Of Losing and regaining love and humanity

Story of my efforts to overcome intergenerational trauma and bring more humanity to my life – Malik Rashid

Love that women blessed me with, nourished me and sustained me. Without it I would not survive. In her Nobel winning novel ‘Beloved’, Toni Morrison wrote: “A man ain’t nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that’s somebody.”

Physical abuse from in-laws after marriage at the age of 15; bearing a girl child a year later and witnessing her child die of malnutrition within the next year, was the time of her life my mother most vividly remembered and repeated often. Stories from her life before marriage included the death of her father and the suffering that followed under feudal hegemony of her paternal uncles.

For my parents, marrying off their 3 daughters was most important. Marriage vows of my youngest sister were performed when she was only 13 to a man at least twice her age, on the pretext that mom and dad couldn’t undertake the hajj pilgrimage until marriage of all their daughters were solemnized.

From boiling tensions, the political situation exploded into genocide. As my family migrated and faced the challenge of starting a new life, my sister’s in-laws grew wary of the lack of financial support they expected from my parents in return for the arranged marriage of their son.

In her teens, my sister went from marriage to divorce to another arranged marriage. I saw her suffer mentally and physically as she was lugged back to our house from her husband’s, each time she broke down under abusive conditions.

For children, abuse was common to boys and girls. Adult life brought endless suffering for women. Men had to join the fraternity of oppressors. As men became complacent due to their privileged status, women grew resilient after grinding it out under violence and oppression. Among the children my siblings and me reared, girls excelled in academic achievement. Women earned their sovereignty through hard work in adverse conditions. Addiction to aggression and conformity with the system made the boys dependent.

As a young man in the 70s, my life was juxtaposed between enlightenment of the sexual revolution in the west and the environment of aggressive male-domination in Pakistan. My wife, sisters, daughters and others could better tell my participation in exploitation and abuse of women but my aspiration for gender equality survived through love for my daughters. Despite my love for them and openness towards women’s liberation, migration to Canada brought new tensions. Adjusting to independence of women in the family as they assume full control of their lives and sexuality is a difficult process. Through this process I started to regain my humanity.

POSITION DESCRIPTION:

Description of Duties:

• Assist the InterChange Treasurer in maintaining InterChange’s finances
• Create and deliver annual or bi-annual financial reports to InterChange members
• Produce cash flow statements and projections every 2-3 months
• Manage and report funds collected
• Maintain receipts submitted by members
• Log money in/out

Skills and Experience (not mandatory but a strong asset):

• Degree (or studies in progress) in finance, accounting, business or related field an asset
• Bookkeeping experience
• Organized, reliable

Application Deadline: Rolling application

Total Hours Per Week: 2-4

Location: Must be able to attend meetings in downtown Toronto; most of the work can be performed remotely

Please submit application to volunteers@interchange4peace.org.

POSITION DESCRIPTION:

Description of Duties:

• Update Twitter daily with information provided by other members (ie. Blog links, thoughts to share, event updates, etc)
• Perform regular management and updates of posts regularly to our Facebook page
• Network and connect with other organizations through social networking

Skills and Experience (not mandatory but a strong asset):

• Experience in working with social media (facebook, twitter, pintrest, instagram, wordpress, etc.)
• Comfortable using new technologies and platforms for sharing
• Ability to concisely summarize and capture information
• Experience social networking with other not-for-profits or organizations with mandates similar to that of InterChange
• An interest in social justice, peace building or reconciliation/healing

Application Deadline: Rolling application

Total Hours Per Week: 3 to 4 hours per week

Location: The volunteer can work remotely but will need to keep in contact with President, IT Manager, and Administrative Coordinator of InterChange.

Please submit application to volunteers@interchange4peace.org.  This job has a rolling application deadline.

