I share news about our current strategy in Kenya. I spoke today with two leaders of our Pyramid of Peace http://www.pyramidofpeace.net , Kennedy Owino +254 723 568 251 http://www.nafsiafrica.org who is currently serving as our Commander-of-Operations, and Rachel Wambui Kungu +254 721 626 389 http://www.peace-caravan.org who served previously.

We agree about our current priorities which I call "journey" and "retreat" and I also add my own thoughts about "ambush". I will explain how I evaluate the situation as a chessplayer.

Once again there seems to be a lull in the violence. I think it shows
that Kenyans are a people of peace. Yes, there are many deep problems, but time and again the violence goes down. There do seem to be instigators who work hard to set people against each other. And they seem to be organized by local politicians, perhaps several members of parliament who lost in the elections. And now I imagine they have been reigned in as Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga are trying to show that they are negotiating. But I think neither is interested that the other win. Neither understands the logic of "love your enemy". Raila Odinga, the voice of reform, tells his supporters: "You cannot steal my cow, and I catch you red-handed, and then expect me to share the milk." Yet we have shown with the Pyramid of Peace that we can act counter to expectations.

I myself believe that the negotiations will drag on for six months or even
twelve. I also expect that the instigators of violence will not wait too
long to play their role in this tussle for power.

Kennedy and Rachel and I agree that our priority is now for our leadership to travel to the most recent areas of violence and show that we all care, check the reality, get to know our local leaders, and understand local priorities. Kennedy has $350 from before and this evening I sent $750 more. This is less than requested and I am encouraging us to do with less as best we can.

Tuesday they will travel to Kuresoi and meet with Laurence Achami +254 720 613 379. Lawrence asked for $400 but I have provided only $200, perhaps that's enough for now. I have also provided $200 which Kennedy will send to Emmanuel Were +254 721 938 340 and/or Rono Richards +254 723 732 617 to organize in Sotik and/or Nandi Hills.

Thursday they will travel to Eldoret. I have sent Kennedy $200 for this
meeting and Kennedy plans to meet with Wesley Chirchir Chebii in Nairobi on Monday and they will surely discuss this. Hi Wesley!

We have also budgeted $50 for Kisumu (Tom Ochuka) and $50 for Charles Kilel's work this is to encourage your important work. Thank you for your dedication! We have also budgeted $50 for the woman who was sexually molested and who Laurence and Rachel are helping. We care very much to respond with all of our love.

As they travel, Kennedy and Rachel will also think who might practice as peacemakers for all of Kenya and prove themselves able to serve as
Commanders. We want to be able to rotate our leaders so we represent a variety of backgrounds, tribes, women and men, young and old. A Commander must be able to think in terms of all of us, not just the situation before them. A Commander must lead us all in many small risks and prefer them to big ones, yet must also be able to function with integrity even when faced by the threat of death. A Commander is a person who would make a good President of Kenya. Our impact may continue to grow and thus I am concerned that we have many Commanders to choose from so that it would be pointless for anybody to scare, hurt or kill any one of them. Also, I think that we are discovering that the natural way to organize ourselves may be very different than what we have been taught. Why can't we have a new "President" every week rather than one every four or five years? By the time they figure out who will be President we may have gone through twenty or more of them. And we can choose Commanders/Presidents to respond to circumstances as they change.

Kennedy has a remaining $350 that will serve for their travels at least up to Eldoret and then we will see if they should travel further, if more
money is needed and if we have it. However, I ask us to realize that
currently we have few funds left and I have not yet been successful in
raising more.

We are therefore preparing a tactical "retreat", which is to say, instead
of "advancing" and engaging our enemies, we will focus to organize
ourselves locally at each of our locations, and stay in touch by phone and Internet rather than by traveling. At each location we want to have a clear leader and a clear "peace center" for developing our ICT skills and for organizing the beginnings of a "global village". I agree with Janet Feldman and Pamela McLean that we focus on what we can do now with the people we have and the ICT we have available. We want to get permission and publicly post lists of our local participants names, phones, deepest values, investigatory questions, endeavors, and make sure they have an email and are signed up for at least one of our groups. I spoke with Franz Nahrada in Austria and he will help us develop a vision for all the dimensions that our peace centers / unity centers / urgency centers can and should include. I want us to develop a Global Village Index that helps us self-rate ourselves and be alert to what we are accomplishing in these many different dimensions. We will turn attention to work with refugees, to organizing local committees to lead work programs and work with John Rogers to design community currencies. We will do many such experiments and also try out some simple businesses, such as Sneakernets or solar recharging. We will vigorously pursue the sister city idea to make sure that each location in Kenya has a partner in the world who might provide an independent source of funding for short term needs and long term projects. We will also think of ways that we can help our sister cities around the world to gain from us, for example, we can help their citizens learn to make excellent use of the web, we can exchange peacemakers and train each other, and we can organize small research projects that can lead to business ideas. I ask Joy Tang and Jeff Buderer of One Village Foundation to help us work openly on the general "unity center" idea, perhaps at our worknets wiki, so that we might apply that in the many particular locations.

