Newsletter: Summer, 2002

Healing Future Generations
— Patricia Mathes Cane, Ph.D. Capaticar Founder/Co-Director

Capacitar's summer workshops in Central America, Indonesia, East Timor and Africa focused on grassroots groups that included many young people who are committed to healing future generations and renewing their communities battered by the violence of the past. Most of these participants were born into desperate worlds, victims of violence in both home and society. Their presence in the workshops was a sign of hope, and their enthusiasm and wisdom inspired.

In Nicaragua teens from Ciudad Sandino, a large very poor barrio near Managua, participated in our Spirituality and Leadership training sponsored by the popular education center CANTERA. This workshop spanned the generations from 14 to 69. One enthusiastic 14 year-old described how he planned to teach what he had learned to his youth group so that his friends could also benefit from positive healing and spirituality. He spoke about the negativity and desperation of some of his peers who felt they had no future. Some had even contemplated suicide. This young man had the great wisdom to see that if he wasn't committed to changing the world into which he was born, then there really was no hope.

In East Timor, one of the concerns of the Capacitar team there is to reach the children. They brought together approximately 70 children for the workshops in June and July and the children responded enthusiastically to the practices.

These are children who have witnessed violence or have been part of it. Now they have practices to help heal themselves and to use for prevention—to keep the trauma of the past years of violence from passing from generation to generation, creating a wounded society in a country which needs all its resources to build this newly independent nation.

Riane Eisler in "Tomorrow's Children" says: "If today's children are to find faith that is grounded in reality, they need a new vision of human nature and our place in the unfolding drama of life on this Earth…They need to hold fast to their dreams, rather than give in to cynicism…They need all this for themselves, but they also need it for their children, lest they raise another generation X, struggling in this uncertain time to find identity and purpose."

Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy in her book "Coming Back to Life" speaks of the importance of being in "Deep Time"—living the present in a way that we are connected with past and future generations. Macy describes how to make the transition to a life-sustaining society. We must begin to act like ancestors, attuned to longer ecological rhythms, nourishing a strong, felt connection with past and future generations. As Capacitar we "elders" are committed to this heartfelt connection walking in solidarity with youth to heal and transform the violent legacy of the past so that future generations can live in wholeness.