Twelfth Month, 2001

QUERIES for the Twelfth Month: PEACE TESTIMONY

• Do you live "in the virtue of that life and power which takes away the occasion of all wars"?
• Do you seek to take your part in the ministry of reconciliation between individuals, groups and nations?
• Do you faithfully maintain our testimony against military training and other preparation for war and against the participation in war as inconsistent with the spirit and teaching of Christ?
• Do you seek to carry out consistently this testimony for peace in all your relationships, whether in family, community, or business?

CALENDAR NOTES

• Let's shine up our Meetinghouse and rescue the back yard from an acute case of neglect.
• The forum this month will be a Threshing Session on Peace Testimony (in response to request from the Peace and Social Concerns Committee of SEYM.)
• The Quaker Study Group will will meet at the Buskirk's to break bread together and then brainstorm on topics for the New Year.
• We will again participate, as a Meeting, in The Great Air Potato Roundup, which this year will also include Coral Ardesia, another unwelcome invader on our property. More details next month.

MEETING NEWS

• The clearness committee of Gainesville Friend's Ministry and Oversight joyfully approved the request of Annie McPherson and David Cook to be married under the care of the Meeting.

  The wedding will take place on Saturday, February 16 in McIntosh.

• Welcome back to the Morrises with their unflagging energy and good cheer. Things are looking better already - especially in the kitchen!

• Check this web page out. In August, Devender Sellars attended the Cuba Yearly Meeting Family Camp as a representative from SEYM. He has photos from the Family and Kids camps posted on his own website: Http://geocities.com/alaskandelivery/cuba1.html

• Let's make the rafters ring with the joy of the Christmas season at our annual party -- in the Meetinghouse, five o'clock Sunday, December 9. There will be festive food, games, music and fellowship. Bring something for the buffet table, and gifts for Gainesville Ministries (they need toiletry items and non-perishable food items).

• Moms in the Prison Program is appealing for items to relieve one of the hardships of women serving sentences. The prison supplies only bar soap, and many prisoners have no income. Shampoo, sanitary supplies, lotion, and hair products are needed. Do not send mouthwash or other alcohol-containing products.

• Our Chinese Auction benefit for the Guatemala Scholarship Fund is coming in mid-January. Please keep your eyes open for items you no longer use or unneeded Christmas gifts and plan to recycle them for a good cause.

• After having both knees replaced, Friend George Newkirk of Ocala fell inflicting substantial damage to one of his knee replacements. After extensive surgery to repair the knee, he contacted a staph infection in the wound and, although home now, he is still on daily IV antibiotics. Please hold George in the LIGHT.

• The Quaker perspective on peace was shared by Friend Jean Larson at a recent panel on peace that rose out of the Campus Ministry Cooperative. Also on the panel, were Eve McMaster , a Mennonite leader, and Father Tim Lozier, a Catholic. The panel was moderated by Sister Margaret Harig and was held in the Catholic Student Center after one of the weekly dinners sponsored by the Newman Club. For this dinner, students from the Hillel Center and The Islamic Center were invited. The Islamic Center Students provided most of the food. Father Lozier spoke of the Catholic concept of " a just war." Ms. McMaster asked if there had indeed been any wars that the Catholic Church had condemned as unjust, and Father Lozier acknowledged that there had not been. He suggested that given the increasing violence of wars and the increasing incidence of civilian casualties, the issue should be readdressed by the Church. Jean spoke about William Penn's Peace testimony and quoted him: "We are too ready to retaliate rather than forgive or gain by love and information. And yet we could hurt no man that we believed loved us... Let us then try what Love will do: For if men did once see we loved them we should soon find they would not harm us." She reminded the participants of Gandhi's and Martin Luther King's success in gaining their objectives by love and peaceful methods.

• The talk to be given by Dorothy Granada is sponsored by our Meeting in conjunction with the Episcopal Student Center, the Civic Media center, and the Matagalpa/Gainesville Sister City Project.

  About Dorothy Granada ... Dorothy is a nurse from Texas who has spent the last 11 years in the rustic and remote village of Mulukuku in the Nicaraguan countryside and whose women's medical clinic was shut down by order of the president of the country. She will be visiting on December 10th to the 13th. Without warning, one year ago, on Dec. 8th, her 70th birthday, the government sent 14 heavily armed policemen to apprehend and deport her from the country. She happened to be in the capital city of Managua and was warned and went into hiding for several months, under the protection of the people whose clinic she administered.

  After a long series of demonstrations in the streets of Mulukuku and the capital, Managua, and after going through countless investigations by more than five federal agencies, and after winning her case in several levels of the judicial system in Nicaragua, Dorothy emerged from clandestinity and continued to provide primary health care to a region of 30,000 people that had no other source of care. But when she went to apply for her new visa on September 1st, she was informed that she could not even apply. Her heroic efforts and those of her Nicaraguan compatriots struggling under a corrupt and unfeeling government are portrayed in a video (20 minutes long) that I have in my possession.

  Dorothy is scheduled to be here on her 71th birthday, and I would like to have her message of peace with justice for the Nicaraguan people get as wide a hearing as possible

  Tim Fogarty - UF Department of Anthropology

  Editors note: Ms Granada will be speaking at the Civic Media Center at 7:00 p.m., December 12th and on the 13th we will have our covered dish supper in her honor at the Chapel of the Incarnation Episcopal University Center, 1522 W. University Avenue. After dinner we will be privileged to hear her inspiring story.





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Joan Andrews, editor j6and8@aol.com
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