A Story Illustrating 'The Poetics of Peacebuilding'

When we first started doing Summer Institutes, about the second or third year, we had a range of people who started to come from Africa and Latin America and Asia. I had always heard about but never met Sam Doe, who was one of our early graduates in this program from Liberia. And Sam and I met at a table right here, sitting down. He was joking a lot because they always kidded me, Sam and all people who came in, that they were expecting somebody with a lot of grey hair and to be much older. Now they can see that has finally all come. But Sam was a person who became very dear to our family…

And I remember that one time Sam and I were sitting. Sam never was the kind of person who trumpeted his good works and things that he did, he was always very quiet. So it would be in unexpected moments that something would come out that you didn’t know about, part of him that emerged. He told me one time about the event that had really pushed him into peacebuilding…