Our Rotary Peace Fellows: Updates
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Editor’s note: Rotary’s theme for February is Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution month. Joy Charlton is Chair of SE PA Rotary’s Peace Fellows Committee and has successfully forwarded many candidates to the Program.
By Joy Charlton
Peacebuilding is an overarching goal of Rotary, to which all its programs contribute. The worldwide organizational structure encourages positive international relationships and dialogues, while the global and local service projects ameliorate conditions that otherwise undermine possibilities for peace.
Rotary’s largest and most intentional peacebuilding effort has been the creation of seven (soon to be eight, perhaps nine) Rotary Peace Centers around the world, and with them the Rotary Peace Fellowship program. Peace Fellows, chosen competitively, are promising early and mid-career peacebuilders who are brought together to hone their skills, learn new aspects of their fields, engage in discussions of pressing issues, develop life-long colleagues, and collectively move into serving ever more effective pathways to peace.
Our SE PA District is unusually fortunate to currently have three exceptional Rotary Peace Fellows who are in the midst of their studies.
Mohammed Fahkry, a medical doctor from Aden, Yemen, is in his second year at the Duke/UNC-Chapel Hill Rotary Peace Center where he is earning a Master’s degree in Public Health, with a concentration in Global Health, at UNC’s prestigious Gillings School. He is simultaneously earning a Graduate Certificate in Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution from Duke University. On April 11th, he will be speaking at the Center’s 32nd Annual Conference (viewable online) about his public health summer internship experience with migrant workers in the mountains of western North Carolina. Mohammed most recently visited our district in October, and he is deeply grateful for our District’s generosity in providing financial support that allows his wife and two young daughters to join him in the United States.
Rotary Peace Fellow, Carly Aquino.
Carly Aquino, from Boothwyn in Delaware County, is in her first year at the Rotary Peace Center at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. She’s found that Sweden’s cold and early nightfalls take some getting used to, but the city is beautiful, the program impressive, and newly made friends and colleagues foundational. She is finding the focus on research and data analysis there to be exactly what she wants to add to her previous policy focus. Carly served in the Peace Corps in Benin, Africa and in subsequent international positions there focused on preventing the spread of violence from surrounding conflicts. She recently gave a fascinating talk via Zoom to Swarthmore Rotarians about that work; a recording of the talk is available here.
Esmeralda Hajdinaj has completed her first semester at the Rotary Peace Center at the University of Bradford in England. Growing up in Philadelphia as part a diverse immigrant community, learning from a Fulbright Fellowship experience in a post-conflict country, and working with underserved community groups across the city, she has been inspired to pursue mediation as a form of peacebuilding, bringing disparate groups at multiple levels into conversation in ways that lead to productive outcomes.
The application process for the next cohort of Peace Fellows opens this month, with a due date of May 15th. Think about people you know – do they have the profile of a promising peacebuilder? More information about the program is available here.