Dear Friends,

I am raising a mala to continue our Peacemaker Institute peace building initiative in Rwanda. Please sponsor a bead on my peacemaker mala (rosary) with a generous donation of any size and become part of our Rwanda Peacebuilding Team.

Donating through this website is simple, fast and totally secure. It is also the most efficient way to support my mala raising efforts for our ongoing bearing witness and peace building work in Rwanda.

You can donate by going to my First Giving page:

At the request of the Rwanda Government, my colleague Archarya Fleet Maull and I will be co-leading a trauma counseling training in early 2012 for Rwandan government and NGO leaders and staff who work with genocide survivors throughout Rwanda. We will provide this training prior to the beginning of the genocide commemoration period of 100 days that begins on April 7th. This is a particularly difficult time during which trauma reactions are becoming more serious each year, both among the genocide survivors and the professionals who work with them, many of whom are genocide survivors themselves.

Each member of our Rwanda Peacebuilding Initiative Team is raising a mala to support this critical work. If we are able to raise sufficient funds, we will also conduct our third Rwanda Bearing Witness Retreat in April or May 2012.

We are supporting our Rwandan friends in their efforts to build the kind of civil society and social capital that will prevent further violence, civil war and genocide. Along with our Rwandan friends, we envision Rwanda becoming a center for peace building in the Great Lakes region of East Africa. The Rwanda Bearing Witness Retreat is based on the bearing witness retreat model developed at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland where Fleet Maull and I have been serving as retreat leaders for many years. We served again on the leadership team for the Auschwitz retreat this November with over one hundred participants, adults and young people from all over the world.

We are deeply grateful for your support – and please don't forget to forward this to anyone you know who might want join our Rwanda Peacebuilding Team and support our bearing witness & peacebuilding work in Rwanda!

Peace & blessings,

Roshi Grover Genro Gauntt