BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN

dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563

DURHAM -- Genocide. Decades of civil war. Millions dead. Abduction of tens of thousands of children.

Response?

Forgiveness. Reconciliation.

That's how Angelina Atyam of Uganda dealt with the abduction of her daughter by the Lord's Resistance Army. The nurse, midwife and activist has advocated on behalf of thousands of children.

Bishop Paride Taban of Sudan responded to more than 20 years of civil war by creating the Holy Trinity Peace Village. Out in the Sudan wilderness, it is a place for people of different faiths and tribes to live together and start anew.

Atyam and Taban have been in Durham for the Duke Center for Reconciliation's Teaching Communities Week. They gave their keynote addresses Monday afternoon in Goodson Chapel at Duke Divinity School.

The Rev. Emmanuel Katongole, a Catholic priest from Uganda who is on the Divinity faculty, served as facilitator.

Katongole cited the widespread strife in Africa, saying that there is a lot about Africa that is discouraging. "Yet there is a lot that is hopeful," he said. Christian-led medical clinics, development projects and peace efforts are all hopeful signs, he said. "But what I find really hopeful are stories and lives like the Bishop and Angelina."

He said that beyond their specific efforts addressing needs, they are also engaged in something far more subversive -- inventing Africa's future. To do that requires a certain amount of madness, courage, hope and sacrifice, Katongole said. The title of Monday's talk was "Daring to Invent the Future: The Madness of Angelina Atyam and Bishop Paride Taban." The overall title of the third annual Teaching Communities Week is "Creating an Oasis of Peace: Forgiveness, Advocacy and Community."

Atyam, who lives in Northern Uganda, became an activist after her daughter was abducted in 1996. She returned home in 2004. Atyam said that her grandson, who had been named after a rebel leader, was renamed Miracle Blessing.

Atyam said that the miracle of forgiveness dawned on her when she was painfully bitter. She said realized that people don't ask to be forgiven, but we need to forgive to release our own pain and surrender everything to God.

She said she learned from another villager, who saw his entire family -- wife and children -- murdered by rebels. Yet he forgave. That knowledge gave her the strength to go on, she said.

"The magnitude of other people's pain became my pain, a big pain," Atyam said. "I think, Jesus had to carry the sins of the world on him -- we should be grateful he did it for us."

The end result of forgiveness sets us free and gives us victory over our enemies and evil, she said. "Together we can heal better. In Christ we can heal better."

Atyam wants rebels to come home so there can be some reconciliation and peace between them and the people they brutalized. She said justice is not realistic. Instead, they want a situation in which people can coexist. In 1998, she received the United Nations Human Rights Prize.

Taban said that in Sudan, after two decades of war and suffering, they had to find a place where people in conflict could live together. He began his retirement from serving as bishop of Torit by going out into the bush.

"To be a peacemaker, you have to be a person who forgives," Taban said. When he heard a rebel commander planned to have him killed, Taban went to the commander's home and they had coffee together. Earlier, rebels had held him in prison for 100 days and threatened to arrest him again.

"The suffering we have gone through has made us strong," he said. Our life is in the hand of God, not the hand of a human being, Taban said. The peace village he directs is a place for people to start a new way of life, he said, something that is impossible to do alone.