I myself will be reaching out globally to make connections. The sister
city relations could provide us with local resources. Corporate
sponsorships could pay for our leaders and peacemakers. Safaricom could donate airtime that we might use as a community currency for providing relief. I ask Henry Migingo and all to help us think through a program for a new economy. I am also looking for customers for our Includer. And I will be dedicating much of my time to organizing our COMMUNIA workshop on March 31 as part of a four day series in Vilnius, Lithuania on "Co-creators":
* March 29: Pyramid of Peace
* March 30: (likely) Creative Commons Europe
* March 31: COMMUNIA "Ethical Public Domain: Debate of Questionable Practices"
* April 1: with the Republic of Uzupis: visions of global villages
Please consider coming and we'll celebrate the 10th anniversary of Minciu Sodas. I will be engaging businesses to support an "inclusion fund" that would help more of us to come.

As we work on our long term local grassroots development we will use less resources, we will develop more local resources, and we will also "lay low" to see "who is who". I encourage us to keep our eyes open and see who are the people locally (in the community, the police, the government, the opposition) who "work for free" and who are the people who seek control or are selfish. I don't think I have discussed this with Kennedy, Rachel or our other leaders, but my feeling is that we should prepare for the next outbreak of violence. Let's keep practicing our skills as peacemakers, engaging people different from ourselves, and also talking with others what the next outbreak might be and trying to think creatively with each other how we might respond to "love our enemy". When the outbreak happens, perhaps in two or three weeks, I plan us to "ambush" the instigators with the love that we will prepare for them in our hearts. We will try to have money and resources and contacts ready on-the-ground so that we can act swiftly. And please know in each location that you can take authority to act, but confer and coordinate with your local leader. And then we will coordinate further across the nation as events unfold. So this is what I mean by our "ambush" that we can start preparing in our hearts and organize with others who can be ready to act with us to "love our enemy". And at this point there may be quite a few surprised Kenyans
who wonder, Where have they all come from, these peacemakers?

After such an event that brings us to a new level of activity, and after
we have made clear the nature of our "unity centers" in each location, and after we have the first thoughts about our Motherly Constitution, and after we have attracted some new resources, then will be a good time to come together in a meeting of the Pyramid of Peace. I suggest that Nakuru would be a good headquarters for our movement because it was and is a natural peace haven and because it is apart from the politics of Nairobi. Let's think about this. I suppose that the meeting might happen in mid-March before our Africans leave for Lithuania, assuming I can organize our visas.

You see that I believe that we can make good progress in remaking Kenyan society and pioneer the remaking of all of our world. We're focusing on what the government is not able to do. I think we're finding it is the more interesting sphere of life. Note also that Kenya seems to be functioning to a degree even without a clear President at the helm. We may discover that the traditional government finds itself irrelevant. Of course, I will be rudely awakened, and yet this dream will keep returning until it is undeniable, even if ten years from now.

We don't attract nearly the attention that would match our joy in our
achievements. Yet some day we might and the attention may be negative, which is to say, our leaders may not be welcome. I think that it would not be difficult to hire a Russian mafia gunman to kill me, should our network cause that much grief. Or more simply, I like my role in our network, but I don't think it's good if my death or illness disrupted our work in Kenya or around the world. We have outstanding leaders at our lab, but not everybody has even the health to pull everything together. As regards Kenya, I think (and may be wrong) there are several advantages to having an outsider serve as Commander-in-Chief as they do not belong to any tribe and also they can suggest visions or strategies that speak to the human condition in general, and are not primarily the integration of emotions for one's own land. Anyways, I ask our leaders in Kenya to discuss and consider options should I be out of the picture, and they may include a Kenyan solution or a global solution. Your thoughts are also helpful as we think through the Motherly Constitution. Also, please consider who might have the spirit needed for a Commander-in-Chief, but as I reflect on our leaders I must say that Pamela McLean has the spunk of a commander, I think of her direction to the demonstrators shown by the BBC, and Franz concurs, and he notes how well she describes the point of Minciu
Sodas. More generally, if we think of our culture of independent thinkers as layers, there are participants who as visionaries speak clearly regarding certain layers, such as Benoit Couture regarding God, or Pamela or Samwel Kongere regarding Independent thinkers, or Franz himself regarding Global villages, or John Rogers or Lucas Gonzalez might regarding Circuits of Traveling Learners. All of this to say that as our vision grows real we can draw on our participants for leadership and think how we each might substitute for each other. Franz himself has pondered, in going through his heart surgery, what would happen to his Global Villages vision without him? And so we might think of the visionaries who keep alive our visions.

Rachel, I am very heartened that the Naivasha youth have received our
sincere efforts to meet their demands. Kennedy, my thanks and
encouragement to all you meet in your travels. I note also that we have
agreed that it would be good for us, Dennis Kimambo +254 722 388 275, if you might serve as Commander-of-Operations upon your return from Zambia. And then we will seek if we might find a new Commander that we might rotate in.

Thank you to Sasha, Meadowlea, Theresa, Kiyavilo, all of Uyoga and our
online team! you have worked so helpfully! Thank you, Janet, for your
wonderful heart and mind.

We accept donations for the Pyramid of Peace by PayPal to ms@ms.lt or at the link at http://www.pyramidofpeace.net or please write.

Andrius

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