Swarthmore College update

*An email to Professor Haviland about my research in the Friends Historical Library and the Swarthmore College Peace Collection

Dear Professor Haviland-

I want to update you about how everything is going here in the archive: everything is going great!!

I was in Friends Historical Library all day yesterday looking at sources related to Restorative Justice - I found a position paper written by members of the New York Yearly Meeting Prison Committee that I think would be a great reading to assign to the class, along with a lot of newsletters from that committee. I also made copies of newsletters from the Quaker Project on Community Conflict, and the New York Yearly Meeting's Incest Committee. I got a lot of raw material that I still need to process once I'm up in Providence, but the library was great about letting me make copies and even take some documents of which they had duplicates, which I was really excited about.

Today I am in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection (same library, one floor down) looking at the periodicals for a program called Witness for Peace, which did work in the 1980s and 1990s around bearing witness to the atrocities in Nicaragua. Their aim, from what I've read, seems to be to bring details of the Contras' actions to a wide American audience, for example, their "hotline" is a weekly update of Contra attacks, delineated simply and accessibly. I am going to get copies of some good examples from the hotline.

A lot of the material that the librarians are suggesting to me when I try to explain our project deals with antiwar work, specifically groups that worked for mediation between governments. To me, this does not seem like something that applies to our work, other than possibly speaking to the memorials section. I don't think that direction is a good use of my limited time here.

I hope this sounds all good to you, and that you're having a nice week up in Providence. Is it still raining? The drive down to Philadelphia was absurd; it was raining so much I felt like I only had safe visibility for driving about 60% of the time! But we made it, no accidents this time, what a relief.

Please let me know when you would like to meet - you had said Wednesday before, which absolutely works. Would you be able to meet around 1 or 2? Wednesday is my 21st birthday so I feel like I might be out late the night before!

Best,
Sopheya