We Have Moved!

The home of the Passport to Peace project has moved to a NEW website!  The new website can be found HERE, specifically at www.passport2peacemovie.com.  This blog will remain up for the time being, however, all of the older posts and content on this blog have been moved to the new website.

www.passport2peacemovie.com

Peace Ed.: No rope climbing necessary

As promised, this post will dig a little deeper into the Costa Rican model for peace education. A 1997 law established every Costa Rican student’s “right to an adequate peace education.” As with many well intentioned laws, however, the peace education mandate went unrealized for years. It wasn’t until 2003, when the Academy for Peace was born, that teachers began to be trained in the field of peace ed.

The Academy of Peace is the main operation of the Rasur Foundation, a Costa Rican NGO founded by US expat Rita Marie Johnson. The organization found its inspiration in a prophetic story written by a former Minister of Education in 1946 that tells of a mysterious peace teacher named Rasur. Though founded in the spirit of a classic Costa Rican fable, Rasur’s methods are cutting edge. Rasur’s unique brand of peace education, BePeace, brings together two well-researched processes. In what Rita Marie calls “feeling peace and speaking peace,” BePeace combines the Institute of Heartmath's method for finding inner peace and Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication techniques. These methods are adapted well for classroom use. The HeartMath technology, for example, includes games that illustrate the physiological effects of meditation (competitive meditation anyone?). Rasur has developed a number of kid-friendly techniques for practicing BePeace. You can learn about those in our interview with the Director of the Academy of Peace, Vera Lucia Salas.

The Rasur Foundation is currently working with the Ministry of Public Education and local school systems to finally implement the peace education mandate. So far, about 600 teachers have some BePeace training. Teachers who have completed a forty hour certification process become leaders in their school and build on-site peace teams. These special few, known as Rasurs, number about 13 at present. While the scope of Rasur Foundation’s work is still limited to a handful of schools, they offer a model which has applications in every school across the country.

What will it take for this model to spread? Well, if you can believe it, the government is totally on board with the movement toward incorporating peace education in every school. As it turns out, that 1997 law wasn’t just hot air. The Costa Rican state may lack the resources necessary to implement a national project, but its partnership with Rasur may be a match made in heaven. In a landmark move in September, 2009, the Costa Rican government established a national Ministry of Peace. Only the third country in the world to accomplish this leap toward institutional peace building, and the first non-conflict country (the other two are Nepal and Solomon Islands). Rasur Foundation played an integral role in motivating and organizing this unprecedented success and the new Ministry of Peace should be a boon to their work and that of all peace builders in Costa Rica.

If that all sounds a bit too ideal to be true, rest assured, the Ministry is no peace fairy doling out safer streets and schools in exchange for tax dollars under pillows. Peace isn’t built overnight, as they say. As of yet, we aren’t sure what the Ministry of Peace’s day to day operations entail, and it seems most Costa Ricans are oblivious to its creation. But for an organ of the state with only 10 months under its belt, what more can we expect? Our interview with the Vice Minister of Justice and Peace next Monday should answer some of these questions. We’ll fill you in on that soon.

Positive Peace

One month into our project, we must take the time to reevaluate our initial questions: What explains the Costa Rican culture of peace and can it be replicated in other societies?

Our thinking about these questions is founded on a simple theoretical framework provided in large part by Johan Galtung. Peace, according to Galtung, is not just the absence of war. Because two nations are not at war does not mean they are in peace. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States is the classic example, but look also to modern examples of negative peace between North and South Korea or Israel and Syria. Therefore, the mere absence of physical violence or war is a negative peace because the conditions that inevitably lead to violence persist. On the other hand, positive peace refers to a state of collaboration and support between states, nations, or members of a society.

In the case of Costa Rica, the 1948 Revolution led to the abolition of the military. Therefore, Costa Rica has been free of war for 62 years. Moreover, whereas many Central American states wielded military force against their own populations (Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, to name a few), Costa Ricans enjoyed a unique freedom from political violence.

But, though free from war, is Costa Rica truly a culture of positive peace? To answer this deeper question, we rely on Galtung’s notion of structural violence. Structural violence refers to the socially, culturally, or institutionally embedded measures of oppression or non-physical violence. Examples of structural violence include racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and the list goes on. Simply put, structural violence is built into the very social structure. In fact, the social structure may rely on it. To bring the theorizing full circle, positive peace is the cessation of structural violence. Sexism, heterosexism, and socio-economic inequality are plain as day in Costa Rica (CR’s Gini index is 46). Nonetheless, compared to its regional neighbors, Costa Rica scores very high in development indicators. It would seem, then, that while structural violence exists in Costa Rica, somebody is doing something about it.

That’s where we come in. So far, we have learned that Costa Rica is no “peace paradise.” That being said, we have witnessed a vibrant civil society making steps towards positive peace in all fronts. For us, some of the most exciting work is being done in the field of peace education. Our next post will explain a bit more about the peace education model being introduced in Costa Rican schools.

