{"id":4050,"date":"2011-08-04T15:26:30","date_gmt":"2011-08-04T19:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/?p=4050"},"modified":"2011-08-26T07:59:42","modified_gmt":"2011-08-26T11:59:42","slug":"grads-in-india-go-to-hot-spots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/2011\/08\/grads-in-india-go-to-hot-spots\/","title":{"rendered":"Grads in India go to Hot Spots"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Ashok Gladston Xavier, MA '04. (Photo by Bonnie Price Lofton.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ashok Gladston Xavier<\/a><\/strong> brought a heart-wrenching documentary film with him when he returned for a brief visit to EMU on June 30, 2011.<\/p>\n

Shown to about 50 of his old friends and colleagues at the EMU library, the film told of terrorized women living in Khandamal, a small district of Orissa, a state in the eastern part of India. These women were part of a minority group \u2013 in this case Christian \u2013 violently victimized by mobs from the surrounding majority-Hindu group.<\/p>\n

From Ashok\u2019s perspective, the nature of the minority status in this case is less significant than the reality that all minorities tend to be highly vulnerable to persecution by majorities, unless a culture of tolerance, mutual respect and reconciliation is fostered.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve worked a lot in Sri Lanka, and there the Sinhalese majority group is Buddhist and the minority group is the Tamil-speaking, who are mostly Hindu and Muslim,\u201d says Ashok. \u201cRegardless of the groups involved in the struggle, the fundamental issue is that everyone deserves the same basic rights of shelter, food, clothing, a means to make a living, and freedom to worship as they see fit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ashok and his wife, Florina Immaculate Mary Benoit<\/a><\/strong>, often work as a team traveling to hot spots upon request for trainings in conflict transformation and trauma healing, usually over weekends. During the week, both of them hold demanding jobs in southern India \u2013 Florina does operations capacity-building for a refugee self-help organization and Ashok is professor of social work at a major university. Both of them earned PhDs in India after completing their master\u2019s degrees at CJP in 2004 as Fulbright scholars.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first question I always ask when I go into a situation is, \u2018What happened?\u2019 and then I always hear two different stories, depending on which \u2018side\u2019 I am speaking to,\u201d said Ashok. \u201cThen I say, \u2018Well, let\u2019s put parts of these stories together and see if we can answer the next questions, Who has been affected by this event? What are the violations and what are the needs? Can we take joint responsibility to address these needs?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cAnswering these questions takes days, of course, of people talking in settings, with facilitators, where they feel safe and can be honest and vulnerable,\u201d Ashok told Peacebuilder<\/em>. \u201cWe have to start with conversations and move to relationship-building to emerge from the trauma cycle of victimization, vengeance and re-victimization.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the past year, Ashok has focused intently on helping to alleviate the suffering \u2013 and break the cyclical violence \u2013 experienced by impoverished Christian citizens living in Khandamal. Over a period of 300 days, 50,000 of them were displaced from their homes and several of their villages were reduced to ashes. And it all could be traced to a misunderstanding about the killing of a popular Hindu swami. Local followers of the swami blamed Christians, but Ashok said actually a Maoist group admitted responsibility for the killing. \u201cMy goal is to help the people of this region to create what I think everyone wants, deep in their hearts \u2013 a just and peaceful society,\u201d says Ashok.<\/p>\n

In one part of Sri Lanka, Ashok and Florina have assisted the people in post-war reconstruction, using development as a tool for building peace. They facilitated a \u201cpeace dialogue,\u201d which enabled community members who had been avoiding each other to begin to interact.<\/p>\n

Two years later in this community, when a terrorist incident caused the Sinhalese-dominated military to sweep through the homes of Tamils, Ashok says the local Sinhalese gave shelter to their Tamil neighbors and told the military, \u201cIf you want to take them, you\u2019ll have to take us first.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ashok Gladston Xavier brought a heart-wrenching documentary film with him when he returned for a brief visit to EMU on June 30, 2011. Shown to… Read more about Grads in India go to Hot Spots<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[978,232,291,617],"issues":[948],"class_list":["post-4050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-resources","tag-ashok-gladston-xavier","tag-florina-immaculate-mary-benoit","tag-india","tag-sri-lanka","issues-spring-summer-2011"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4050"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4186,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4050\/revisions\/4186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4050"},{"taxonomy":"issues","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issues?post=4050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}