From the Boundary Waters to Rwanda to DC: A Reflection on Inner Strength
Grace Connors July 29, 2024
It is not often that you find your personal motto while waist-deep in mud, but that is exactly where I found mine.
The week prior to my freshman year at Notre Dame, I was sent to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota for Outward Bound, a wilderness leadership program. While the stated goal of the program was to gain leadership skills in a non-academic setting, in practice this looked like five days of camping in the woods and canoeing along the border with Canada alongside a group of six other young scholars.
On our third day, I was chosen to lead our group to our next campsite, but there was a twist: we did not have a set path on our map upon which to go. Rather, we would be “crashing” through the forest to find our way. A few hours into the day, we realized we were headed in the wrong direction, so I got out of my canoe to find higher ground to chart a new course. Immediately once my second foot stepped onto the bank, I sunk right into the mud. A slight inconvenience, but given that I only had one outfit for an entire week and a team of hungry teenagers relying on me to find a new route to lunch, this felt a bit overwhelming. Before the tears started pouring, my friend Connor pulled me out of the mud and helped move us forward, one just slightly dirtier than the other.
One hour and a bit of backtracking later, we found ourselves in front of a beaver dam. Though it was only two feet wide, it required us to unpack everything from our canoes, carry our supplies over the dam, and then lift the canoes one-by-one over the branches. Hungry and frustrated, about halfway into this process, I stepped forward to grab a canoe and: Bam! I was waist deep in the mud once again.
I realized I had two choices: lean into my frustration and spoil the day, or find humor in the experience. Choosing the latter, I looked up into six sets of worried eyes, laughed and said, “you know, it’s all part of the experience.” In that one muddy moment, I learned the critical lesson that we each have power over our perspective in life, and we can choose to find joy even amidst challenges.
Reflecting on that experience the next day, I gained a second perspective: you can do more than you know. We were asked to journal alone for an hour, and I recall writing that phrase to myself and just staring at it for a while, thinking through the moments in life where I felt like I was reaching my full capacity, then finding I had a hidden reserve of strength upon which to draw. I can do more than I know, even if that includes portaging for a week with six strangers (many of whom have become my closest friends), carrying a 180-pound canoe on my shoulders, and falling waist-deep in mud. Not only do I have the power to change my perspective, but I am inherently strong enough to do so.
Connors and fellow scholars at Outward Bound
As I have begun my discernment journey as a peacebuilder, I have found myself often returning to these guiding principles. Almost every day, we are asked to do more than we think we are capable of to respond to the myriad global challenges that arise, learning new skills at each turn.
This complements well a definition a friend once gave me of peacebuilding as “creative conflict transformation.” Each day, we collectively bring our skills and passions to creatively work to build a better world, which often necessitates digging into those deeper reserves of strength we didn’t know we had.
Nothing has typified this more for me than the peacebuilders I met while studying and working in Kigali, Rwanda. In particular, I recall meeting with a women’s group in the eastern region that had initially formed as a discussion space for widows of the genocide to collectively process their trauma. As we sat in a small mud-floored room, hiding from the bucketing rain outside and laughing at the rain drops coming in from the ceiling, these women opened up to our small cohort to share the story of their evolution as an organization.
After months of meeting amidst just the wives of Tutsi victims, the women decided to open up the group to the wives and widows of perpetrators, recognizing that their community would not be able to heal if they were not able to speak with one another. They started by simply talking about their experiences during the genocide, sharing their fears, their struggles, their loss. Through months of conversation and trust-building, they learned that many of them were navigating the same challenge of stepping into a role of financial responsibility while still maintaining the household, as many of their husbands were killed in the violence or had been imprisoned. They eventually decided to start joint economic ventures together across ethnic lines, which have turned into thriving businesses. Two of the group’s members also proudly shared with us how they had been traveling around the country in recent months, teaching other women about their approach to collective healing. This is the definition of finding a deeper inner strength: being able to look your neighbor in the eye after such devastation, seeking common ground and shared healing, and intentionally shifting your perspective of perpetrator and victim.
Now, as I head into the second half of my Scoville Fellowship, I have been thinking often about the variety of ways we as peacebuilders can creatively transform conflict and my role within this field. My work in Rwanda gave me a grounding in field-based programming and the importance of centering voices of impacted communities. My studies and research at Notre Dame taught me about the history of conflict and avenues for response, and gave me skills in analyzing real-time conflict. I then gained experience in program evaluation through my work last fall with an agriculture start-up in Ghana. An area I had yet to explore, though, was in communicating about conflict.
This is why I chose to work with ReThink Media for my fellowship, as they spend each day collaborating with advocates and organizations to maximize the strategic impact of their work. Some days, I am working one-on-one with an advocate to edit an opinion article and hone in on where their argument will be most effective. Other days, I am collaborating with Mac, my boss, to write out messaging strategies on big issues in the peace and security space to help our partners streamline their individual narratives into a cohesive argument. Even others, I am assisting the research team in studying the media space on a certain topic as a whole, identifying trends and gaps to which our advocates can respond.
From ReThink’s position behind the scenes across a variety of issue spaces, I am able to see the system behind the advocacy space and the variety of tactics we can use to have influence. This is inherently creative work, which has been dually challenging me to stretch my conception of my own creativity and to think in new ways about the role of language in shaping collective opinion.
As someone new to this field, I am reminded each day that I can do more than I know, and much of this is due to the support of my team. This has been a massive learning experience, and I look forward to continuing to expand my strategic communication skills as a peacebuilder.
Connors and her ReThink colleagues after a presentation to arms control advocates.
And each day in DC, I am reminded that it truly is all a part of the experience. From meeting Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa at a digital peacebuilding conference, to spending my Fridays exploring different coffee shops with fellow Scovilles, to dealing with traffic by my apartment due to the NATO conference mere blocks away and realizing that meant global leaders were practically on my doorstep, to joining a new socially-focused data science nonprofit through a connection from my kickball team—each day there is something new that makes me even more appreciative that I was granted the opportunity to move to this city through the fellowship.
In the end, I am grateful that I fell in the mud that day in Minnesota. Rather than trip me up, it gave me strong grounding for my future work as a peacebuilder. It is a path I am still navigating, but I know that wherever it takes me next, I will be prepared. We can all do more than we know by leaning into each new experience, be it in the Boundary Waters, in the (sometimes very rainy) field with peacebuilding organizations, in the policymaking halls of Congress, around the table at advocacy organizations, and anywhere we find ourselves creatively transforming conflict.
Grace Connors is a Spring 2024 Scoville Fellow with ReThink Media.