Kigali, Rwanda. At the request of Mussie Hailu, URI Coordinator for Africa, URI Executive Charles Gibbs has send a message of peace to be read at the opening of the Role of Religion for Peace and Reconciliation program of the Reconciliation Week in Rwanda, November 18-25. Mussie has been working hard on behalf of URI to support peacebuilding ad reconciliation efforts in DR Congo and Rwanda.
Reflections from the President – On the way to the URI Global Assembly in Mayapur, India
Monday, 17 November 2008
November 14, 2008
Dear Friends,
Now that I spend lots of time with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and others, I read the Bible differently. Also I read the newspaper differently. On November 12, 2008 I picked up the San Francisco Chronicle and two articles jumped out at my United Religions brain. One about the King of Saudi Arabia, one about the President of France.
This year,
2008, thousands of people participated in URI observances on the weekend of
September 19-21, from Santiago to Trivandrum, from Helsinki
to Sargodha.
Greetings and peace from Iguaçu Falls, Brazil at the end of the first
day of the Third URI Latin America regional assembly. Ninety
representatives of 21 Cooperation Circles from eleven countries shared
a rich and engaging beginning to what promises to be a powerful,
inspiring and empowering assembly.
After breakfast at our hotel, we boarded three buses and for a
half-an-hour drive through the outskirts of this city of 300,000
inhabitants, to the biological reserve of Itaipu, the company that
built and operates the world’s largest hydroelectric plant on the
Parana River. In the mid-seventies, before construction on the power
plant began, the population here was 15,000. As construction began, the
population more than tripled in one year to 50,000 and within a few
years had grown to over 200,000, with Itaipu employing more than 80,000.
Features 
