We're meeting today across Kenya and online http://www.worknets.org/chat/ to organize many small teams of peacemakers ready to act in the event of a new cycle of violence, which is likely, if the demonstrations go as planned.

Wesley Chirchir Chebii +254 722 992 107 Eldoret
http://groups.yahoo.com/g...ngpeacefully/message/764,
Kenneth Chelimo +254 722 809 690 Eldoret
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/holistichelping/message/2622,
Collins Odour +254 721 637 457 Nakuru
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/holistichelping/message/2626,
Tom Ochuka +254 712 929 029 Kisumu
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/holistichelping/message/2624,

Thank you for your pressing reports. I ask Dennis Kimambo +254 722 388 275 http://www.repacted.org and you to confer with each other about immediate actions that you can take to vigorously pursue peace. I will confer with Dennis about midday Tuesday on our strategy and then will send him some money. Janet Feldman has sent 350 USD and I will count the rest but we can do a bit on all fronts.

In the meetings tomorrow, I ask us to encourage each other to be bold and act as individuals, as each desires. If you have a larger group, be sure to break up in teams of seven or eight people so that each person can help the team prepare for action. Each team should choose a leader. Consider, who is your enemy? and how might you love them? engage them? take up their point of view? And then please have each team consider, What do they want to achieve locally? And how would they like to help other regions? At each meeting please make a list of all team leaders, and how each team leader can be contacted (make sure to get their permission to post that publicly - this is a requirement to participate in the Pyramid of Peace - and it keeps us all mindful of the law), and what ways they are keen to help locally and beyond. We will see how many such teams we can organize tomorrow. Please help us get the word out for this. And we will help at our chat room http://www.worknets.org/chat/

Wesley, thank you for your deep thinking. I appreciate your reflection and I encourage us all to add to this discussion.

This evening I was greatly encouraged by Rachel Wambui Kungu +254 721 626 389 http://www.peace-caravan.org who called to say I should think how we might spend 100,000 EUR per year. This is roughly the rate at which we are spending money now. You can imagine what we might unfold in three years. I share my vision and I ask for yours.

I was born in the US but I was raised Lithuanian. My first language was Lithuanian. My parents only had Lithuanian friends. Every Saturday we would drive twenty miles through Los Angeles to Lithuanian "Saturday school" and learn to read and write and sign and dance and pray and care about Lithuania. We were a village, we were a tribe, we were refugees from our Soviet-occupied homeland. We would fly across the US to folk dance festivals or scouting jamborees where we might fall in love and start families with youth from other "villages". This is all the reason why I live in Lithuania, my homeland. I appreciate the logic of a big country like the US but also the logic of a small country like Lithuania.

Lithuanians are like a tribe, there are only three million of us, and we have a language and a culture. Americans are not a tribe, they are the citizens of a state. I think Kenya is like the US or the EU. They are all states and who knows or cares if they will be around in 100 years? But the tribes have been around for thousands of years and they may be around for thousands more.

The tribes are the keepers of our culture and they should be the source. Yet note that the tribes have no true leaders. The traditions are handed down, but dead, by which I mean, there is no authority to shape the traditions. There is nobody to say - we shall abandon female circumcision - and we shall reform this tradition, perhaps rethink our symbols. In Lithuania, we don't have anyone with authority to say, here is our social sickness that yields our record high rates for suicide, divorce, car crashes, alchoholism, and here is how we will rethink our practices, our traditions. Yet we know that great individuals of various renown have transformed our culture, such as the Bishop Motiejus Valancius who taught people to have fun without drinking, or Jonas Basanavicius who turned peasants into patriots, or book smugglers who made us perhaps the most literate land in Europe. In December I spoke with Asif Daya, and we considered the link between malaria and household water practices, and who will instruct the people to change their practices? and understand what they could be? I think Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai is an example of such a leader of leaders with her tree planting. Johnny Appleseed is another. We can think of our social life as structured by patterns evoked by recurring activity. (I note architect Christopher Alexander's books on pattern languages.) Our society has patterns that work and patterns that fail. Our cultures can learn from each other and change.

I am surprised that our Kenyan youth leaders are so Kenyan! and so often say "I have no tribe". I am sure to surprise you that I have a tribe. Or, more precisely, I was born into a tribe. My tribe was in exile, so as a boy I also had to choose my tribe. I had to choose to think Lithuanian in an English-speaking world, which is a constant struggle and part of my "caring about thinking". One reason that I live in Lithuania is that I can escape that struggle and live in a Lithuanian-speaking world, and that's a reason why I appreciate that every tribe have a homeland, some corner where one can escape from English and the rest of the world. All signage in Lithuania must be in Lithuanian! because we remember how the Soviets tried to Russify us with their Russian signs. So I believe that we choose our culture, and yet we are born into a culture which is ours to choose, but we can also choose other cultures. We can have more than one! just as I am in some small sense a Black American when I sing in the choir, and we can create our own culture, which is truly "caring about thinking" but also shows the whole point of having a tribe. A culture is the victory of mind over matter, one of the final outcomes of independent thinking, perhaps the last one before God might be welcome on earth.

