Organizational Peace and Community Building

While I am tempted to spend the majority of this blog ranting about my housing and wifi status, I will suffice it to say that neither have been anywhere near optimal. I moved to a new location last Sunday only to discover that now, instead of crappy wifi, I have no wifi at all. I was informed/promised that it would arrive on Monday. Five days later, I was told it will arrive the week after next. I also have a cold. I fell last Saturday and have a major ouie on my arm that I have been doctoring ever since. Oh and did I mention that my body hurts, I can’t sleep, the hills are steep and I…? Okay, I’m done whining. Let’s get on to the interesting stuff—the work.

In Northern Ireland, community building and peace building are pretty much one in the same. For instance, there are numerous groups working with youth to keep them in school, keep them out of trouble, and help them visualize and work toward a positive future. This is extremely important as many of the country’s youth are vulnerable to recruitment by dissident paramilitary groups and drug dealers.

I recently met with the assistant director of the Youth Justice Agency of Northern Ireland in Derry, a public organization charged with handling youth who have broken the law. It was really good to hear about the agency’s philosophies and practices, as they are based on principles of restorative justice. I am hoping to meet with the director of the Woodland Juvenile Justice Centre sometime in the next two weeks to learn more about how youth are handled within the legal system and to visit the facility, which is basically a detention center for youth who, for a variety of reasons, have not responded to the restorative approach.

One of the main things I have been impressed with in Northern Ireland is how well the peace/community building organizations collaborate with each other. They all seem to recognize that resources (people, money, support) are limited and that they need to combine their respective strengths if they are to continue the work that must continue. For instance, the Youth Justice Agency doesn't just focus on the legal aspects surrounding the youth who come through the system. The agency collaborates with other organizations—public, private, non-profit—to address the systemic issues that many youth face, such as poverty, unemployment, depression, drugs and alcohol.

Within this environment of collaboration, it is not unusual for organizations to reach out to one another when new opportunities come up. Twice already, I have sat in on conversations between PRG and organizations they had had no previous connection with, and in a matter of an hour, together they were looking at ways they might build on each other’s strengths to achieve both groups’ respective goals. In one case, PRG and the other group even came to an agreement right then and there to co-lead an important project. It was really interesting to see how both groups knew what questions needed to be asked and what concerns needed to be addressed, and they worked it all out.

Most of the work I have been involved in has had some degree of confidentiality attached to it which makes it difficult to talk about it in any great detail. Generally speaking, a lot of the work being done here is referred to as single-identity work, which basically means that members of one tradition—Catholic or Protestant—gather together to learn about themselves and the other tradition in a relatively safe environment. Some trainings are done in mixed groups—Catholic, Protestant, and other—where the attendees’ purpose for gathering is based on a common interest such as poetry, music, or art.

As my personal focus is on dialogic processes, I have been a bit disappointed so far in that all of the trainings have felt more like lectures than dialogues, and the topics have been primarily about history and history’s role in the conflict. I struggle frequently to keep an open mind about what I see as an overemphasis on history. It seems to me that most of the people I have encountered are ready to move on. And if peace workers are not the ones urging people forward, who is?

This is not to say that there hasn’t been amazing progress in Northern Ireland. One of the things that Derry locals are proud of is the fact that you barely know when you are crossing between the two countries these days. In the not-so-distant past, going between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would include checkpoints and armed guards, and frequently meant being searched and interrogated. I have now been across the border and back twice and I couldn’t tell you at what point we passed from one country to the other except that the condition of the road changed, which my escorts pointed out. Both of my escorts, by the way, live in County Donegal (Ireland) and work in County Londonderry (Northern Ireland). In fact, living in Ireland and working in Northern Ireland is quite common in this area near the border.

Another important type of peace work being done is the reduction of tension in interface areas. Interface areas are where Catholic and Protestant communities physically sit next to each other. Last week, I traveled to Belfast to attend a meeting at a peace organization office located in a highly charged interface area. The two communities are separated by what is euphemistically called a "peace wall," which is actually a fifteen foot steel and wire barrier. Near the wall is a gate that is closed every night to reduce night time altercations between sides.

 

In closing, I want to say that I am thoroughly enjoying all of the people I work with at PRG. I won’t mention names so as to avoid embarrassing any of them, but they all have many traits to be adored. And they all have distinctly different accents than the others, which means that I am challenged every day by a minimum of six different Irish accents.  Lots of work, but lots of fun too.