POSITION DESCRIPTION:

Description of Duties:

• Attend local centre events such as yoga in the park, workshops, meetings, book club, etc. to take photos
• Upload photos to our internal community website (“basecamp”)
• Edit photos or create shots for use on our website
• Create videos using footage or still images from InterChange events to create Youtube videos we can share

Skills and Experience (not mandatory but a strong asset):

• Creative arts, photography, or graphic design
• Photo and/or video editing
• Digital imaging
• Interest in community peacebuilding and reconciliatio

Application Deadline: Rolling application

Total Hours Per Week: An average of one event per month for a period of 3 to 5 hours

Location: Toronto, ON (many events will take place at OISE, 252 Bloor St. W, however there may also be events at other locations around the city)

Please submit application to volunteers@interchange4peace.org.

Note: Since the events are not regularly scheduled, timings will be different for each (day and/or evening) as well as the days of the week (weekdays and/or weekends).  The ideal candidate would have a flexible schedule with their other commitments so that they can attend our events.

POSITION DESCRIPTION:

Description of Duties:

• Liaise with InterChange’s Social Media Coordinator
• Work with members to implement InterChange’s Communications Plan and communicate the importance of community-based peacebuilding to a broader audience
• Build partnerships with community stakeholders

Skills and Experience (not mandatory but a strong asset):

• Degree (or studies in progress) in Marketing, Public Relations, or Communications an asset
• Communications experience in a not-for-profit setting
• Ability to develop appropriate online content, liaise with the media, and share information with public

Total Hours Per Week: 3-5

Application Deadline: Rolling application

Location: Most of the work can be performed remotely.  Some meetings in Toronto may be required.  The volunteer will need to maintain regular contact with Social Media Coordinator.

Please submit application to volunteers@interchange4peace.org.

Let there be Peace 

By Lina Babiker and Rida Raheel

The hot wind blew

Shuddered the small shacks of Western Africa

Slowly, the Ghanaians watched as the world collapsed around them

Liberia spilt refugees into their borders

Sierra Leone was a chaotic land of bloodshed

And Ghana was well on its way to another civil war

Two tribes

At a feud since the beginning of time

A bitter history, the division remain

One saw themselves superior

For they had a chief

They had power, they had wealth

It started with a small dispute

A mere misunderstanding

But war is a flame, even the smallest spark can burn a forest

Peace talks were arranged

The chief of the superior tribe arrived

Spitting insults, furious that only a young man from the small tribe came to negotiate

The young man stood, nodded

When it was his time to speak

“Father” he said with the upmost respect, “you are perfectly right”

His humility caused the chief to pause and work for peace

There is much to learn from this young man’s wisdom

In order to achieve the dream of peace

We must stand United

For we are a community

Let there be diversity

To avoid adversity

To you we present the truth

Let us return to our youth

We seek to achieve our dream

That one day there shall be peace

Let our minds overflow with solutions

Lets take it one step at a time

Embracing, tolerating and celebrating our differences

Let there be peace

(Please read below or download the PDF version by clicking here.)

A concept I use extensively in my teaching and peacebuilding work is that of peace as a “process-structure”. I learned about this through the work of peacebuilding theorist and practitioner, John-Paul Lederach, who drew on ideas from quantum physics to develop this concept. For Lederach, peace is neither just an endless dynamic process nor a fixed end-state; it is both. He uses the metaphor of a river to illustrate this. When you stand knee-deep in a flowing river, you see, feel and hear dynamic movement of the water. However, if you view the river from the top of a mountain or an airplane, it appears as a static shape.

Being involved in the day to day work of InterChange is like being in the swiftly flowing river or perhaps a whirlwind: busy, exciting, and often taking us in directions we hadn’t expected. However, at the time of our Annual General Meeting, when we look back to take stock of what we’ve done over the past year, the big picture of the “structure” side of the concept emerges.

The big picture, the main focus of our work over the year has been peace literacy—the idea that peace is not an abstract, unattainable dream, but rather a way of looking at the world involving  values, attitudes, concepts and skills that can be learned and put into practice. We’ve promoted this idea within our organization and taken out into our communities, guided always by the notion that “Everybody can be a peacebuilder”.

