You and guest will join Brian Kelly, founder of The Points Guy and Points for Peace, as well as PeaceJam, as they travel to Guatemala City, Guatemala for a two-day PeaceJam conference hosted by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Rigoberta Menchú Tum.
This experience includes roundtrip business class airfare within the 48 continental United States and accommodations from June 2-5, 2017.
Activities include:
The Nobel Peace Prize 1992 was awarded to Rigoberta Menchú Tum in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples.
Menchú Tum was born in 1959 to a Mayan family in Chimel, a mountain village in Guatemala. The Mayan people could not grow enough food in the mountains to survive, so most years her family left their community to work on cotton and coffee plantations. While her family struggled to survive, Guatemala also struggled as a country. In 1954, the United States government helped overthrow Guatemala's democratically elected government. The Guatemalan army took power and sparked more than 30 years of dictatorship, war, and violence, during which 200,000 Guatemalans were murdered. The military brutally targeted the Mayans, including a campaign that destroyed 450 Mayan villages and displaced 1 million refugees. Menchú Tum lost both of her parents, two brothers, a sister-in-law, and three nieces and nephews to violence in Guatemala. Menchú Tum worked with the Committee of the Peasant Union to secure basic rights for the Mayan people, including fair wages and protection of their land.
From 1980-1981, she participated in nonviolent demonstrations and helped educate Mayan peasants to resist military oppression.In 1983, she told her life story to Elisabeth Burgos Debray in a series of interviews that became the bookI, Rigoberta Menchu. The book drew international attention to the horrors occurring in Guatemala and led to her recognition as a world leader for indigenous rights. In 1996, Guatemala's 36-year civil war ended with a peace accord. Menchú Tum fought to have the Guatemalan political and military establishment tried in court, and ran for President of Guatemala in 2007 and 2011.
She also established WINAQ, the first official indigenous-led political party in national history. Rigoberta Menchú Tum has joined her sister Nobel Peace Laureates to form the Nobel Women’s Initiative, to shine the light on women and children’s rights around the world. Menchú Tum has been a member of PeaceJam since 1996. Young people ages 14-18, as well as their teachers and adult advisers, have the opportunity to spend two days interacting with this amazing world leader for peace and participating in workshops around current issues, volunteer projects, and family groups led by university mentors!