In the meantime, take a look at the website of Dramatic Problem Solving, an organization (run by Steven Hawkins) that uses theater methods to help communities solve their own conflicts. He draws inspiration from the work of Brazilian Augusto Boal and his Theater of the Oppressed, an important form inspired by Freirean pedagogy. Video clips will be uploaded soon.

Peace

Quick Update

Things have been very busy for us, as we have been making great headway on the documentary.  We are getting learning much about Costa Rica, and we have spoken with many interesting and insightful people.  The warm receptions that we have received from individuals and organizations has made us feel much more at home here.

We have seen so much in the past two weeks.  We visited Centro de Amigos para la Paz, who run the hostel Casa Ridgway, where we heard Honduran author Jorge Miralda speak about his recent book and the coup in Honduras.  We then visited the University for Peace, the only UN mandated graduate school for peace and conflict studies.  Yesterday we spent a day at a high school in the town of Santa Ana.  Luckily, we had a chance to speak with a teacher there who is certified in peace education by the Rasur Foundation.

We apologize that this is such a short update.  Blog posts in the not-too-distant future will cover more of the details, and there will be video clips of some of our footage posted soon.  Thanks for keeping track of our project!

First Stages of Filming

On Friday we spent time at Rasur and filmed a nonviolent communication training for Nashua Community College. This was our first real attempt at filming and besides for a few glitches we got all of the technology to work. At the training, we met many students of NCC´s Peace and Justice Studies program who came to Costa Rica to learn experientially about peace. The Rob Atkinson Scholarship Fund, created to honor Rob Atkinson who was a member of the Student Peace Alliance in the United States, sponsored many of the students on the trip. Since then, we have been working on lining up interviews and making connections to other organizations in Costa Rica. The project is progressing just as we had hoped, and we are excited for the coming week when we hope to continue to film!

Figuring Things Out

Well, we´re here! We arrived in Costa Rica on Tuesday at 10:30am to discover our bags failed to make the journey with us (they eventually showed up). We found Jonah´s friend who brought us to our apartment, which is in a beautiful neighborhood of San Jose called Rohrmoser. We took the rest of the day to get our bearings, get some food for the apartment, and figure our way around where we live and San Jose in general. The following day we took all of our gear to the Rasur Foundation, the organization that we´re working with for the project.

After a long busride and a 3 mile walk in the Costa Rican humidity, we arrived at Rasur, which has a stunning facility. We took the time to work with JP, our extremely helpful contact at Rasur, to further our understanding of our camera gear and to conduct practice interviews. We were pleased to discover that all our gear works properly, which is a miracle considering that we carried all of it while traveling. Today we are working on scheduling interviews and further developing our storyboard. Both are progressing just as we had hoped. Tomorrow we are back at Rasur to watch and perhaps film a nonviolent communication training, which will be an awesome opportunity. All three of us are fast becoming more and more excited about the project as we move from our theoretical plan to more concrete expereiences. Until our next update . . . pura vida!

  

 Ned, Jonah, and Alex at 4am at Logan Airport, Boston, embarking on the project.

  

 Our living room of the apartment in Rohrmoser.

  

 Conducting a mock interview.

 

Ned, Jonah, and JP working with the equipment.

Ready for Departure

The three of us are leaving for Costa Rica in only three days, and we are very excited to begin working full-time on our documentary, Passport to Peace.  We have been hearing about the increasing buzz surrounding our project, and we are ecstatic.  Several people have contacted us in order to learn more or to find out how to become involved.  If anyone is still interested, please do not hesitate to email us at passporttopaz@gmail.com.  We are very busy with the project details, so we will try our best to get back to you promptly.

We have begun to receive applications from NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Costa Rica who are interested in being featured in Passport to Peace.  All applying NGOs work towards the cause of peace.  We will soon begin reviewing applications, and we will get back to all those who submitted them within two weeks or so.  Thank you to all those who submitted applications!  If you have not yet submitted one, but intend to do so, please submit your application as soon as possible.

We are looking forward to meeting many of you who we have spoken with through email when we arrive in Costa Rica shortly.  Until then...

Beginnings

It is just under a month before the the three of us (Jonah, Ned, and Alex) leave for Costa Rica.  We have been speaking with our extremely helpful contact at the Rasur Foundation in order to flesh out ideas for the documentary.  The project and documentary will henceforth be called "Passport to Peace."

We will begin publicizing Passport to Peace on this blog and through a Facebook page.  These media will contain updates on what we are doing, who we are talking to, and what we are seeing, along with pictures and video.  We are asking for your support; this is a big project, and we could use all of your help.  PLEASE show your support by keeping tabs on this blog and clicking "Like" on our Facebook page.  We want to let people know about our documentary, and you can help.  None of us have ever tackled a project of this type before.

Peace is important.  Thanks for taking an interest.