Lucy Awate Dabi stands resplendent in an emerald green dress in a church social hall in the heart of Kentucky’s horse country talking about her home of South Sudan.
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus once told his disciples, “for they shall be called children of God.”
Spend an hour with this year’s group of International Peacemakers, back at the Presbyterian Center Tuesday after having completed more than three weeks sharing their stories and building relationships around the country, and you’ll soon realize why the Lord was and is so fond of those who work for peace.
Ten of 12 international peacemakers commissioned Wednesday are set to fan out over about 50 presbyteries in the coming four weeks, sharing the work and witness they’re doing to promote peace and justice.
Since she was in her early 20s, Erlinda Maria Quesada Angulo has been an advocate for environmental justice and human rights. She initially became involved in social ministry at the Roman Catholic parish in the small village of La Guácima, in the Caribbean region of Costa Rica.
Anastasiia Rozykova, a Russian journalist who grew up in an agnostic family, is among 14 Presbyterian Peacemaking Program’s International Peacemakers. She came to faith during her university studies, after taking a course in world religions and reading about Martin Luther and his 95 Theses.
Mabuchi N. Dokowe has 6,204 children.
Four of them are her own she is raising with her husband in Lusaka, the capital and largest city in Zambia. The other 6,200 are students in 32 community schools in the southern African nation that she oversees at the director of community schools for vulnerable and marginalized children for the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP), Synod of Zambia.
When many South Koreans think of their neighbors to the north, the phrases that come to mind are not so neighborly: “horned monsters” or “a demon to be removed,” writes the Rev. Moon-Sook Lee, who has held several ecumenical and Presbyterian posts in South Korean over the past three decades.
Recent controversies over migration at the United States’ southern border have been mirrored by similar fights in Europe, including England, where a surge of asylum seekers from the Syrian conflict brought the issue to a boil in 2015.
