Hunt: Conflict resolution training should be as important as training firefighters and EMTs

If a fire erupts in your kitchen, do you know what to do? Do you have a fire extinguisher handy? Do you know how to call trained people equipped to extinguish fires? Yes?

If there is a medical emergency, do you know how to summon trained people who have the equipment necessary to save lives? Yes?

If you want to buy a gun, do you know where the gun store is? Yes?

If a conflict erupts, maybe at home, at work, in your church, temple or mosque, on city council, or between citizens in a state, among ethnic groups or nations, do you know what to do? Do you know where to find professionally trained people equipped to save lives and put out the fires of human conflict? No? Why not? Why are we more aware of where to obtain weapons than where to find peacemakers?

One man in South Africa is working to change that.

Apartheid ended in 1994, but wealth inequality has continued to grow; it is the worst in the world with 20% of the population controlling 70% of the wealth. The white population at about 7% still owns most of the land and has most of the wealth.

Violence is all too often the go-to response when conflict arises, from violence against women to gangs to interpersonal and group-to-group disagreements.

Oscar Siwali thinks that having people trained in what he calls “conflict transformation” is just as important as having people trained and equipped as firefighters or EMTs. And he is trying to make it happen.

I am writing this on the day of national elections in South Africa. People are angry and frustrated that the politicians have not delivered on promises made decades ago to address high unemployment and wealth inequality, but there is no consensus on what to do about it and who can best lead the country. Political violence is a real threat. Siwali’s organization, SADRA, has been working to train people in communities throughout South Africa to intervene as soon as trouble is brewing.

His organization relies on training pastors because there are a lot of them everywhere, and they have experience as leaders. There is also a push to train young people; schools in South Africa, and everywhere else on the planet, can use all the help they can get to teach students how to live together without resorting to violence.

Where did Siwali acquire many of his skills? In part, just 30 miles up the road from me at Eastern Mennonite University where I met him in 2017. He was a fellow student in a couple of classes I was taking in EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute. He was getting a masters degree; I was just learning what I could. I have been following Oscar’s work ever since.

This week “Christianity Today” published an article about his efforts in the runup to South Africa’s election. Some candidates have threatened to drive the country into chaos if they don’t win; there have been assassinations.

His organization has trained 3,000 people in conflict transformation. Their goal is 5,000.

I emailed Oscar, knowing how hard his peacebuilders have been working. He answered, ”My job is to equip community structures with skills to resolve conflicts and differences amicably. Elections bring a lot of differences, hence the need to identify and equip leaders…tough job. My religious leaders have been doing amazing work in communities, building peace and resolving community conflicts.”

He concluded, “I so wish religious leaders in the USA could see the task and embrace it.”

Sadly, although I don’t think it is entirely fair, the average American probably thinks of religious leaders as sources of conflict rather than peacebuilders.

What would it be like to have as many people trained in conflict transformation as in firefighting and emergency medical care? What if we called on them as naturally as we do the fire department and the rescue squad? What if we thought of conflict as just as inevitable as illness and fires but considered conflict resolution as obvious as having a fire department? What if we accorded peacebuilders the same appreciation that we give to firefighters and EMTs?

What if we thought our best defense was not a gun but education in conflict resolution and taught it along with good citizenship and computer skills?

Adam Gopnik observed in his New Yorker essay, “The trick is not to have unified societies that ‘share values’---those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman’s axe—-but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently.”

But as Thomas Merton observed, that task “will, in fact, require far more discipline, more sacrifice, more planning, more thought, more cooperation, and more heroism than war ever demanded.”

Oscar Siwali doesn’t think of peacebuilding as hopelessly utopian; it is just what he does every day.

This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: Hunt: The importance of conflict resolution training