“The weight is on whom?” the Rev. Peter Tibi, executive director of RECONCILE International, asked those gathered at a church in Uganda’s Omugo Refugee Camp.
Lucy Awate Dabi stands resplendent in an emerald green dress in a church social hall in the heart of Kentucky’s horse country talking about her home of South Sudan.
Squeezed together with girls about her same age, Mary sat on a bamboo pew in the sanctuary. It was the first morning of a three-day children’s trauma healing workshop. The list of things written in her new notebook included: too much housework, loss of my parents and missing school.
Reconciliation is a sacred space where weary bodies are refreshed and troubled souls are soothed, where the roar of oppression is silenced and the calm of compassion resounds. The pathway to reconciliation is long and grueling with setbacks, detours and delays. Along the journey lie ambushes of criticism and alienation, yet those on the journey press on like flocks of birds surging through cold winds for warmer homes. Reconciliation is a distant place — far from the battlefields of South Sudan — yet not beyond reach.
