The next day we are following Sisters Ann and Stella, SCN past heaps of garbage into a slum of Delhi.  The narrow walkway between rows of tightly packed stone houses is guttered on either side by an open running sewer.  We turn an abrupt corner, enter a simple, tidy building and climb stone steps to a windowless room of the Women’s Center.  There in a burst of colorful saris and smiles we are welcomed by students taking a tailoring class

At the Center, women can take empowerment courses and learn numerous “cottage industry” skills to support themselves and feed their children.  For some these classes are the only barrier between themselves and prostitution or suicide.  Each woman stands, says her name and shows us a garment she has expertly hand sewn. 

“This place is full of life,” says Sister Ann as we leave, passing children using the gutter for a bathroom.  Through an open door I glimpse someone lying on the floor wrapped in a blanket, hear moaning.  And death, too.

Now, in the soft humid darkness of Jaipur, seven women and one man smile back at me from around the supper table.  The polite protocol of introducing ourselves turns heart-wrenching.  Four are from Iraq, one from Afghanistan, another from Syria.  S. Helen is sitting beside me.  What else to say except we are deeply sorry for the suffering our government’s wars cause them and their families.  Ninety-three percent of the people killed in Iraq were civilians.  One of the women at table is rebuilding her bombed home for the third time.

“We’re here to find unique and effective ways out of war,” says the Afghan woman, Sakeena.  She believes the wisdom and compassion of women, who have honed their peacemaking skills raising children and keeping families together, can offer solutions that cannot be accomplished with weapons.  She builds schools in isolated Afghan villages.

The Peace Summit, Making Way for the Feminine for the Benefit of the World Community, is a program of the Global Peace Initiative of Woman (GPIW).  Founded in 2003 in Geneva and based in New York City, GPIW is an international, inter-faith network of women leaders who come together to stimulate reconciliation efforts in areas of conflict.  Among their first initiatives was the creation of the Iraqi-US Women’s Summit in New York.  GWIP has non-governmental status at the United Nations. 

In the fall of 2006 GPIW brought together religious leaders in Syria when tensions between the US and Syria reached their peak.  In March of 2007 they gathered forty young Sudanese leaders for six days of intensive dialogue on ways they could lead their nation to a more hopeful future.  March 6-10, 2008 in commemoration of International Women’s Day, they summoned 450 women and some men from forty-five countries and nearly every major faith or tradition to India. 

The ambitious goal of the Summit?  We are here to put our hearts, minds and souls to creating a platform for global transformation based on cooperation, peace and sustainable living.  The times call for audacious women.

In the course of the Summit’s work S. Helen Prejean speaks as a member of a panel addressing ways to restore women’s dignity.   She identifies a starting place for American policy: never separate self from “other”—persons, species, lands.  Because the other is self!

I am invited to speak on the panel: Restoring the Environment: Changing Our Relationship with the Natural World.  My colleagues are from Kenya, Tibet, Mexico, Germany and Cambodia.  The young woman to my left is passionately convinced she can shift the Mexican government toward more sustainable policies. 

Yangkey, a Tibetan in exile, works to promote organic farming among thousands of Tibetan exiles.  Venerable Heik, director of Cambodian Buddhists for the Environment declares, “We cannot allow destruction of the forest for profit.  No trees mean no wood for small home! Water goes bad.  Animals die.”  Conversation with the audience extends well into the lunch hour. 

During the six hour bus ride back to the Delhi airport I see women thrashing rice by hand, boys herding goats, men leading camels laden with stacked wood.  And indeed, cows wander city streets safely.  We pass villages of tiny thatched roof homes and, here and there, a few gated mansions skirted by green lawns.  I see graceful temples and shrines where the feminine and masculine aspects of Divinity are honored. 

I think about the Summit.  Will this expensive effort to bring together women from Earth’s six inhabited continents create any real change?  Will it benefit the most poor people and lands?

“Not by might and not by power, but by my spirit,” declares the Holy One through the prophet Zechariah.  (Zc 4:6b)  Four hundred and fifty people return home, carrying stories of struggle and suffering that are beyond compelling.  Four hundred and fifty people refusing war, daring dignity.  Welcome, Spirit. 

Home in my little trailer at the Benedictine Monastery in Dayton, Wyoming everything seems so very clean, fragrant and safe.  The cacophony of India remains, however, a clamoring ache.  The ache is also energy, glowing embers that flare to invigorate my work, Earth Hope, and our Franciscan charism.  I expect I’ll never be able to leave that global table where we all are sitting.