Called to Make Peace
by Yvette Moore
Parvina Nadjibulla’s faith and life call her to peacemaking. The story of how she got from Tajikistan to New York City, where she is a US-2 assigned to work with the seminar program at the Church Center for the United Nations, is filled with serendipity.
"It really was the grace of God -- God-incidence," she said.
Ms. Nadjibulla grew up in countries that were part of the former Soviet Union. Her mother was Russia Orthodox and her father Muslim so she learned about both faiths growing up. Her mother taught her about her Orthodox heritage. At school, she read and studied the Koran, and her paternal grandmother taught her about Islam.
"For our family, religion was a source of peace, not conflict," Ms. Nadjibulla said. "We prayed at dinner. I always knew that you ask God, and God gives."
At 9, she asked God for something that changed her life -– to save it. Her town was bombed during the days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
"I was outside playing jump rope with my friends, and we got into an argument over the game, so I left and went inside my house," she recalled.
Inside, she heard the familiar shrill whistle of missiles, then silence.
"All I could think of was my father saying, ‘If you hear the missiles, it’s not going to hit you; it’s just passing over you,’" she said. "I prayed hard, telling God, ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want my father and mother to die.’"
For close to an hour she heard bombs exploding around her.
"I remember a moment of stillness," she said. "I felt a sense of peace and protection, then I heard a scream."
She ran outside, and there were her two friends, dead. The scream was from their mother. Impressions of that day are lasting.
"Being in Afghanistan taught me it’s not so important to know what you are willing to die for -– life and death are not in our hands -– but what you’ll live for," Ms. Nadjubulla said. "And I learned the power of prayer."
Within a few years of that tragic incident, the world shifted. Ms. Nadjibulla’s family moved to Tajikistan as the Soviets lost the war in Afghanistan. Armed fundamentalist groups came to power in Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union dissolved.
The U.S. Freedom Support Act began bringing young people from the former Soviet Union to the United States to study and experience U.S. society. One requirement was that the students speak English, which Ms. Nadjibulla didn’t. But the U.S. ambassador’s wife said, "She can learn English." So Ms. Nadjibulla went to California to an intensive English-language camp and then to New Hampshire for the senior year of high school. She was now able to speak Russian, French, English, Tajik and Farsi.
Meeting United Methodists
Ms. Nadjibulla returned to Tajikistan and was there in August 1995 when a United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries delegation came to visit.
"The group was only supposed to go to Russia, but once there, they were invited to come to Tajikistan," she said. The International Peace Foundation in Tajikistan extended the invitation. Civil war was underway in Tajikistan.
"It was an incredible opportunity to go into a part of the world they hadn’t gone to before, so Dr. Randolph Nugent, general secretary of the board, said, ‘Yes, go!’" Ms. Nadjibulla said.
For political reasons, local leaders in Tajikistan refused to speak in Russian, creating difficulty for the Russian translator accompanying the United Methodist delegation. Ms. Nadjibulla, then a 17-year-old who worked for the International Peace Foundation served as translator for the United Methodist delegation, using her knowledge of Tajik, Russian and English languages.
She had completed high school and wanted to go to Moscow to do university studies, but with the breakup of the Soviet Union, that was no longer possible. She came instead to the United States with the help of the General Board of Global Ministries. She studied political science and history at Birmingham-Southern College, a small United Methodist-related college in Birmingham, Ala.
"Alabama was like an incubator for me," Ms. Nadjibulla said. "Birmingham was a sane environment where I could start to process the things that had happened in my life in a peaceful, supportive environment. I needed that time to heal and gain a personal sense of peace and wholeness through my faith in God. This was a time of personal disarmament along my journey of Christian peacemaking."
She was baptized in a rural United Methodist church in Sand Mountain, Ala., in 1997. While in school, she spent summers coordinating mission teams that came to Upper Sand Mountain Parish to build housing for poor rural families and distributing food to families in need. The parish is a 20-year-old cooperative community-service organization that serves a poor, rural community.
"I saw suffering imposed, not by war but by injustice, poverty and lack of education," she said. "I saw that the First World had a Third World in it."
Ms. Nadjibulla started making connections.
"All of those things that happened to me were not just God’s plan for me, but God’s plan in the world to bring about change," she said.
Peacemaking
Today, Ms. Nadjibulla sees her work at the Church Center for the United Nations as a part of God’s call on her life to peacemaking.
"The seminar program allows people to meet who would never meet otherwise," she said. "For example, young people from remote parts of the United States come here and meet with activists from Nigeria, Columbia, Central Asia and various parts of the United States. It becomes like Romans 12. You are being transformed by the renewing of your mind."
Ms. Nadjibulla said a goal of the seminar program is to help participants develop new minds and new eyes for seeing the world and its peoples.
"In the United States, if four of five children are fed, it’s hard to see that fifth child who is left behind," she said.
Ms. Nadjibulla will begin graduate studies at Columbia University in New York City this fall. She knows it’s another step in God’s preparing her for service as a peacemaker.
Yvette Moore is managing editor of Response.