"There is no road to peace; peace is the road."

I find it difficult to believe I have been in Costa Rica for a week.  Time all ready seems to fly and we are only just beginning classes.

I spent the weekend attempting to get my life in order, but to no one’s surprise, I still find myself quite scattered.  A group of us also went to la playa de Jaco on Sunday to relax and enjoy our free time before classes become intense.

The class schedule for Upeace is quite different from the schedule I am used to back to home.  My master’s program is 42 credit hours and we take classes in 2-3 week blocks. 

For example, I only have one course right now, Foundations in Peace and Conflict Studies, which meets 5 days a week one hour for lecture and 1.5 hours for a seminar.  In the lecture, all 210 students meet in the lecture hall and listen to the professor and then we are split into groups of approximately 15-20 students to discuss the lecture and complete exercises further exploring the topics of peace and conflict resolution.

I find the lecture and the seminar to be very instructive and I feel I will learn the most from the different perspective provided by my colleagues in class. 

During the first day, we were introduced to several definitions of peace ranging from “absence of war” to a more reflective description of “individual peace creating the right relationships with others, the environment, etc.”  

Most “western” influenced students subscribed to the individualistic and relationship-based definition assumptions about the absence of war withstanding, however, I was enlightened when my classmate from Rwanda gave the differing perspective about how it is difficult to find individual peace when your country is in turmoil and people are being raped or murdered every day.

I think eye-opening experiences such as this will be what I take away most from my education here.

I am also finding much of our readings here to be quite fascinating as well and I am very excited to learn about “Ghandian conflict theory.”

This Tuesday, I attended my first Rotary Club meeting in Belen, a small town near the capital San José.  I found to the club to be very friendly and quaint with only 13 members.  Maggie and I will be helping the club with a fundraiser on September 4^th and we plan to recruit some fellow Upeace students to help us.

Pictures will be posted soon.