Immaculée Ilibagiza was a 22-year-old engineering student at the National University of Rwanda in 1994 when life as she had known it came to a horrific end. Over the course of approximately one hundred days following the assassination of Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana, the remaining Hutu leadership, supported by the national army, local military and civil officials, mass media and ordinary Hutus, carried out the slaughter of as many as [...]
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Chris Henrikson | The community cure for a violent culture
Chris Henrikson is the founder of Street Poets, Inc., a non-profit poetry-based violence intervention program for high-risk youth in the juvenile detention camps, continuation schools and streets of Los Angeles County. Henrikson also calls it “a poetry-based peace-making organization,” which uses the creative process as a vehicle for individual and community transformation. I first learned of Street Poets at a Malidoma Somé ancestor ceremony in Ojai, California, which two young [...]
Linda Biehl | Radical forgiveness
In 1993, Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old Stanford University graduate, was a Fulbright scholar in South Africa, researching black South African women’s struggle for equality in the new constitution being negotiated to replace the apartheid government. On August 25, she left her office to drive three colleagues home to Gugulethu, a township outside of Cape Town. En route, she was spotted by a mob marching through the township, shouting ONE SETTLER, [...]
Gordon Hempton | We save what we love
Gordon Hempton is an acoustic ecologist. He has traveled the globe three times recording the vanishing sounds and silences of nature—from the songbird chorus that greets the dawn to the crash of waves on a rocky shore; from the call of a whale in the ocean depths to the drip of rain on a forest floor. After 30 years recording the natural world, he reports that “There are fewer than [...]