BRATTLEBORO — From the moment I walked into the contact classroom and sat down next to Atiya, a quiet young woman from India dressed in a white traditional dress, amid row after row of participants from around the globe, I felt I had entered an enchanted world.
A few minutes later, we all lined up, each of us sticking a colorful tag on the large map in front of the room - in some cases multiple stickers marking places where we'd lived or that had special meaning to us.
Some of our 57 participants, whose stickers stretched throughout Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe, spoke as many as five languages, we were told, and we were promised that the couple of weeks that were to follow would change our lives.
It was not hyperbole.
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Over the next several days, we shared a number of exercises. In the first one, a colored sticker was placed on each of our foreheads, and we were permitted to talk as much as we could with those whose stickers were green but politely shun those with red stickers and either engage with or avoid those with orange stickers.
How did it feel to not know our own “color,” and how did we feel about ourselves afterward?
This was to be our first taste of experiential learning and of seeing what it felt like to be the object of prejudice.
In another exercise about stereotypes and prejudices, we were asked to specify on a ballot one group that we felt uncomfortable about or prejudiced toward on the ladder of tolerance. And then we saw the sadness on the face of Susie Bellici, our session leader, as she read the results back to us, one by one: Muslim, transgender, Muslim, Jew, tea party ...
There is good and evil in each one of us, we learned, and stereotyping “the other” as all evil simply made no sense.
And if there was any doubt in our minds that these were our brothers and sisters, we came to realize in a very short time, in our hearts, that we were one.
Quite simple, we fell in love with one another as fellow human beings.
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Each morning, we shared a ritual in which a person or group shared from their culture a quotation, their word for “peace,” and a special song, which we then all sang together before lighting a candle and naming, together with all of us, the challenges faced by their people: Poverty. Oppression. Prejudice. Genocide. Isolation. Loss of cultural identity.
And then, together, we shared in the darkened space a moment of silence in honor of their people.
And through that ritual, as with our shared conversations and in class or over dinner, we discovered our common humanity and our common suffering in a world that's become dehumanizing for us all.
And there was the pivotal session on the cycle of violence, in which we're left traumatized, shocked, vulnerable, and deeply saddened as well as confused, blaming ourselves and trying to make sense of how this could have happened, before we're tempted to strike out against the “other.”
It was in this exercise, in which we placed ourselves in the moment on that cycle - depicted on the floor - we came together, in the palpable suffering of each member of this new multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious new community from Rwanda and Albania, from Liberia and Pakistan, from Yemen and Tibet.
Many of us cried. Many of us cried out in the pain of remembering, of feeling the trauma. And many reached out to comfort one another.
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The intimacy, the courage, the expressions of pain and guilt and bewilderment, washed over each of us again and again as we watched films about Nigerian and Liberian and Rwandan and Serbian atrocities, and as we attended detailed, sometimes grisly, presentations by our home countries.
Who knew, for instance, that the Diné people, the Navajos, were taken from their families at age 8 and sent to federal boarding schools, where they were stripped of their native language and cultural identity?
Who knew that the Canadian tribes face desecration of their sovereign lands by energy companies without being asked for their consent?
Who knew that sexual violence by militias in many of these troubled countries was designed to intentionally shame the men and leave the entire family broken?
We took part in role-play exercises in non-violent protest, working with a trainer from the Philippines who shared with us details of the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos. We learned from Kevin Clements, a professor from New Zealand, about a quantitative analysis of physical and institutional violence of nearly every nation in the world.
And we learned from Rwandan refugee Joseph Sebarenzi, the former president of his country's parliament, about the genocide there.
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I fear I've done a disservice to SIT's graduate program by not mentioning other components, including separate trainings that took place in non-violence, training for trainers, conflict resolution, human rights issues and economic development in peace-building. It's training that can be extended to a certificate or full master's degree. I can't say enough about the program, and how much it's needed.
Much of the contact program focused on the real enemy of injustice, and how it manifests around the world through political corruption and corporate greed under the guise of religious and racial prejudices and ethnic differences.
But the real emphasis was on the possibilities of non-violence and the active work of peace building, whether by planting trees in Kenya or offering the kids peace-training programs, which one of our participants does in Pakistan.
Many of the participants, in fact, already work on projects in their home countries, in fact. Like “Mama” Sara, who works in the women's movement in South Sudan.
Just having these people there with us, to personalize the pains and injustices inflicted on peoples around the world, but also to exemplify the possibilities for working on justice issues and grassroots peace-building projects at home, was enough to make this two-week, hands-on training very much a bit of heaven on Earth.