq, the West Bank, Columbia, and various native communities in the United States and Canada. Teams and peacemaker delegations have worked in Chiapas, Vieques, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. and investigative teams have visited Chechnya and Afghanistan. Christian Peacemaker Teams, originally an initiative of the Mennonite , Brethren and Quakers, has expanded to include a wide variety of Roman Catholic and Protestant participation, with 38 full time and 125 part-time peacemakers. Stoltzfus traveled to Iraq immediately before the first Gulf War in 1991 and has spent extensive time in Iraq again in 2003, consulting with Muslim and Christian clerics, Iraqi human rights leaders, families of Iraqi detainees and talking with American administrators and soldiers. Gene’s commitment to peacemaking is rooted in his experience in Vietnam as a conscientious objector with International Voluntary Service during the US military escalation there 1963-68. He recalls that watching the helicopter personnel unloading their cargo of bloodied bodies in Saigon set him "n the search to make sense of like and death where the terms of survival, meaning and culture don’t forbid killing. I had to ask myself," he said, "whether I was as willing to die for my conviction as the Vietnamese and American soldiers all around me were being asked to do." In the early 1970’s, Stoltzfus directed a domestic Mennonite Voluntary Service program with a view to engaging with the social justice and peace issues of the day in order to awaken church and society. In the late 1970’s, he co-directed the Mennonite Central Committee program in the Philippines during the Marcos’ martial law era focusing it on human rights and economic justice, and then went on to help establish a grass roots international peace and justice organization in Chicago to connect U.S. and Third World people. Gene Stoltzfus graduated from Eastern Mennonite High School in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and from Goshen College in Indiana. He holds an M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies from American University and a Master of Divinity from Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries in Elkhart, Indiana. He is married to Dorothy Friesen of Winnipeg, Canada. They have lived in Chicago for the past 23 years. Evening Presentation: Concert with MUSE and Drums for Peace
Articles about previous symposia... Wilmington College Peace Resource Center |
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After reporting for years for National Public Radio in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East, as well as nearer her base in Paris, Sarah Chayes is taking a break from radio to make a direct contribution to reconstructing a post-conflict society. She is directing a dairy cooperative in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Afghanistan. A courageous group of Afghan professionals founded BALCO during the dark days of the Taliban regime, and has turned to Ms. Chayes to modernize and expand the cooperative. Its objectives are to build grass-roots participation on the part of member farmers, to improve their standard of living by raising their income and improving their farming techniques, to offer a reasonable alternative to poppy cultivation, to help educate and empower village women, and to provide wholesome products for local consumers. For the previous two years, Ms. Chayes served in Kandahar as Field Director for Afghans for Civil Society, a non-profit organization founded by Qayum Karzai. Under Ms. Chayes’s leadership, ACS rebuilt a village destroyed during the anti-Taliban conflict, launched a successful income-generation project for Kandahar women, launched the most popular radio station in southern Afghanistan, and conducted a number of policy studies.
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Loyola Marymount University
Christian Peacemaker Team leader
MUSE is a women's choir dedicated to musical excellence and social change. In keeping with our belief that diversity is strength, we are feminist women of varied ages, races, and ethnicities with a range of musical abilities, political interests, and life experiences. We are women loving women; we are heterosexual, lesbian and bisexual women united in song. We commission and seek out music composed by women, pieces written to enhance the sound of women's voices, and songs that honor the enduring spirit of all peoples. In performing, we strive for a concert experience that entertains, inspires, motivates, heals, and creates a feeling of community with our audience.
Drums For Peace uses percussive gourds in a routine that consists of music, dance, and storytelling. The group encourages cultural diversity and understanding.