It's a running joke within FORGE that the Executive Director (myself) is the least-educated of all of our staff.  It's funny, but sometimes it becomes pretty clear that I need to finish my education.  I was a junior at Stanford when I started FORGE, and by the end of my junior year I had decided to stop out of college and dedicate the entirety of my energies to growing and improving the organization.

I spent a full 2 and a half years out of school before finishing a few more units of credit in the first half of 2007.  I am now only 13 credits away from finally obtaining my bachelor's degree…and I'm about to do it.  Needless to say, developing FORGE has returned a savvy unlike any I could learned elsewhere.  But… formally completing the education I started is an important milestone.

My Public Policy degree has actually been very good at preparing me for an action-oriented approach to life and society: how to recognize problems, analyze them, and create best-fit solutions.  I've appreciated the rigorous analytical framework that it it has given me, and the extensive economic and mathematical emphasis that it has incorporated.  At the same time, I can't escape the feeling that I am learning more (and accomplishing more) by doing work rather than problem sets and papers.

But yet I am reminded that it is just 10 weeks, a mere 13 units, and that Oprah will be the graduation speaker.  Wish me luck !

When I was 7 years old, my mother told me that my family was enemies with my uncle’s wife and that they have not greeted each other for the last ten years though the distant between our home and their home was less than three miles.  

I asked her what was the cause of all those conflicts.  She told me one time my elder brother was playing with my uncle’s son who later cut my brother on the head using a knife and my uncle’s wife supported her son wrongly.  She said that my father and my uncle tried to solve the problem but she was not happy at all.  She told me not to visit my uncle’s family and she said that my uncle’s wife can easily kill me.  I told my mom that I didn’t know all that had happen between them and I was sorry because I have been eating and playing together with my uncle’s children as their home was closer to school than ours.  

I asked my mom if my uncle’s children were enemies to our family as some of them were not yet born when they fought with my uncle’s wife and if she can allow me to play with them because our teacher told us that all children are brothers and sisters, they can sometimes fight but live and play together all the time.  Mom told me to listen and follow what she has told me and to not ask any questions.  I kept quiet and didn’t not bother to ask my father about what happened, because my mom was more friendly to me than my dad  and I used to trust her very much.  But after experiencing war for myself and thinking back on that experience I have learned the following lessons:

-          The fact that families and communities all over the world still keep on telling the young about their old enemies and they want them to continue living in enmity makes it very difficult for the peace makers to do their job.

-          For peace to cover the whole world, we need a great change in our mindset . I know it is not easy but we have to face it, if we are interested in peace, because I always ask myself before I ask others, does it mean that if my grandfather failed to bring peace than all the coming generation will fail to break through?  The answer is a BIG “NO” and how long are we going to keep on inheriting enmity from our ancestors?

-           Another lesson I learned is that time and environment keep on changing and it is a big task to the current generation that we try our best at our time to bring peace to the world through interactions, forgiveness, understanding of human values, and fair judgment.  Of course, all these may not be possible without patience and sacrifice, both moral and material.

-          Finally I also learnt that it would be a grave mistake for us to go in solving problems  without consulting the elders who one time tried their best in bring peace and failed, because it is from their weaknesses and strengths that we the new generation can come up with a powerful modern tool to solve problems.

By Kwase Mohamed