young leaders

A couple weeks ago I completed co-facilitation of a Middle East Jam in Jordan’s exquisitely beautiful southern desert, where 27 young leaders gathered from 14 nations throughout the region for a transformational week. Jam participants built friendships and laid groundwork for vibrant partnerships, and gained support to empower their work for sustainability, peace, localization, community resilience, justice, human rights, interfaith dialogue, social entrepreneurship, youth development and conflict transformation. We met outdoors, and were in a place of deafening silence. We had luscious soft flat sand to meet on, right up against towering pink cliffs that provided shade from the intense sun. It was amazing, and deeply inspiring.

After the Jam I went to Hebron, Palestine, with Tareq, a Jam alumnus who leads nonviolence trainings for Palestinians. I loved the people I met, and was also pretty shocked at the level of brutality and systematic disrespect that is manifest by the Israeli settlers and military there -- it feels like it is beyond security at any price, to the point of at times looking like intentional and systematic dehumanization.