Their message is
”
get in the way,
”
and that’s exactly what the Rev. Carol Rose, daughter of a
Hollister couple, plans to do now that she has taken the reigns of
the Christian Peacemaker Teams organization in Chicago.
Their message is “get in the way,” and that’s exactly what the Rev. Carol Rose, daughter of a Hollister couple, plans to do now that she has taken the reigns of the Christian Peacemaker Teams organization in Chicago.
An Mennonite minister, Rose is the daughter of John and Dorothy Rose in Hollister. She spent the last six years as pastor of a Kansas Mennonite congregation and will now share her duties as program director with Doug Pritchard in CPT’s Toronto office.
The 1978 graduate of San Benito High School officially started work on Sept. 1, but the symbolic nature of her position will take center stage as she departs Chicago to spend three weeks in Hebron, part of Israel’s much-contested West Bank.
“CPT has grown out of a challenge,” said Rose. “What would it look like if we were willing to risk as much for peace as soldiers do for war? The first name for the Christian faith was ‘the way,’ as in the way of Jesus. Getting in between two parties who are involved in lethal confrontations is a way to follow that.”
Staff members are stationed in places like Hebron, where they escort Palestinian children to school past a violent Israeli settlement; Iraq, where they keep an eye on military raids and the families of missing Iraqi citizens; and Arizona, where they monitor the interaction between migrants and border agents.
“When CPTs first went to Hebron, it was one of the absolute hot spots in terms of violence between people in the West Bank,” said Rose. “The presence of international nonviolent observers who will tell the world what is happening is a deterrent.
Hebron is not one of the places where you hear about the most direct interpersonal violence anymore.”
Early life experiences inspired Rose to become a peace worker.
As a high school senior she traveled to Thailand for an exchange program, opening herself to the broadness of the globe. In college, she visited Central America during the years of disappearances and civil war.
The experiences stayed with her, and she devoted herself to working toward peace for at least a couple of months each year, serving much of her time with CPT in Columbia.
The experiences have not been without their scars. Observers deal with large amounts of trauma, from the secondary effects – nightmares, sweats and anxiety – brought on by the tales of degradation, fighting and torture they hear to more direct sources of shock, such as witnessing large-scale bombings in Iraq.
In September and October, members of the Hebron delegation, one of three such international delegations in the area, were attacked by Israeli settlers from the nearby Ma’on settlement.
Observer Chris Brown of San Francisco and his teammate Kim Lamberty were set upon by five masked settlers carrying a chain and bat as they walked schoolchildren from the village of Tuba to their central elementary school in another village called al-Tuwani.
Brown suffered a punctured lung while Lamberty’s injuries included a broken arm.
One of the most heartwrenching losses for CPT members, however, was a recent accident. Iraq team member George Weber was killed in a car crash while serving CPT in 2003.
“We don’t just sit aside and expect changes to happen,” said Rose. “We’re willing to put our lives on the line. I think we’re at a juncture in history that is incredibly exciting. Millions of people were in the street and yet the war went on. But MILLIONS of people were in the street. More and more what I hear is that the common knowledge is ‘Of course you can’t stop violence with violence.’
“I see the very feet that the war machine stands on as crumbling. Our time is kind of like being abolitionists in the early 1800s.
A huge change is coming, but we’re kind of the first wave, at the hinge of a door that is opening.”
About Peacemakers
Christian Peacemaker Teams is an initiative of the historic peace churches (Mennonites, Church of the Brethren and Quakers) with support and membership from a range of Catholic and Protestant denominations. For more information on CPT, visit their Web site at www.cpt.org.
