On Our Way to Chad, Practicing #Tools4Peace in the Air

After some quick brainstorming, our team decided on a hashtag for our 17th trip to Darfuri refugee camps in Eastern Chad. We picked #Tools4Peace because it’s exactly what we’ll be working on. Preschool education and a soccer program are tools for peace. They provide specific skills and benefits that will help the kids and their communities pretty much immediately, but they also helps to build internal peace which can then lead to interpersonal peace, to family peace, to community peace, and from there expand even further into the future. Yeah, “some might say I’m a dreamer,” as John Lennon sings, but I believe that world peace will start from the heart and mind of each of those little persons we’ll be working with in the camps.

On this trip, some of our i-ACT team members — those going and those staying back home — will be working on our internal peace. It makes sense. We should start with ourselves. One of the #Tools4Peace we’ll be using is Tonglen meditation. For me, it will be at the very basic level, and I can’t really know if I’ll be doing it right (or even if there’s a “right” way to do it). Rachael is joining me on this also.

Here’s some of what Wikipedia says about the practice of Tonglen: