Day 2 of the meetings started early again. We began with very general discussions to define and better understand the issues of social inclusion and peace building. Our three basic questions were “What is peace?”, “What is inclusion?”, and “What are the fundamental human rights?” We came up with many good answers and more importantly we kick started our brains in the morning.

Once we had definitions down we listed problems resulting from a lack of peace and social exclusion. We then discussed their causes and effects at length. Once we had completed this discussion we dove into the most important time of the meetings, program conception. In two groups the participants tried to think of activities and programs we could create to address the needs of Nepal in the areas of social inclusion and peace building. We ended up with twenty or so good ideas from which you could probably design ten really good and effective programs. We only needed one though this time.

Our most intense discussion ensued on how to best draw from the best ideas and put them together into one comprehensive plan. It was a long process but we ended up with a great idea. Essentially the idea is to create Peace Committees at a local level. Nepal’s districts are each split up into smaller units called VDCs. We propose to create a Peace Committee for each VDC. These Committees will receive training in human rights, mediation, counseling, advocacy/information collection and other things. They then will operate to build peace through mediation during local disputes, the discussion of local human rights violations and what actions might be taken. The Committees will also try to collect information from conflict victims while helping them with rehabilitation and the application of pressure on the government for victim compensation.

It is a big project and it opens up so many possibilities. Once the project was decided upon we set a second meeting time to finalize details and the meeting was adjourned. It is now mine and Krishna’s responsibility to take our rough idea from the meeting and make it into a proposal.

We will need to polish some concepts, design a realistic implementation scheme and demonstrate the need for such a program in that proposal. These are all challenges, but I think the core idea is strong enough that we will be able to do a good job. To be honest this idea and this project could really be a big step towards creating peace from the bottom up and I am excited to participate in the design of a program with so much potential.