The Bishop says peace meeting is a dream come true.

For three days, they converged at St. Teresa’s Pastoral Centre Lodwar discussing challenges that face pastoralists and how to counter them using peace as an important tool. It was a follow up to a similar meeting that took place in Lodwar last December, Courtesy of our own the Rt. Rev Dominic Kimengich. The Inter-diocesan Conference on Peace and Cross-Border Evangelization that that was held from 8^th to 10^th December at St. Teresa’s Pastoral Centre, Lodwar was a dream comes true. According to the host of the Important conference that was aimed at advocating for peace among the Turkana community with her neighborsm Uganda, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan and the nnnnneighboringioceses of Kitale and Nakuru, among others, the initiative kicked off when the Catholic Diocese of Lodwar was celebrating 50 years of evangelization in Turkana.

“We had invited up to 10 bishops and seized the opportunity to start something that would help in bringing about peace in the region,” he told us in an interview held in Lodwar. “When we held the first Inter-diocesan Conference on Peace and Cross-Border Evangelization, 5 bishops attended the meeting at which various issues regarding peace were discussed that was held in Lodwar and certainly this was a good start,” he continued. “Since then, for the first time, we have managed to have our people from various places sit together and discuss common problems facing them and to me this is a very good start since for a long time it has not been able to do this,” he added.

The second meeting which ran from 8^th to 10^th December 2013 was a follow up to the first meeting at which notes from all the participants of the first meeting compared notes and also chart the best way forward. The three day conference, which was held at St. Teresa’s Pastoral Centre in Lodwar township, was officially opened, first with mass at St. Augustine’s Cathedral, Lodwar, by the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Charles Daniel Balvo, brought together delegates from Torit Diocese (Southern Sudan); Jimma-Bonga Vicariate (Ethiopia); Kotido and Moroto (Uganda) as well as Kitale, Ngong, Lodwar and Nakuru (Kenya). The Ethiopian delegates were led by their Bishop Rt. Rev. Markos Gebewedhin. It was organized by The Catholic Diocese of Lodwar and sponsored by Funded by the Association of Member Episcopal Conference of Central and East Africa (AMECEA). Action plan that will see this important peace initiative developed further in order to help bring about long-lasting solutions to the challenges faced by the participating dioceses was drawn.