I’m terrible at endings, especially when endings mean being strewn about across the world. My heart ached to watch the participants leave, and it is strange to not hear them yelling and talking and laughing from a short distance away.

As we close out the camp, one of the most important things we do is write affirmations. Each participant, LIT and staff member has a brown paper bag with his or her name on it, and everyone has the opportunity to write notes to other people at camp to let them know what they’ve learned from and appreciate about one another.

The panel I participated in reminded all of us that the work we do in our wonderful safety bubble at Holmes is all in preparation for continued action.

Between exhaustion and failed internet, I’ve been slow on these posts. Several to come!

We eat our meals family style, passing bowls and plates of food around the table to make sure everyone gets enough. We have several Jewish campers who keep different levels of kosher and Muslim campers who observe halaal.

We spend our whole lives told to “sit down, shut up, and listen.” In our dialogue programming, we try to revamp the way people think about listening and turn it into a proactive and positive way to hear one another’s stories. One activity we do is called intentional listening.

According to the dictionary application on my MacBook, the word trust means “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.” It’s hard to build that firm belief. Especially when the individuals trying to experience trust are involved with decades- or centuries-old conflicts that have destroyed connections and broken trust for generations. Especially when we only have two weeks.

When I first came to Face to Face in 2007, I learned an incredible number of things. Among them was that there are a wide variety of ways to speak the English language.

It is difficult to explain Face to Face | Faith to Faith to those who have not experienced the program, but over the next two weeks, I will try. I will try to explain how we look at conflicts - of culture, faith and identity - and create a space for dialogue and relationships.