In looking back over the year, we find that this work is foundational to the vision and mission of InterChange, and that this focus has helped us define our niche. It has also given us a solid base on which to build, and we have defined this as the direction we want to take in our Strategic Plan.

Another highlight of the year is the further development of our website especially with the expansion into exciting new areas such as the intersection of Food and Peace, and where Health and Peace meet.  Over the year, we produced a newsletter focused on the theme, “Everyone can be a Peacebuilder” and our Facebook page has been very active. We’ve also produced attractive InterChange promotional brochures, a series of educational postcards, and an InterChange banner, which was unveiled for the first time at our 2012 AGM!

I’ve also been most encouraged by the dedicated hard work of our members around the world and by the new people who have come into the InterChange family over the year.  I look forward to the future development of InterChange with excitement and enthusiasm.

Anne Goodman, President

2011 ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING (AGM)

InterChange’s AGM was held on June 11, 2011 in a unique bookstore/community space in Toronto, Canada, called Accents on Eglinton. As is our usual practice, the AGM was followed by an event of interest to both people in InterChange and the wider public. The 2011 event focused on our project, “Building a Culture of Peace in Toronto,” and we used a strength-based, Appreciative Inquiry approach to look at what we had achieved to date with the project and where we wanted to go in the future. The approach used 4 D’s:           

• Discovery (Appreciate what is)
• Dream (Imagine what might be)
• Design (Determine what should be)
• Destiny (Create what will be)

The workshop made a significant contribution to our focus on peace literacy and the “Everyone can be a peacebuilder” theme that emerged over the past year.

2011/12 INTERCHANGE BOARD

InterChange Board members worked hard over the past year, taking on responsibility for committees, various areas of governance, and local centre activities. The Board consisted of the following:

Anne Goodman (President) – Toronto, Canada

Ezra Houser – Toronto, Canada

Tor Iorapuu- Jos, Nigeria

Issa Kirarira- Kampala, Uganda

David Macharia- Nairobi, Kenya

Erin Scuccimarri- Toronto, Ontario

Charles Tauber- Vukovar, Croatia

Carolyn Webb (Secretary) – Ottawa, Canada

Michael Wheeler (Treasurer) – Toronto, Canada

Ezra Houser, Issa Kirarira, and David Macharia, and Erin Scuccimarri have decided not to run again for the 2012-13 term.  We would like to sincerely thank them for their contribution to InterChange during their term on the Board and we look forward to working with them in other capacities.

EDUCATION AND PROJECTS

InterChange projects fundamentally define and solidify the organization and its work.  Projects are multi-dimensional in that they integrate with all other aspects of the organization’s work including action, community building and relationship building.  Projects provide opportunities for members to be involved in the organization’s activities.

Projects also contribute to InterChange’s identity as an organization that is both international and intensely local. Projects are international in scope but are rooted at the local level, taking their shape from and contributing to the local context. Project themes emerge from the interests of members and have the capacity to link and engage members from around the world.

The aim of InterChange’s educational work is to provide basic knowledge, skills, and attitudes to a number of groups in the context of the theme Everyone Can Be a Peacebuilder.  This work is targeted at trainers of trainers, peacebuilders, and the public.  InterChange’s public education efforts aim to transform societal ideas on peacebuilding and to build general consciousness of peacebuilding at the grassroots.

Building a Culture of Peace in the GTA:  This is an exciting education and training programme that was initiated in September 2010 with the support of the Catherine Donnelly foundation. The funding was for one year, and allowed us to employ our first full-time employee.  We have worked to make the project sustainable and ongoing by using an earned revenue model whereby a portion of course fees goes to the facilitators and a percentage is retained by InterChange.  This has allowed us to retain a part-time staff person.  We are also seeking donations specifically for this project and will pursue further grants in the future.

The project connects facilitators able to offer peace-building workshops with leaders and members of communities who want to foster a culture of peace in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada. The programme targets, amongst others, communities facing ongoing cycles of violence due to historic and current traumas, and systemic injustice. These include diaspora communities from conflict zones, women and youth.

