In communion with their experience within the Pope John XXIII community, a group of youths and conscientious objectors felt questioned by the conflict in neighbouring Yugoslavia in 1992. They were present on various fronts and would labour to re-unite families, protect ethnic minorities through their presence, and endeavour to foster dialogue among the warring parties. However, they soon realized that these efforts were insufficient. This experience has since been exported to other conflicts: Sierra Leone (1997), Kosovo and Albania (1998-1999), East Timor (1999), The Chiapas Region of Mexico (1998-2002), Chechnya (2000-2001), The Democratic Republic of Congo (2001), and in Israel/Palestine (since 2002).
Operation Dove is open to all people. Believers and non-believers alike who wish to experience within their lives the power of non-violence as the sole means by which to obtain lasting peace founded upon justice and truth. Over 1000 volunteers have loaned their efforts to Operation Dove since 1992
Their are three main characteristics to our work:
Non-violence: Confronting an adversary with tools which allow you to understand the other rather than destroy him. The objective of non-violence is to liberate both the oppressed and the oppressor.
Fully sharing their lives with those undergoing the consequences of conflict.
Neutrality with respect to the warring parties but not with respect to the the concommitent injustices.

Operation Dove is today a Civil Peace Corps belonging to the Pope John XXIII Community which intervenes within armed conflicts by sharing their lives with the victims on three fronts: Israel/Palestine, Kosovo and Northern Uganda

Four volunteers have been living in St. Thomas Minakulu parish, Bobi area in Gulu district, since May 2006. Their presence has been made possible by Monsignor J. Baptist Odama’s invitation, archbishop of Gulu.

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Saturday 26th august 2006 has become one of the historic day for Uganda.
On Saturday 26th was signed an agreement for a truce which had its actual beginning at 6 a.m. of Tuesday 29th August and which, according to the terms of the agreement, should soon lead to peace.
This is the result of the diplomatic process worked out on the bargaining table in Juba (Sudan) and so long wished by many outsider, mediator and spectator in the theatre of this conflict under way from more than 20 years.
For more than a month, meeting, visits in the Garamba park (the rebel’s base), debates and council had taken place while news on newspapers were seesaw. Every day information about the peace talks reported unhappy remark from both parts, which were only able to flare up minds and weaken the expectations of a population exhausted by the conflict and much more by the life in the refugees camp.
So, the piece of news of the double agreement between the Ugandan government and the LRA (Lord Resistance Army) – with the mediation of an infinity of groups and people belonging both to the political and religious spheres – and the South Sudan government’s participation in the negotiations gave the most concrete possibility of the last ten years for a “rapidâ€? resolution of the hostilities.

To share, in this land, means to see every day situations of abandonment, especially towards children and elderly people, not only victims of the war, but often, especially for old people, of the impossibility of being able to till the land and then providing by one’s own for the food needed to survive. In the refugees’ camp, where people live, the food is scarce and the only source of survival are the lands, hard for elderly men to reach because many kilometres far from their huts. Elderly men can hardly go to get some water to the well and carry it in the can put upon their head, trying to lean on their staff; as for the food, they can only count on a piece of cassava and some bean. After having fled with their family years ago, because of the war, after years of hardship, fears and hard work in the refugees’ camp, they end up, nowadays, at the final chapter of their lives, old, con their gaunt bodies, often sick of tuberculosis and malaria, with their empty stomach and their heavy heart, and with their sons and daughter who hardly can provide for their new family. It’s not a matter of cruelty, but of that sort of “darkness� which we could even call “instinct of survival� and which inevitably leaves the weakest behind. All of this strongly resemble the respect of the human dignity which is not a matter of things to posses or possession to administrate, but of the ineluctable right to have every day enough food and to be able to take care of your health if needed.

Fr. Carlos Rodríguez
The Weekly Observer

What can drive a young, bright European graduate to leave a comfortable life at home and spent months digging in IDPs’ gardens for no pay?

Since last year I have been asking myself that question every time I see the four Italian volunteers working in my parish at Minakulu-Bobi (Gulu district) pick their hoes and accompany some of the nearby displaced persons in their daily trek for survival.

Two years ago I met a group of enthusiastic Italians from the Association Pope John XXIII who had come to visit northern Uganda and get a first-hand experience of the people’s life conditions.

For a good number of years I have seen many of such groups. Most of them come for some few days, take pictures, show sympathy and go away. Perhaps they may continue the relationship for some time and send some money to support whatever project. The young people of John XXIII had different intentions. They said they wanted to stay in a displaced people’s camp. “We want to live with the victims of this war”, they told me, “but everyone we met told us that it’s impossible”. My answer to them was: “It’s not impossible, it’s only uncomfortable”.