The Mitchell Scholarship

The 2018 Mitchell Scholar class gathered in Belfast for their mid-year retreat February 23-25, 2018. Led by Mitchell Scholarship Director Carolina Chavez, the group began the weekend on Friday afternoon with tour of the west Belfast peace murals led by Dr. Dominic Bryan, a Queen’s University professor and long-time friend of the Mitchell Scholarship. The group later had dinner with distinguished poet and writer Dr. Glenn Patterson, who is also Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s.

On Saturday morning, the group departed Belfast city for Corrymeela, Northern Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization. Located on the coast in Ballycastle, the organization hosts groups sessions using dialogue and other methods to help fractured communities have difficult conversations. The group had the extraordinary opportunity to visit with Dr. Padraig O Tuama, Corrymeela’s Community Leader, who is also a poet and a spiritual writer. The group discussed Dr. O Tuama’s previous work in Uganda and Ireland and how it feels to be present during the worse part of people’s lives. After a cozy lunch at Corrymeela, the group braved the cold and wind to visit Giant’s Causeway, an extraordinary natural wonder on the Northern Ireland coast.

The next morning, the Scholars visited the Titanic Museum where they learned about the city’s industrial past, which included shipbuilding and textile production. The Museum is located next to the docks where the Titanic was built, giving a real sense of the vessel’s immense size. At noon, the Scholars went their separate ways and returned to the institutions. The mid-year retreat was a grand opportunity for the scholars to come together as a group for the first time since the early fall. We are thankful for the attention and time showered on the group by those we met with, a testament to the reputation of the the George J. Mitchell Scholarship Program.