Highlights of the project include:

• Developing a foundational workshop, Everyone can be a Peacebuilder, using the metaphor of a picnic to explore participants’ unique peacebuilding roles
• Creating a series of peace postcards and other materials that have great utility for education about peace
• Continuing our workshop series entitled Peace begins at Home in 2 Toronto-area high schools
• Piloting a 4-module workshop series at Centennial College
• Providing a number of workshops in the community, including with the Rexdale Women’s Centre and the Toronto Crisis Response team
• Offering meaningful opportunities for volunteers, interns and practicum students to be involved.

Toolkit for peacebuilders:This project was initiated at the InterChange symposium in Rwanda in 2005 but received new energy and far better definition during the Facilitators’ Workshop in Kenya at the end of 2010.

InterChange is developing a toolkit that will compile and share peacebuilding models, tools and ideas that its members have found useful.  Each tool will provide information about: who has used the tool; where it can be obtained; in what situation people have found it useful; how it was used; and where it may not be suitable / advisable to use.  The intention is not to create an exhaustive list of resources but rather one that has been peer reviewed and recommended.  A template has been developed for collecting resources for the toolkit. The toolkit will be made available to InterChange members through the organization’s website.

Food/Peace project:This is a long-term InterChange project that recently became an ongoing column on our website, due to the efforts of InterChange volunteer, Rebecca Ballen.  Food is universal, and every culture has stories of how food is connected to peace and conflict. Because identity and cultural issues play such a big part in violent conflicts today, the symbolic value of food in peacebuilding can be enormous.

InterChange is collecting and sharing experiences about how food and drink are used to build peace in our communities, with an online column of stories, recipes, pictures, songs, poems and snippets of information. Rebecca uses the metaphor of the Eastern European folk tale “Stone Soup,” to describe this project. Just as all the villagers in the story contributed food items to create a delicious soup, creating and sharing an ongoing Food and Peace column together is part of building peace.

 
COMMUNICATION

Our website: The past year has seen a marked development and expansion of our website.  We initiated a section called Peace Talk, which broadly explores the many different ways we understand and experience peace in our lives. This section has a number of components, including our definitions of peace and peacebuilding, our stories from around the world, the column on Food and Peace discussed above, and a new focal area on Peace and Health, initiated by Anthea  Darychuk. Anthea describes peace and health as mutually reinforcing concepts, and suggests we cannot have one without the other. In all of these areas, we are encouraging InterChange members to send their stories, ideas and resources.

Other features of our website include:  a number of photo galleries, updates and information on our projects, and regular President’s messages.

In the future, we’d like to generate regular blog posts on practical and theoretical aspects of peacebuilding. We also plan to further develop the interactive nature of the website.

Member’s only website: We have developed the technology for a members-only section of the website and will be using it to post the Toolkit for Peacebuilders, amongst other information.

Newsletter: A second editionof the InterChange newsletter has been produced on the theme of “Everyone can be a Peacebuilder’. 

Social media: We also have an active Facebook page and plan to initiate a Twitter presence.

Other communications: Because we are an organization based on relationships and because of the geographical distances that separate us, communication technology is very important. We will continue to search for and develop technologies that allow our board to function well across distance and to allow real communication among our members and local groups around the world.

We are also hoping to create opportunities for members from different centres around the world to get together in person.  One such opportunity is the 20^th anniversary of the Transformative Learning Centre, the university host of InterChange, in 2013. We also encourage InterChange student members to do internships and independent study in InterChange centres in other parts of the world when possible.  

INTERCHANGE LOCAL CENTRES

InterChange is a Canadian charitable organization with members in different parts of the world.  Our work is both international and local, and Local Centres bring InterChange’s work to the local level. We seek to establish local centres where there is a concentration of InterChange members, recognizing that the form and composition of the centres may differ from place to place. 

