EARLIEST CJP STUDENTS PRIZE THE ‘LENS’ THEY ACQUIRED
Who would come from half-way around the world to enroll in a program at Eastern Mennonite University that was so new, no college catalog listed it? Sam Gbaydee Doe did. From Liberia. Initially, the plump squirrels running around campus dismayed him: They could be food for very hungry people in his war-torn homeland. He himself would have welcomed eating a scrap from a squirrel not long before. Today [November 2010] Doe is a “development and reconciliation advisor” with the United Nations Development Programme in Sri Lanka, thanks in part to his master’s degree in conflict transformation from EMU. Herein we explore the lives and reflections of the first group of students to complete EMU’s Conflict Transformation Program (CTP), now called graduate studies in conflict transformation under the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). In this series of articles, the acronyms “CTP” and “CJP” will appear somewhat interchangeably, depending on the interviewee and the years referenced.
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peacebuilder fall/winter 2010-2011