Marylea and I were blessed yesterday to be invited to a meeting to discuss organizing, coordinating, planning events for the weekend of March 16th.

March 16th will be five years since Rachel Corrie's passing and the group would like to keep an underlying theme of remembering Rachel for all the events that weekend. The Choral Society already has their War and Hope concert planned for Sunday, March 16th at 7 pm. We will approach that group and invite them to openly connect their event with the other events that will be happening and remembering Rachel.

The Olympia Friends Monthly Meeting - Friends/Quakers - will be welcoming our friend Adrien Niyongabo back to Olympia on that weekend. We have an event planned for Adrien at the Longhouse at TESC for Sunday.

Adrien is a survivor of the unimaginable violence in Rwanda and Burundi in the 1990s and he currently works with the African Great Lakes Initiative on surviving trauma, alternatives to violence, reintegrating communities where tribal/ethnic violence has riven the communities.

I recommend the film Hotel Rwanda if you want to know more about what happened in Rwanda and Burundi in the early 1990s and if you can stand the subject matter. I also recommend the Frontline film Ghosts of Rwanda if you want to see a less glamorized version of the story.

Author and filmmaker Jen Marlowe is expected to be in town for the weekend. Jen's work Darfur Diaries: Message from Home is tremendously moving. Jen was in Olympia for a screening of this film in Olympia's living room: Traditions Cafe (thank you, Dick) a couple of years ago.

Jen is currently working on a film, Rebuilding Hope, with the "Lost Boys" of Southern Sudan, a people displaced by war who are trying to return to their homelands and re-establish their communities, find any family members who are still alive.

Jen is also on the Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre and is a founding member of the Rachel's Words initiative.

A common thread among all of these various struggles is trauma, displacement, suffering, and the necessity of healing and peace-making that will allow communities to reintegrate and live togehter. This is very hard work. There is so much pain, anger, and resentment that attends the histories. How do we overcome the trauma, put the anger to rest and find a way to live together? That is the question we want to be coming back to over and over in these events and I think it is the question we all need to be asking ourselves.

Cindy and Craig Corrie expect to be in Haifa, Israel on the weekend of March 16th for an opening of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie.

The play continues to be staged. It is running this weekend in Albuquerque.

I hope that folks who see the production in Israel will ask themselves the existential question that we pose for this weekend: How shall we live together?

I don't think there are easy answers. I have been working with Sudanese family since 2001 and I continue to wonder how the indigenous Africans of Southern Sudan or Darfur will ever be able to live with the industrialized muslims of Northern Sudan. Even if they split the country in two, the struggle could continue over valuable resources.

We are still in planning stages and we hope to have an agenda of events roughed out this week. We are thinking of workshops on Saturday, possibly at the Olympia Center. We are hoping that Jen Marlowe and some members of the Dinka community of Southern Sudan will speak their minds about how the displaced people of Southern Sudan can return to their homelands and what they think about how the various peoples of Sudan can live together.

We think that John Harvey will be back from a trip to the Israel and Palestine and will agree to tell us about what he has seen and experienced there. We are planning to ask Steve Niva if he can lead a workshop about the Israel - Palestine situation.

And although it seems not to be on the same level, we are thinking about hosting a workshop to ask the question, how will Olympians live together? We are planning to invite folks from the administration of TESC to join us for this workshop on living together.

There are significant resentments and conflicts in this community. The police treatment of demonstrators at the Port of Olympia and the recent destruction of the law enforcement vehicle make it clear that we have our own issues here in the South Sound. There are many groups here who are not yet ready to meet with "the other side" to map a way that we can live together. That is apparent in the discussions even here on Olyblog. I am not immune from this challenge. There are certainly folks in the community that pose a significant challenge to me if I try to say how I am going to live together with them.

We are hoping to have arrange an oud concert, possibly at Traditions. And we are also hoping that that the local African drum group and choir will agree to perform. We are expecting to include a community potluck in the Saturday workshop event.

We will have a number of people here with us on the weekend of March 16th to help us think about the question: How shall we live together?

I would be very surprised if I haven't forgotten something really interesting from yesterday's meeting. The ideas were alive and developing rapidly.

More information to come.

Namaste,

Mike