InterChange Kenya Local Centre

The context of the work is the approaching elections which will be held in 2013. After the 2007/8 post-election violence, there have been many state level responses, including the August 2010 referendum and the establishment of the Kenyan Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission, and the International Criminal Court indictment of Kenyans responsible for the 2007/8 post election chaos.

After InterChange’s very successful Facilitators’ Workshop held in Nairobi at the end of 2010, members in Kenya have been working on community-level training workshops and discussion forums. The work has been focussed on reconciliation and healing after the post-election violence of 2007/8, as well as preventing violence in the upcoming election.

Communities across the country have reflected on the following questions:

• What were the causes of the post election violence 07/8?     
• Is it possible for the reoccurrence of the post election violence in 2012/2013?
• How to prevent the reoccurrence of the post election violence?

InterChange members in Kenya are mainly concentrated in Nairobi and in Kisumu, in western Kenya.

InterChange Uganda Local Centre

The organization promotes peace on all levels, from the individual to family to community, and branching out to the national and international levels.

The centre has been active in 3 parts of the country: Kampala, Kabale in the southwest of the country, and Lutengo,  a village in the Mukono region.

The centre carries out a range of activities, including:

•  Peace education in the schools
•  Media and peace programs and regular peace radio broadcasts
• A program for youth , “play soccer, make peace”- played on religious holidays and UN days
• In Lutengo, with the donation of 3 laptops, the centre offers an Internet café with computer training, internet surfing, typing, scanning and counseling services, among others.

InterChange Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Local Centre

The Centre holds activities that deepen relationships between its members and programs that provide outreach and education to the broader community.

The primary focus over the past year has been the Building a Culture of Peace in the GTA project.  

 Teresa Holleran took on the role of Local centre coordinator. The local centre plans to host at least six events a year.  Events during the past year included Meditation Monday, when people were introduced to breathing, mindfulness, and yoga in a local park, and an event following the 2011-12 AGM called Remembering Partition 1947: A Dialogue for Healing and Change. Upcoming events include a book discussion, a youth-focused event and a social event for our members.

InterChange Vukovar Local Centre

In Vukovar, Croatia, the Coalition for Work with Psychotrauma and Peace (CWWPP) serves as the local host of the Vukovar Local Centre of InterChange.  InterChange Board member, Charles Tauber, notes that it is now 20 years since the Balkan wars began in 1991.

CWWPP/InterChange believes that “everyone can be a peacebuilder”. Their work includes:

• A program of sensitization/public education to get people to talk about their lives and to work together to achieve health and healing.
• Working on the Course for Workers in Areas of Regeneration (CWIAR), which includes work on communication, psychology, civil society, non-violent conflict transformation, and human rights. The idea is to give people with little or no education in these fields sufficient knowledge, skills, and attitudes to work in their communities. They are now completing the manual for the course and developing an online version of the course.

Jos, Nigeria

InterChange Board member, Tor Iorapuu, lives and works in Jos, Plateau State, an area which witnessed the centre of a great deal of Christian-Muslim violence over the past year with ever-increasing militarization, escalation of violence and police presence. As in many other areas of the world, the communities lack trust in the politicians, media and the military.

 In reporting on the peacebuilding work being doe in the community, Tor remarks that “hope is not lost”. Youth, Adolescence Reflection and Action Centre (YARAC) is a youth focused group working with young people on a variety of issues and using a number of approaches, including Development Theatre and Soccer 4 Democracy. Over the past year, the group has drawn on the core lessons learnt from InterChange–dialogue and Nonviolent Communication– allowing people from different religious groups the opportunity to speak, listen and hear each other.  Young people from the group have shown remarkable tolerance, maturity and solidarity, and they have been able to take their message to other youth groups in different communities.  The outcomes look promising. Tor remarks that, “Moving from one community to another is our InterChange way of breaking barriers….Peace cannot be achieved at hotel conference halls but with the people sharing and empathizing with and in their contexts. “

