“When you enter a home, greet the family, ‘Peace.’ If your greeting is received, then it’s a good place to stay. But if it’s not received, take it back and get out. Don’t impose yourself.”

Luke 10:5-6

At the edges of every culture and group there are people of peace. They exist as go-betweens and ambassadors for the peoples they represent. When Laurie and I lived in China we were befriended by a woman, Cui Jin Xiang, who was a person of peace. She took us under her wing during a vulnerable time in our acculturation process, teaching us and introducing us to the vast culture of China. In Detroit, finding your place as an outsider, as a white person, was culturally difficult to navigate (especially in the racially tense year of 2020 in which we arrived!). We were fortunate to encounter a person of peace, a kind neighbor named Vonnie. Miss Vonnie would take Laurie on long bike rides, showing her the lay of the city and introducing her to neighbors and family.

Persons of peace are both cultural hosts and explorers. They cross sometimes difficult cultural, linguistic, racial, political, and gender lines for the sake of peace. Jesus was a person of peace, one of his first acts as a rabbi was to visit a village of the hated Samaritans. He spoke with the woman at the well, a crossing of rigid gender boundaries from that era. The woman turned out to be a person of peace as well, introducing her entire village to this oddly behaving rabbi.

My parents taught me the value of being a person of peace from the time I was young. As an elementary school kid I remember them hosting a young man from Albania named Gezimy who was visiting the United States with a group called Up With People (you may recall). My dad visited Panama several times during the 90s to use his skills as a welder on clean water well digging projects the church was sponsoring. These encounters all made a deep impression on me.

In the times we live in it can often feel like the world is getting less connected and more isolated. We often pull back to our tribe, our people. Crossing over to be with those who are different can be perceived as risky, or at worst a betrayal of the group we’re coming from. This makes the work of cultural go-betweens, both domestically and internationally, more important than ever.

As a family, we have spent many of our years in cross-cultural environments and much of this blog over the years has explored these spaces. We have an opportunity to do this again as a family this summer. Coming to the end of her first year of law school, Laurie has accepted a summer internship with The Sudreau Global Justice Institute through Pepperdine University which will further her studies in international human rights law. She has a clerkship with the Supreme Court of Uganda for nine weeks from May to July. Our family will be living in Africa this summer, as Laurie works at the courts. She will be working alongside their national judiciary, not just to learn about a different legal tradition, but to actively support the inspiring efforts the Ugandan legal community is making to expand access to justice for all its citizens.

Her work will be focused on supporting the Ugandan legal system in two primary ways:

Clerking at the Supreme Court: she will spend the majority of her time serving as a clerk for the Supreme Court of Uganda. It is a profound privilege to support their justices as they refine and grow their national jurisprudence. She is eager to contribute to the high-level legal research and writing that sustains their highest court.
Advancing Access to Justice: She will join a team of U.S. and Ugandan attorneys working inside local prisons providing legal representation to incarcerated individuals who have been stuck in pre-trial detention for months—or even years—without a court date. The goal is to facilitate case resolutions through plea bargaining, offering a path to justice for those in need and resolving case backlog.

On my end, I will be continuing to offer counseling remotely during our time there and homeschooling the kids with a specific focus on East Africa. I also will be sharing on a more regular basis about our cultural learnings and experiences on the blog. We look forward to this experience as a family and supporting Laurie in this important work. There is more information about the Sudreau Global Justice Institute below, as well as a video on the important work of this program.

This trip is about partnership. Uganda has a rich, evolving legal landscape, and Laurie is honored to be invited into their halls of justice to help them achieve their goals.

This is an unpaid internship. If you would like to participate in this partnership, we are also fundraising to help with the costs of this trip. If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to support this important work of international human rights and access to justice, you can follow the link below.

https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/fralicks-in-uganda

Being a person of peace is just as important as it's ever been. In our fractured world we can choose to embrace hope, an expectation that things will get better. We look forward to sharing more with you as this summer unfolds.

Drew, Laurie, Abner, Zip

People of Peace