By Rebekah Chevalier, Canada

WACC honorary life member Cees Hamelink first became interested in communication when he was eight years old.

Hamelink, who was awarded the membership 10 October at Congress, is an internationally recognized expert on mass communications and communication rights. In an interview, Hamelink shared his experience of growing up in a mainly Roman Catholic village in The Netherlands, where he attended a Protestant school. There was daily fighting between Protestant and Roman Catholic children.

Cape Town: Marcelo Rezende Guimarães est un moine bénédictin qui fait la formation des professeurs sur l'éducation pour la paix au Brésil.

Johnathan Ben Efrat is a documentary film director who co-founded Video48, an Israeli documentary production collective, in 1999. Video48 primarily seeks to highlight the struggles of the working class, primarily amongst Arab populations in Israel and the West Bank. The have produced several 50 minute features, and some shorter documentaries, since their inception.

WACC has been a key funder for Video48, providing them with a camera and the equipment necessary to equip an editing studio, and funding their latest film, Six Floors to Hell.

Cape Town:  Carlos Eduardo Corado, Audiovisuales de la Univ. Centro América (AUCA), El Salvador

Cape Town: Diana Ferrus was one of the “Clouds of Witnesses” honoured at WACC’s peace congress. Ferrus uses the art of poetry to express herself in a way that touches the emotions more deeply than dialogue can.

Cape Town: Congress 2008 of the World Association of Christian Communicators (WACC) will go in the history of some African journalists as a source of knowledge which they had not previously known.

The journalists drawn from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa and Malawi report that they have benefitted a lot from a 'Peace Reporting Workshop' run by veteran journalists Stephen Brown and Peter Kenny from the Geneva-based Ecumenical News International (ENI).

Cape Town: At the last meeting of the WACC 2008 Congress, I met a radio producer from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I asked her if she could share some audio excerpts for my website on stories for peace building. She said unfortunately, no. Her organization did not have the equipment or budget for producing audio files.

Cape Town: Hola, que tal? soy Ana Montoya, de Colombia. Estoy feliz de estar aqui y de participar. trabajo con radios comunitarias indigenas, especialmente en zonas de conflicto; y tambien con emisoras escolares en sectores populares.