Education equips Ethiopian leader to serve
“With the grace of God, I escaped many deaths throughout my journey in Christ,” says Tigist Alamirew. Born to an Orthodox family in Finote Selam, she now serves as distance education director at Meserete Kristos College in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia. “While I was a teenager, one of my friends witnessed to me about the love…
To serve and to give
I was born in Santander in north-central Colombia. My husband and I married when he was 17 and I was 15, and we decided to come to Bogotá to look for a better life. In about 2005, Iglesia Cristiana Hermanos Menonitas El Progreso had an evangelism campaign, and my husband went. That’s how I got…
RJC performs Godspell
Every year, as part of homecoming and graduation weekend at Rosthern Junior College, the students present a large-scale musical. This year they performed Godspell by John-Michael Tebelak and Stephen Schwartz. Godspell has been around since the late 1960s and is based on the story of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew. Through parables and lessons,…
True connections
Walk into Hagar Association, a school in Be’er-Sheva, Israel, and it looks like almost any other school. But if you listen closely, you’ll hear children speaking both Hebrew and Arabic, and see them playing together—uncommon sounds and sights in the region. Hagar is a bilingual school for 330 children of Jewish-Israelis and Palestinian citizens of…
Nonviolent action in history and today
“In the Second World War there were over 10,000 loyal Canadians who served Canada without weapons. What were they called?” This is the question Conrad Stoesz has been asking students at the Red River Heritage Fair for more than a decade. War has long been the popular narrative throughout history and it continues to be…
Peace is everyone’s business
The political scientist Harold Lasswell once defined politics to be “who gets what, when and how.” If that is politics, peace studies in contrast can be seen as an attempt to answer the question “why” things are given to whom, when and how. While peace studies is concerned about the political challenge of stopping people…
A child’s world in the palm of their parents’ hands
When most parents send their elementary-and middle-school-aged children off to school, they rely on school websites and notes in their children’s backpack to keep them informed. But one Winnipeg school has changed all that. Now, Winnipeg Mennonite Elementary & Middle Schools (WMEMS) parents can download a school app to stay in the loop with their…
Drawing students ‘in’
In “Outwitted,” poet Edwin Markham writes: “He drew a circle that shut me out— / Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout. / But love and I had the wit to win: / We drew a circle that took him in!” Early last December, the city of Winnipeg served an important role as textbook and…
Teaching in a flipped classroom
Chani Wiens, UMEI’s academic math teacher since 2009, has introduced a new style of teaching to the school: the flipped classroom. “I started to research classroom flipping when I became frustrated that, even in a small classroom, I wasn’t meeting the needs of each student as much as I wanted to,” she explains. “I felt…
Rockway adds business courses to curriculum
It was with great excitement that Rockway Mennonite Collegiate in Kitchener, Ont., launched a new business program last fall. Our new courses in business leadership and international business are designed to expose our students to important business ideas and invite them to consider them through a Christian lens. It has been both exciting and a…
