Peter meets John: Guest blog by Peter

Had an interesting conversation in my office at the Peace Centre the other day. John Zimba came to talk to me about doing our diploma programme in Peacebuiding and Conflict Transformation via distance. I was quite delighted about his prospects for study in this manner, which is in contrast to recent turmoil in the Peace Centre over distance learning.

Offering the peace programme via distance is a new option that was officially launched last year just before I arrived. Everyone was pleased with how well it went with the pilot participant who used the distance option to complete a diploma after doing most of it at Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation in a previous academic year. So, word got out that one could use the distance learning option to do a peace diploma at MEF. Advertising is great, as long as you have the goods to deliver on what you advertise. To make a long story short(er), my colleague and I had begun to look more closely at the distance offering as applications began appearing rapidly. We realised that perhaps the distance offering had not been thought through quite as carefully as it needed to be. Was our system adequately set up to take participants from entry into the programme all the way to graduation? We had our doubts about several components that needed to be addressed.

Back to John Zimba. He, in fact, is an ideal candidate for the distance diploma because he has already completed a certificate programme (three months) at the Peace Centre in 2005. This is the target audience for the distance learning option in the first place. Not only that, he is passionate about what he is doing already in using his certificate training and is convinced he needs more training in order to deepen his ministry. John is a chaplain at a prison (holding ~4,000 men) near Kitwe. He has been using his peacebuilding skills to mediate conflicts among prisoners. Even more compelling, he has taken mediation skills and applied them toward practical restorative justice. That is, he found that many prisoners upon release could not successfully reintegrate back into their communities/villages because there was so much stigma and resentment still there. So, he began going to those communities and bringing victims to the prison so that victims and perpetrators could talk face to face and try to restore relationship. Anecdotally, he reports that if some level of reconciliation takes place in those kinds of meetings (often involving creating some terms of restitution), then prisoners fare much better in their reintegration efforts. John is calling this aspect of his ministry ‘The Sycamore Project’ in reference to the story of Zacchaeus who encountered Jesus and promised to make restitution to those he had wronged.

John is ready and willing to embark on the distance learning option to further his prison ministry as an avenue of peacebuilding. He is highly motivated and already deeply involved in practical peacebuilding in the name of Jesus. The cost of doing the programme by distance is about $3,000 USD. He is praying to see how God will provide for this need. I agreed to pray with him.