Center on Violence and Community
Healing From the Heart of Africa
- Press Release - VFH Partners With Burundi Organization (THARS)
- THARS Website - Trauma Healing And Reconciliation Services
Now Available!
Tough Times Companion Vol. 2
Tough Times Companion is a collection of poetry, essays and stunning photographs by and for people surviving difficult times. Whether you are suffering from illness, the loss of a loved one, violence, displacement, depression, job loss, surviving the aftermath of war, or some other very tough time, this book can help. We hope you find it inspiring.
Order a copy in the VFH Store (you only pay shipping)
The World At War
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace.
General William Tecumseh Sherman
(to the leaders of Atlanta, September 1864)
The world is often at war, perhaps the most terrible, mysterious affliction of the human community. War itself is cruel, but the unseen effects of war far outlast the anguish and loss of war itself. Wars are generally begun to prevent some loss – of land, prestige, or life. They end by costing all parties more dearly than they had imagined. The costs of war extend far beyond the tallies of materiel and bodies. The costs are social as families are destroyed and children are raised in want. They are personal as the trauma of war changes patterns of thought and response. They are cultural as a people’s previous beliefs and entertainments come to seem vacuous or foolish in the face of mass mourning.
About the Center
The Center on Violence and Community studies the long term effects of violent systems – social arrangements rooted in violence. These are most commonly seen in their more brutally obvious forms: in communities caught up in ethnic cleansing or other internecine battles, in wars across national borders and wars of conquest or control, and in a variety of forms of political repression and dictatorship. Yet they also exist in the small social structures of home and family, in which violence can come to shape and misshape love and protection. Within each country there are a million tiny wars that sometimes coalesce into larger ones. Often, many violent systems exist at once, and the people caught in them suffer and inflict a multitude of wounds.
