Center for Reconciliation
African Great Lakes Initiative
Since its launch in 2005, the Center has identified the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa as a key geographical area of global outreach. Over four years, the Center formed a close partnership with the Mennonite Central Committee, African Leadership and Reconciliation Ministries (ALARM), and World Vision International, hosting yearly gatherings in the region and forming a fresh movement for peacemaking. Today, the African Great Lakes Initiative has impacted thousands around East Africa, drawing seasoned and emerging leaders into a vibrant ministry of cultivating, resourcing, and connecting Christian peacemakers.
Josephine Munyeli, World Vision International, Rwanda
Josephine Munyeli facilitates healing and reconciliation seminars and projects for people who have experienced severe trauma. She serves with World Vision International, a core partner in the Great Lakes Initiative. Drawing on her personal experiences of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Josephine lives out the very reconciliation and forgiveness she teaches.
She has participated in the Great Lakes Initiatives gatherings, and as a person working in an intense context of pain, she counts on the community at those gatherings to sustain her work and her hope.
“Events like this are a sign of hope for this region,” she explains. “I believe that participants are being challenged about the huge work of reconciliation ahead of us, but at the same time we are more equipped and more confident because we know that we are many on this journey. This connection to one another is a great encouragement.”
Learn more about Josephine Munyeli:
Josephine Munyeli: After night comes the day on Faith & Leadership
We Think Our Bitterness is Sweet on Reconcilers
Pie Ntukamazina: Reconciliation Is a Discipline
If the church does not take part in poverty reduction and ignorance reduction, then people will continue to suffer, a Burundian Anglican bishop and co-founder of Light University says in an interview on Faith & Leadership.
The African Great Lakes Initiative would not be possible without abiding and mutually transformative support from partner organizations in Africa. These three ministries have committed time, institutional energy, and resources to this initiative over many years of shared partnership.
In November 2006, the Center for Reconciliation organized a gathering of 45 key Christian leaders in Kampala, Uganda to learn more about needs of East African leaders in the field of reconciliation and to dream together about possible ways in which the search for peace, healing and reconciliation in the region could be strengthened and deepened in partnership with the Center.
The gathering has since become an annual event. The most recent gathering was in Burundi in January 2010, with participation from 110 African leaders from Christian-based organizations and institutions involved in ministries of reconciliation from Uganda, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Kenya, Burundi, and Tanzania.