Physicians for Human Rights is an international network that uses “science and medicine to stop mass atrocities and human rights abuses.”[1] I was excited to speak with PHR after hearing a lot about their work with Palestinian hunger strikers in Israeli prisons shortly after I arrived in the West Bank in May. Much had been reported about Israeli prison staff shackling hunger strikers to beds, restricting their movement and humiliating them by allowing soldiers into their rooms to heckle and harass. At the time of writing, dozens of Palestinian men have been on hunger strike against Israeli policies of arbitrary administrative detention. Some have held on for as long as 104 days without food, access to private medical care, family visits or independent physicians. In this context, physicians working with PHR-I work as advocates. The organization supports transparent and impartial treatment of inmates in Israeli prisons, by public media campaigns, professional advocacy platforms and social media outreach.

But it also does much more.

PHR is an interesting organization in its steadfast commitment to human rights principles and practical application of technical assistance. In one of their programs in the occupied Palestinian territories, volunteer Israeli doctors and health professionals staff mobile clinics and provide primary care to those who lack access to it because of the Israeli separation barrier. “We bring people to the West Bank and this challenges the separation we feel in our everyday lives’ Kifah tells me, “this is the thing we are able to do.” By bringing two groups into contact, albeit with a power imbalance, PHR-I still pushes the envelope in terms of peace and reconciliation efforts.

To learn more about the organization, check out their website:http://www.phr.org.il/default.asp?PageID=4

Please watch the interview and reflect on how people from one group in a conflict can opt to work in peace promoting, life-giving ways while their government does the opposite.

At InterChange, we hope to showcase how peace and health promotion work actually works, and what it looks like. I hope the interview conveys this.

You can find my interview with PHR here:

Some of the questions I asked  Kifah were;

Could you tell me who you are and what your organization does? [0:02]

Do you partner with any other organizations? [1:00]

Do you have examples of health and peace workers coming together? [1:56]

Here Kifah talked about one of PHR’s largest programs, which involves Israeli physicians volunteering their time to staff mobile medical clinics in the occupied Palestinian territories. She spoke about how bringing both groups face to face in the context of a patient-doctor interaction had been eye-opening and positive for both parties in the conflict. Kifah reported that one doctor said “The last time I was here, I was in the army and I had a gun- now I come with band-aids and medicine” which I think shows how powerful this type of work is, in relation to both health and peace.

Later on, I tried to dig into what were the discrete linkages PHR saw between peace and health and whether or not the organization employed similar strategies to address the two goals [6:15]. The advocacy organization has a specific focus on the right to health, and sees their biggest success being the legitimacy they enjoy to work in both zones, and protect the right of Palestinians and Israelis without discrimination. “We are willing to protect the right to health and we are saying this from inside Israel” said Kifah [13:04]. Involving the medical community was also cited as a major accomplishment for the group.

My interest in PHR stems from their nonpartisan commitment and dedication to protecting and promoting human rights for all people living in the area they work. My interview with Kifah caused me to question what the role of government here is? Is it only under the auspices of health that the initiative is tolerated by the Israeli administration? Would it be helpful or harmful to PHR if a mainstream political party were to visibly support their work? Does political coverage make peace and health promotion more simple or does it threaten the very foundations such work is trying to build? When a post-conflict country moves toward establishing its own health systems, usually with foreign monetary assistance, how can that transition build health systems that promote peaceful environmental conditions?

TAKING STOCK: MOVING FORWARD

We’re officially into Fall—the time of year when we gather the harvest and make long-range plans for the year ahead. Using the picnic metaphor that has been a key part of our work, InterChange is planning a half-day working session to take stock of our work in the Building a Culture of Peace in the GTA project and plan how to move forwards.

Who should attend?