If we cherish the tribes, then we see that we don't have to think in terms of states and boundaries and lands. Instead, we can think in terms of acrobats, dancers, artists, actors, singers, poets, farmers, cooks, artisans, architects. We can have a world of Jews, Palestinians, Serbs, Albanians, Kikuyus, Kalenjins, Lous, Lithuanians, Russians and every shade and combination and even new tribes such as the Kenyans. We can revive lost tribes. But nobody can revive a lost state. Every tribe should have a homeland, a diaspora and minorities. But the exact boundaries don't matter, and perhaps they don't have to be exact. And who administers doesn't matter much either. Do the people of Los Angeles County even know who their supervisors are? And yet the latter are more powerful than the President of Kenya. And if the tribes were strong, and they had good and strong traditions regarding marriage and family and community and education, then would it matter if one had office or money, but went against the tribe?

Imagine that we are the champions of the tribes. Who will be against us? Not the tribes. Not the militias. Not the police. Not the people, not in the end. Imagine that within each tribe we organize women and men who love their tribe, their culture, their traditions, who are ecologists, academics, musicians, entrepreneurs, authors, pastors, athletes, doctors, teachers. Imagine a council of such leaders for a tribe. This is the Reform Movement that led to the independence of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and led to the break-up of the Soviet Union without Soviet blood shed. Swiftly, within three years.

Imagine the collapse of the government of Kenya. Imagine that office and money are worthless. And imagine that it is because people have stopped caring about the state and the power of its offices and the greed for its money and have started caring about the tribe. And imagine that in this no man's land people get along. People are free. Imagine the impact on the rest of the world if there is one land without a state? That's the great fear of the powers. But what if we could make it work?

Imagine that we take these steps now before there is civil war. If we are the champions of the tribes, then will the elders support us? Will the women support us? Will the children support us? Or will they support the politicians and their cronies? And if we can organize councils to lead the tribes, and if we focus on the independent thinkers in the tribes, then would they not want a confederacy of the tribes of all the world? There has even been an Iroquois Confederacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois with a constitution Gayanashagowa ("Great Law of Peace") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Law_of_Peace and perhaps in Africa as well? If we lead the tribes, then what is there left of Kenya? for the politicians to fight over? And who is leading the tribes? Who wants to?

I share this because this is for me the natural direction that I would head towards if I had three years. If we had income of 100,000 EUR per year, then I would spend it like this:
* 25,000 EUR per year for myself so that I could dedicate myself and not go bankrupt.
* 25,000 EUR per year = 5,000 EUR per year for 5 leaders. One leader for our online support network, one leader for our software development, and three Commanders who we would rotate, much as we are now. We would send each Commander once a year to another country to train peacemakers there, such as in Israel and Palestine, the South Side of Chicago, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and even help with Lithuania's sobriety movement. Our Commanders would also tour Kenya and train peacemakers and help them. Also, we would keep looking for new opportunities for our Commanders so that we might rotate out the most experienced and accept new ones. We might be sure to have at least one Commander from each tribe.
* 25,000 EUR per year = 1,000 EUR for 25 peacemakers. Each peacemaker would lead a mission to some location and build a team of project leaders there. We would also invite other countries to send peacemakers to play this role and get practical experience.
* 25,000 EUR per year = 200 EUR for 125 investigators. Typically half would be for the investigator and half for their project. These would be all manner of experiments to do groundwork for a project that fosters a "global village" outlook and might be two months of part-time work. In three years we might have 75 unity centers for global villages.

In three years, given such basic capacity, and then making use of opportunities as they come, I think it's possible for us to have a well organized movement of independent thinkers who are able to bring together those who truly love their tribes into a Confederacy of Humanity. We could be the organizing force of Kenya and also be a worldwide movement, perhaps the inspiration for the leaders of a dozen tribes around the world. We may have more or less worldly success, but we will have a shared vision, handbook, constitution, society and culture that invites all into all cultures. And when we fail, then we will look so naive that the worst that will happen is that people will laugh at what fools we are. I am that kind of fool.

I share my vision so that you let me know if it might be a shared vision. Please let us know your dreams. The hour is grave. Kenya has two pharoahs and they are both hard of heart. Let us take to heart our dreams for the future. We may act beyond the limits of our lands and of our minds.

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Pyramid of Peace
http://www.pyramidofpeace.net
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@ms.lt
+370 699 30003
Vilnius, Lithuania

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http://www.nytimes.com/20...ca/26kenya.html?ref=world

“After four hours of intense negotiations this morning, the negotiating team made almost no progress toward reaching an agreement on governance, despite the fact that they were given the entire weekend to consult on their positions,” Mr. Annan said in a stiffly-worded statement issued Monday night. “I had to conclude that they were not capable of resolving the outstanding issues.”

Aides close to Mr. Annan said he was running out of patience.

“If this foot dragging continues, it’s unlikely he’ll stay” said one aide who was not authorized to speak publicly.

United Nations officials seem increasingly alarmed. "If there is no quick resolution to the political crisis, the risk of a fresh surge in violence, more displacement and further polarization of society is very high," John Holmes, the United Nations top humanitarian official, said on Monday. "The humanitarian consequences of this could dwarf anything we have seen so far."