Features
Guelph Students Helping to Heal Civil War Wounds
Planned garden and arts centre for El Salvador town to draw on U of G student designs
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Fifteen years after a brutal civil war ended in El Salvador, the effects linger from the conflict that left 70,000 people dead or missing. Now a U of G faculty member hopes a garden and arts centre designed by landscape architecture students here will help heal war wounds in a small pocket of the Central American country.
In late November, almost 50 students in a site planning and design course displayed their concepts in the Landscape Architecture Building for a project proposed for the colonial town of Suchitoto in central El Salvador. Prof. Larry Harder, Environmental Design and Rural Development, hopes their ideas will one day become reality at the Centre for Peace and the Arts, an arts and education facility run by a non-profit group on the site of a former Christian mission.
The proposed project involves three vacant plots around a hospital, church and school located on the two-acre property.
The student designs include variations on a peace garden and outdoor spaces for exhibiting art and sculpture and for performing music and dance. The area is also intended as a place for reflection and as a forum for children's activities.
The project has given students a chance to craft designs that express meaning through landscape, says Harder. They've also learned about geography, history, culture, art therapy and postwar reconstruction.
But there's more to the project than that. “One of my objectives is to get more international exposure for students,” says Harder, whose human rights interests have also taken him to the West Bank. This fall, he returned to the Middle East to present a conference paper on postwar reconstruction.
Referring to the El Salvador project, he says: “This is all about a human rights issue, a broader issue. Part of the motivation is to expose students to the ethical and moral aspects of design work.”
The Guelph project began after he visited El Salvador last summer with a human rights organization. While there, he met the centre's co-founder Sister Peggy O'Neill.
“The sister said, ‘Someday what we would like to have is a peace garden' — at which point I said, ‘I can help you with that.'”
Back at Guelph, he enlisted help from Jane Eligh-Feryn, a sessional instructor who co-teaches the course for second-year BLA students.
“The students are really excited about it,” says Eligh-Feryn, a 1985 Guelph MLA graduate who runs Ginkgo Designs in Stratford. “They're engaged by the political nature of the issues and the struggles the people of El Salvador have gone through.”
The civil war between the El Salvadoran government and leftist rebels lasted for 12 years before ending in 1992. More than 70,000 people were killed or disappeared throughout the country.
Recalling people's stories of atrocities, including military invasion, rape and murder, Harder says the Guelph project “is critical to try to heal some of those wounds.”
He plans to share his students' designs with the centre, which is raising money for reconstruction and development of the property.
“People need a home, a country, a space for gathering to heal their heart and soul,” says second-year student Jackie Lau. “I hope some of my work will appear in the site.”