She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.
A nurse and therapeutic specialist, Sr. Maria Christina Färber (born in 1957) worked with children from broken homes in Germany. In 1999, during the Kosovo War, she moved to the Albanian city of Shkodra, where she helped refugees from Kosovo. After the war she took over Caritas International’s psychological and social care of Albanian families involved in blood feuds. With the reconciliation of hostile clans, counseling mothers, and organizing children’s therapy sessions, Christina does everything possible to help families step out of the vicious circle of violence, revenge, and death … (1000peacewomen).
She says: « We must break the cycle of killing. The first step is that the victims of violence do not become offenders themselves ».
Verleihung des Bundesverdienstkreuzes am Bande an Schwester Maria Christina Färber.
Am 02.02.02 fand die erste Profess der Schwester Maria Christina Färber in Kehrsiten/Schweiz, am Vierwaldstätter See, statt.
Der Albaner Pal und sein Sohn Marresh haben ihr Haus seit Jahren nicht verlassen. Sie haben Angst, erschossen zu werden – aus Blutrache.
Maria Christina Färber: « Wenn der Vogel kein Nest mehr hat“. Hilfe für Inlandsflüchtlinge in Albanien.
Maria Christina Färber – Germany
She works for Caritas International, and for the Spiritual Community.
Sister Christina has been invited into Albanian houses for Raki countless times, and always politely refused. But here, in the Laçi family house (all clan names have been changed to protect the families) it is impossible. Dede Laçi pours his distilled spirits to the brim. The men in the smoke-filled parlor rise. Only Dede’s wife Mira remains seated in the corner of the sofa, in a black dress of mourning.
Her youngest son cries on her lap, too small to understand what his father and the nun from Germany have just discussed and will now confirm with liquor: That the murder of Dede Laçi’s nine year old son Elton will not be avenged with further murders.
Sister Christina had been fighting for this agreement for months. Again and again she tried talking to the men of the Laçi clan in the northern Albanian city of Shkoder, for the first time on the very day that Elton Laçi was shot. And now the father of the family has asserted before witnesses, that he wants to reconcile his family with the family of his son’s murderer. “The first step is that victims of violence do not become offenders themselves,” says the 47 year old. Thoughtfully she adds: “If the promise can be kept.”
Because Dede Laçi does not decide alone. The family is large, with many branches. All of them have to renounce something they see as their right for the sake of reconciliation. A right that, says Christina Färber “is still very much in peoples’ minds” in northern Albania: The right to revenge, faithful to the unwritten law of blood for blood.
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