About 25 selected scholars from around the world explored “The Spirit of Human Rights” in that three-day dialogue. It was then urged that the process should be repeated somewhere in the near east this year. Cypress was selected because of its proximity to Iraq, Africa, and Israel Palestine.
Among last year’s participants who will meet again this month in Cypress are Dr. Arn Chorn-Pond, a Cambodian who as a child escaped from the Pol Pot killing fields in Cambodia, and is now a U.S. Citizen; Yitzhak Mendelsohn, an Israeli clinical psychologist who currently promotes Palestine-Israel dialogues in Israel; John O’Dea, executive director of the Noetic Sciences Institute which was developed by astronaut Edgar Mitchell, one of the men who walked on the moon.; Svetlana Billoz, M.D., granddaughter of Josip Broz, better known as Tito, the late premier of Yugoslavia, and Ruth Yellow Hawk of the Black Hills of South Dakota, formerly a faculty member of the New Zealand Social and Civic Policy Institute which deals with Maoris and other Pacific Islanders and is now on the staff of the Kettering Institute.
About 30 peace scholars and activists are expected to participate in the Cypress dialogue this year.
Thompson is a graduate of Michigan State University and the School for International Training, an adjunct of the experiment of international living in Vermont. She became dedicated to world peace issues while working with Palestinian children in 1983 at a Catholic Mission in Israel near the Sea of Galilee.
She assisted in the opening of a new school living in Ibillian for Islamic, Greek Orthodox, and Greek Catholic children. In 1984 she founded a worldwide peace program headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y., called “Children of War.”
The program brought youngsters from various battlefields around the earth to the U.S. to meet with our own high school students. She took them to Charlotte, Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and other cities. The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The TV News Networks, and church congregations around the U.S. featured the “Children of War” visitations.
In 1986 Thompson was awarded the annual peace fellowship by Radcliff’s Bunting Institute at Harvard. Her search for international “Conflict Resolution” has taken her to Tokyo, Kenya, Phnom Penh, Guatemala, Vienna, Stockholm, Zagreb, and to conservations with the Dalai Lama in India.
“The hope is that these peace dialogues, like the ones in Cambridge and now in Cypress, will eventually create a worldwide good neighborhood where everyone can enjoy peace on earth,” said Thompson.