• Current InterChange members and those who’d like to join us
• Volunteers who have been working and/or would like to work on this project
• Workshop facilitators and those who would like to develop workshops and/or learn facilitation skills

Purposes of the workshop

•  To  review the workshops currently offered, to see what’s working and what improvements can be made
•  To identify opportunities for future workshop development and/or modifications
•  To identify areas for Training-the-Trainer opportunities to expand our roster of facilitators
•  To look at how to promote these workshops to communities and organizations who would benefit for them

Event details

• DATE:  Sunday, October 14^th, 2012
• TIME: 2-pm to 5pm
• PLACE: Peace Lounge (7th Floor) atOISE,252 Bloor Street West.
• TO BRING: Food snacks or drinks to share (it’s a picnic!)
• DONATIONS: Always welcome.  Every little bit helps!

Before the event

Please familiarise yourself with the current workshop flyer, available at this link: http://interchange4peace.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ICWorkshopFlyerNov2011.pdf

RSVP your attendance to community@interchange4peace.org

Congratulations to Lutengo A team, the winners of the “Play Soccer, Make Peace” match in celebration of Eid!

Written by Denis Cox Emuria

InterChange for Peace Uganda marked this year’s Eid, the Muslim festival celebrating the end of Ramadan, with a soccer match.  The match was held at St. Anne playgrounds in Lutengo, Nama Sub-County in Mukono District.

The match was part of InterChange Uganda’s “Play Soccer, Make Peace” programme, the mission of which is to bridge the differences between cultures and religions, and to be united by the common good.  “Play Soccer, Make Peace” matches are regularly played on religious holidays (such as Easter, Christmas and Eid) and on other internationally recognized days (such as the UN International Day of Peace and International Day of Tolerance).

Four adult clubs competed in the tournament: Katoogo FC, Kyapa FC, Lutengo A and Lutengo B. The final Eid match was played between Lutengo A and Lutengo B football clubs.  The final winners of the game, Lutengo A, won in a penalty shoot-out and walked away with a full kit of sports jerseys donated by InterChange Uganda.  Prizes,which included  t-shirts, soccer balls, and cash prizes, were also given to the best players nominated in the games.  You can find more photos of game day in the Photo Gallery.

Before the main event a “curtain-raiser” match was played between children’s teams consisting of players aged 10-14 years old.  The children’s teams were given refreshments by InterChange Uganda, but due to lack of resources, the children did not receive any prizes. In the future, InterChange Uganda hopes to support the children’s teams with sports uniforms and footballs for training.

Addressing the invited guests, spectators and players was the coordinator of InterChange Uganda, Mukono Branch, Mr. Lubuulwa Henry, who urged the youth to work hard towards developing their natural talents.  His words of encouragement to the youth advocated working hard as a means of achieving goals towards self and community sustainability.  As he expressed, “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop”.  Mr. Henry thanked those who have participated in conflict resolution in Lutego and those who have been appreciative recipients of the work accomplished in the community, particularly in re-uniting families dealing with conflict.

The Chairman of InterChange Uganda, Mr. Issa Kirarira, also addressed the players before the match.  He called upon the players to prioritize self-determination before monetary gain and to direct their energy towards developing their natural talents and abilities in order to achieve the objective of “Play Soccer, Make Peace”.  Mr. Kirarira reinforced ideas of peace and tolerance amongst spectators, urging them to extend strong affection towards one another if we are to avoid violent conflict in society.  He appealed to the local community in Lutengo to register for membership with InterChange Uganda because of the wide range of opportunities it offers, and to seek out InterChange’s local facilities to build up the community instead of traveling long distances for similar services.

InterChange is a community based organization with roots all over the world including: Canada, Nigeria, Kenya.  Services offered by InterChange for Peace Uganda include: computer training, internet surfing, typing, scanning and counseling services, among others.  The organization promotes peace on all levels, from the individual to family to community, and branching out to the national and international levels.

InterChange Uganda will be hosting another “Play Soccer, Make Peace” match in celebration of the International Day of Peace on Friday, September 21, 2012.  They hope to raise funds to supply the children’s teams with balls, uniforms and other equipment.  To support InterChange Uganda with a financial donation and to find out more about how to receive tax receipts for your donations, please visit our donations page.  For donations being made within Uganda, please contact Issa Kirarira.