Joseph resident hopes to help peace in Africa with new database

Published 12:00 pm Friday, July 22, 2022

Seth Kinzie stands next to the Peace Pole in his garden in Joseph on July 12, 2022.

JOSEPH — If you drive past Seth Kinzie’s home in Joseph, you’ll see a tall, maroon, wooden stake planted in the middle of his garden among various trees and flowers.

A Peace Pole, it has the words “May Peace Prevail on Earth” etched in eight different languages. This message was first uttered in 1955 by Masahisa Goi in response to the destruction of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in his country, Japan.

Now, Kinzie has placed one in front of his house to help spread the message of peace on earth. But when it comes to advocating for peace, he’s been doing a lot more than just putting up wooden poles.

After graduating from Lewis & Clark University in 2008, where he studied religion, Kinzie knew he didn’t want to write any more papers or take tests, but found big-scale problem-solving to be of interest.

“I do love the intellectual battle of figuring out something and putting it together for the sake of a good cause,” he said.

So he started doing various peace work throughout the continent of Africa. He focused on interfaith work with different religions, and doing conflict transformation workshops with his mom in Nigeria.

While living in Africa he’s noticed a lot of factors which have stifled peaceful relationships between various groups. One being that even though you see some Pan-African unity, the divide between different communities and countries can be extreme.

“There’s 55 countries (and) within each country you can have up to 100 languages. Each language is its own culture,” he said.

In Uganda, which according to Kinzie is the same size as Oregon with 10 times as many people, the overpopulation of youths, especially men, has created a lack of job opportunities.

“A lot of men you’ll see will just be on the side of the road doing nothing, just hanging out with their buds,” Kinzie said, “Basically everybody’s 15.”

So in 2021, looking for the opportunity to become an even greater agent for peace, he applied for a Rotary Peace Fellowship in Africa with the help of the Rotary Club of Wallowa County. After getting accepted, he became one of three Americans to embark on a yearlong program at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

As a part of this fellowship, Kinzie went to Uganda for 10 weeks to study peace and conflict from a community perspective. After studying he went to Ethiopia, Malawi, Somalia and Botswana where he laid down the framework for his fellowship project, an African Peacemaking Database.

The idea behind the database was to fill a void. There are many international indexes that show how peaceful a country is based on factors like the number of weapons, economy, wars and corruption. But even though these indexes inform about how peaceful a place is, how can people look at any of this data and improve peacemaking in their day to day lives?

So in collaboration with the African Union, Kinzie laid out a 15-year project to figure out the best practices of peace throughout the continent by obtaining responses from local leaders, women, youths and elders.

“I’m gathering how they view the experience and the expression of peace in their daily lives … then from the bottom we go to the top and we make policies out of how people really view what peace means in their life,” he said.

For some people it can be as simple as playing sports, getting water and going to church. But these practices can help communities achieve peace, which is why he wants to update the database not with stats, but by making sure these processes of peace are being implemented by Africans.

“Instead of just getting new data all the time, it’s more like how do we make sure that it is always recycled into the people who offer it so that they own it and there is action coming from it,” Kinzie said.

Joseph and Africa have quite different circumstances, and Kinzie feels that in Joseph he can be with his own thoughts more than he can in some of the vibrant communities he works in on the other side of the globe.

“Africa kind of wears you out a little bit,” he said, “I’m able to relax a little more here (in Joseph) and recharge.”

When he’s in Joseph, Kinzie and his friend Ezekiel Hale run a web-development business called Develop Easy. He is also a pianist, who composes music with different groups and by himself, and teaches piano lessons on the side. He spends time doing information technology for the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture so he can pay the bills while doing his peacework.

He is going back to Africa in October to present his findings, as he hopes to get $250,000 a year for an initial five-year period to start the project. If he secures funding, Kinzie hopes to keep traveling between Oregon and Africa and help spread peace for the next few decades.

“I would love a future where I get to go back to Africa a little bit every year, stay in touch with the project, help it out, but kind of let it flow away on its own wings. That sounds like a cool life,” he said.

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