How I Became a Mediator
George Brose
This story begins in May, 1988,
shortly before our family was scheduled to leave Canada for a year of teaching
in Beijing, China. My wife Marie had been hired
by a Canadian organization to upgrade the English capabilities of Chinese
graduate students before their departure to study in Canada. It was hoped that they would then return to
China with a favorable outlook toward Canada in their future jobs back in
China. After all, if every Chinese
bought a pencil made in Canada it could denude the forests of British Columbia,
or so it was hypothesized.
A month or two before we were due to
leave Canada, my father, living in Ohio, had a stroke and was left in a
vegetative state in a veterans’ hospital in Dayton. My mother, in her late 70’s was now alone to
look after the family homestead, and I was divided on whether to stay with her or go to
China with Marie and our two teenage children, Dominique and Jacques. After a quick visit to Dayton, my mother
gave her blessing to us to go on our way to China. And we did.
By November, my father had died and I came home for the funeral and
knowing our contract would end on the following August, I told her we would
come back to Ohio to live and look after my mom. It didn’t quite work out that way.
Our year in China only lasted ten
months and was cut short by the Tiananmen student uprising that left us in
evacuation mode about four days after the massacre of the Beijing
students. The kids and I had been on the streets that
night and had witnessed some of the violence.
It left us scarred in ways we didn’t comprehend at the time. Nevertheless, we came back to Ohio, and
Marie, a Canadian, applied to renew her Green card in the US. Then she headed up to Canada for a visit
with her family but was denied re-entry to the States, because the law stated
that you had to remain in the US while the Green card application was being
processed. It forced us into a
separation for a year that we had not planned on. My son and I
stayed in Dayton to look after my mother, and Marie and our daughter Dominique stayed in
Quebec.
During that separation, we did see
each other once when I went up to Montreal and then once again when Marie entered
illegally for a quick visit in upstate New York. It seems that back then it was the license
plate number that set off the immigration red lights and she was driving a
different car from the one she had been in at the first refusal of entry. That first refusal co-incidentally was the
day the Berlin Wall came down. Freedom was proclaimed by the West. It made
cynics of all of us.
By June, 1990 Marie’s Green card had
been approved and she prepared to move back to the US. Dominique would remain to attend college and
university in the French schools.
Unfortunately in early June, my mother was killed crossing a major street near her home while going to see a sick friend. I had offered to walk with her to see her friend. She said she would be fine and went on her own. That's the last time I saw her alive. This really upset the family apple cart. I had not been able to find full time work in
the teaching or coaching field and had begun working in construction and house
painting under the tutelage of my old high school track coach, Ed Jones. I did have a part time job at Wittenberg
University as a track and cross country coach but the pay was a pittance.
One Sunday afternoon, Marie and I
and my 80 year old Aunt Adele were taking a walk on the bikeway that runs off Irving
Ave. near the University of Dayton. We had my
parents’ dog with us, a Schnauzer named Fritz.
I had let Fritz off the leash for a bit, when a jogger came by all fired
up on his adrenaline and endorphins and told me if I didn’t put the dog on a
leash he would kill it. That threat to
my deceased parents’ dog was the spark that sent me off the rails, and I
replied that the only thing going on a leash would be the jogger. This led to a physical confrontation while
Marie and my Aunt looked on rather horrified to put it mildly. At one point I was on top of the individual and was holding a grapefruit sized rock. I could have inflicted some serious damage, but somehow I held back. We were on the boundary of the municipalities
of Dayton and Oakwood, and since it must have been a slow Sunday afternoon for the police, a total of five squad cars from both towns showed up. They
separated us and no charges were filed.
A lawyer later told me, I could have been charged for failure to control
the dog. Failure to control myself would
probably have been more appropriate. I
encountered that jogger one more time a year or so later. He was in line ahead of me at the Post
Office. I chose not to say anything to
him. Not sure how it might have
ended.
A couple days after the fight while reading a
free community paper I saw an ad for a course called Alternatives to Violence
Project (AVP) taught by the Quakers. At
my age of almost fifty, I didn’t see a long future with my anger management
issues, so I decided to take the course. I'm not sure what stage of the grief process I was in at the time, but I was ready to look for some way of dealing with my anger. The course lasted twenty-four hours and was spread over three days. I found it helped me a lot and decided to
take the next two levels of the training which would be taught at the Dayton
Correctional Institution (prison) by Quakers alongside prisoners who would
also be teaching. After completing
those three courses I was a qualified trainer or facilitator of AVP. As a volunteer, I taught over forty of those courses over
the next five years. I moved up the ranks
a bit in AVP and attended several national level meetings and workshops. I also taught some courses in other prisons in Ohio
and even in Greenhaven prison in New York.
While attending one of those national meetings, in Plainfield, NJ, I took a twelve hour course in
Mediation. I thought this was a cool
thing and with my twelve hours of training, I offered my services as a
volunteer in the mediation program in Greene County, Xenia, OH courts. I did three cases under a bit of supervision
with the professional mediator in Xenia, and suddenly found myself with a full
time job offer in the Springfield, OH juvenile and domestic relations court. At that time I was now working at the
University of Dayton as the women’s cross country coach and assistant track
coach. The pay was a little better than Wittenberg U., but still not enough to support a family of four. The mediation job along with the coaching made everything possible.
Initially my mediation work was with the city and county schools regarding truancy and behavior by juveniles that would prevent court involvement. At that time truancy was a crime that could result in incarceration of children. In cases where parents contributed to the truancy, that too could result in incarceration of the parent. That could snowball into removal of the child from the parent’s care. There were lots of mediation trainings offered by the Ohio Supreme Court in those days and I eventually had over 400 hours of additional training including a week at the National Judicial College in Reno, NV. I eventually got into mediation of more and more serious criminal cases where victims and offenders were brought together to talk about what happened and how it affected the victim or the survivors of the victim. I also thought this might be a good skill to transfer to Africa where I had worked in several countries in the past. I got connected with the Quakers in Africa and went there four times for training mediators in conflict zones including Rwanda, Burundi, the Dem. Rep. of Congo, Kenya, and Tanzania. By that time, back home I had also moved into other types of mediation in the Domestic Relations and Civil Courts in Springfield. While in that capacity I mediated thirteen cases involving homicides. I worked there fifteen years until I retired in 2013. We subsequently moved to British Columbia and I took up the profession again on a part time basis only retiring this year after approximately 3,500 cases. I have no degrees in mediation; I never wanted to be a mediator, it just happened as a result of life experiences.
I can also say that I never joined the Quaker church although I've worked with them extensively in the US and Africa. Were I to join a church it would be theirs. They saved my life and enabled me to find a profession when I needed one.
Comments:
Most of us have had moments where odd circumstances have given us another direction. As Yogi Berra said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it". Had you not been confronted about the dog, especially so soon after losing your parents, you might have had a lengthy career as an elevator operator or a mixed martial arts instructor. As it turned out you had a positive effect on many people through your mediation, coaching, parenting and just being George. I remember spectating at one mediation. Forgot how you introduced me to the client but it was something more than "my buddy from California". Roy M.
Really enjoyed the piece, George. A well written account of life‘s unpredictability.
Dave H.
