Patricia Smith Melton

The heart and soul of PeacexPeace is the Global Network, which came about after 9/11. Patricia Smith Melton sat up, looked at the screen, saw the many men who seemed to be in charge of creating world peace after a horrible catastrophe like 9/11 and said: "Where are the women? What does peace mean? And how do you empower women to build peace in their backyard, given how, at this point, it is women and children who suffer the most when a war happens?"

Her first project was to go with an all female documentary crew into post-conflict regions. They went to Argentina documenting women in economies that had crashed completely overnight, with 300% inflation and absolutely no way out. She went to Afghanistan, where the women had been keeping it together through the long Taliban years. And she went to Burundi, to Bosnia, to Argentina, to Afghanistan and to Ground Zero to document women rebuilding their society.

The documentary, Peace x Peace, Women on the Front Lines had its international premier at the U.N. in NYC. Peace x Peace came as an offshoot of that project and it grew into the Global Network that it is now.

The Global Network creates meaningful internet based communications between women around the world, and is dedicated to empowering women and mobilizing them as peacemakers. We connect women in order to empower them, to support them and to help them feel like what they do has value. Women’s work is crucial to reconstruction in anyplace and even to the daily goings on of a society like the United States. Women need to feel that there is value to what they do, that they are being heard, that their stories matter.

We have over 4000 members, and about 700 sister circles right now. Circles in the United States connect with circles abroad and we broker these connections. It’s based on the internet, or email, where everybody communicates through circle principles, which means you listen from the heart, you listen without judgment, you speak one at a time, and when you hit an impasse, you invite silence. In other words, if you have nothing good to say, take a moment, say nothing bad, regroup, come back to it. And it's working!

Men are an important part of the Global Network too. In a lot of places we couldn’t do it without the men because they’re in places where women don’t have access to e-mail. Men are still the people at the table, so they’re the ones who bring the women in. I would not underestimate the importance of that. Peace x Peace would not be true to its work, making it possible for peace in the world, if you didn’t bring in men as well. We have a lot of men readers. Men are indispensable, just like women are indispensable.

We are also building connectivity centers. In Kenya we have a Peace x Peace research center where women who have never turned on a computer in their lives now have e-mail. It is quite amazing to see how a person’s horizons open up, to an entirely new way of looking at another world and tapping into those resources. In Kenya the big problem was HIV. Our liaison, Mercy said what the women need most is mentorship. These women don’t want to your money. They need someone to share experience with them.

So, we set up a Peace x Peace center in Kenya where hundreds of women can go to log on, to be part of the Global Network or to just cruise the web and see what it’s like on the outside. AIDS has been around for 25 years. The women in the U.S. have resources to share, they know how to set up support systems, how to administrate and run an NGO. What the Kenyan women can tell the women in the United States is what it’s like to do that with no resources at all.

Our other Peace x Peace center is in Kabul, Afghanistan where I cannot overemphasize how important it is to give women and men a safe place to go and check their e-mail. It's expensive to go to an Internet café and to get online on a slow connection to communicate with somebody across the world. But we need to make that possible. We need to keep lines of communication going.

Our next Peace x Peace center, will be in the Palestinian Authority in Bethlehem. I can’t think of a place where that’s more crucial right now. One woman I interviewed, (she’s on our website at the moment), Ghada Issa, is an educator. She has small children, and she wants to be on good terms with her Israeli neighbors. It’s difficult to do that when you literally cannot see one another, or you can’t get to one another. Communication and contact with one another is truly what helps women bridge those connections. And that’s what we do. We help them get to know one another. We help them to stay in touch. We support their conversations and we support them in what they’re doing in order to build peace.

 Through direct communication we learn about each other, understand our differences and commonalities, and make a positive difference in the world person by person, connection by connection, and peace by peace.

 PEACE X PEACE provides technology, translators, dialogue facilitators, and e-publications to support meaningful Internet exchanges between groups of women-led Circles in the United States and women-led Circles in other countries. Our Global Network offers an innovative approach for building sustainable peace both locally and globally. www.peacexpeace.org