Corrymeela Community

After an eye opening tour of Belfast we made our way to the coast of Northern Ireland where we arrived at our home for the rest of the week.

Here we learned about the meaning of conflict, peace and resolution, and what it meant to have any or all of these states of society.

In addition we talked about the questions we had while our leaders, Jonny McEwen, Anna, and Nial did their best to answer them.

The week in Ballycastle was full of intense information and hard topics. Fortunately for us, at Corrymeela the staff have been working with groups from all over the world, and they understand the need to take breaks in order to process the information we were given. 

During these processing times we were given the opportunity to walk along the beach towards  Macroni's Cottage (the location of the first radio transmission) or downtown Ballycastle (which mostly featured the marina).

As mentioned above, one of the main topics of discussion was the idea of reconciliation, and what it means to be reconciled. In order to have a greater understanding we used different activities and models to show the progression of a on conflict.

In addition, we discussed the meaning of peace, and what a completely peaceful society would be like. As a group we were split between wanting to live a life of peace without any conflict and living with some conflict. The differences largely reflected our engram numbers which we learned about in our orientation.

"Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means"-Ronald Reagan.