"Violence is like a rash on the soul. We must treat it and return the person to health. It is our job to take this violence out of people and out of communities. We are getting good at this. We have had a lot of practice."
Carolyn Nordstrom is an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame. Much of her work for the past decade has been in Mozambique and last weekend she came to Derry to tell us about an extraordinary "success story" in the difficult process of reconciliation.
Mozambique suffered terribly in a civil war which lasted 15 years and cost the lives of approximately one million people out of a population of 15 million. Many of them were brutally massacred. The structures of civil society were destroyed. Yet, against all the odds, the Peace Accords signed in 1992 have held. In 1994 hundreds of thousands of people defied a call for the boycott of elections and, in many cases, walked miles to cast their votes.
As important, a remarkable process of reconciliation, started during the war itself, when individuals and communities banded together to defy the violence, has taken place. This has owed nothing to the official institutions of the state. Instead, so-called "ordinary" people devised strategies to create schools, medical clinics, informal food markets and exchanges. They called on their own historical memory for ceremonies and rituals in which violence, all violence, was treated as an illness to be cured and replaced with "cultures of peace."
The quotation at the beginning of this column is one of thousands which Ms Nordstrom heard in the course of her work. In Derry last weekend she gave us many examples of how individuals and communities have been helped to put a violent past behind them, to look in hope to the future. In Mozambique, for example, people believe that if a soldier or an individual kills someone, then the soul of his victim follows him, causing trouble not only to him and his family but to the whole community.
For this reason he has to be cured of the violence he has perpetrated. It is the same with victims. They too must be taught to put the past behind them.
It is quite common for individuals and communities to offer reparations to the victims. There have been cases where villagers have gone to find boys who were forced to become soldiers by one side or the other, kidnapped them and brought them home to be healed.
Ms Nordstrom stressed that for a Western academic, educated to believe Hobbes's theory that without the benefit of political structures people degenerate into animals, what she saw in Mozambique defied all the accepted conventions. Here, "the ordinary throng of people reconstructed society from the ashes of conflict and violence."
Last weekend's conference was organised by Prof Paul Arthur of INCORE, the University of Ulster's initiative on conflict resolution. It brought together people with experience of peace building in the Middle East, India, the former Eastern Bloc countries, Latin America and the former Yugoslavia.
At the public forum which I attended there was a clear debate between those who argued that peace and civil order depend on creating structures of government based on human rights and principles of international law, and those who believe that the process of building justice and reconciliation must be rooted in the historical traditions of the community and grow from the roots up.
In Northern Ireland just now the emphasis is on getting the political structures up and running. Enormous sums of money have been spent on creating commissions and review bodies on human rights, equality, policing and so on. This is necessary if the political parties are to take the Belfast Agreement forward.
But it is on the ground that the real work of rebuilding what Carolyn Nordstrom described as "a purposeful social universe" will have to be done.
People want the agreement to work. The opinion poll published in this newspaper on Tuesday showed that they may well be in advance of their political leaders in their willingness to accept compromise. At community level one sees this hunger for change, and also a pragmatic recognition of the sacrifices that will have to be made by both communities to achieve this.
When Chris Patten first announced that the Police Review Body would hold public meetings across the North, there was some anxiety as to whether they would attract audiences. The sceptics have been confounded. Over 10,000 people have turned up to the meetings and about 1,000 have spoken at them.
As Maurice Hayes, a member of the Review Body, put it, "At times we felt that we were acting as a surrogate Truth and Reconciliation Commission."
At one meeting a man at the back of the hall addressed Chris Patten directly. He thanked him for listening to all that had been said and then continued, "But my son was murdered, Mr Patten, and the man who killed him is sitting just a few rows from me. How do we deal with that?"
More than anything else, people wanted to tell their own stories.
It is only quite recently that we have learnt that this is an essential part of the healing process. In the past victims were too often urged to put the past behind them, forget what they had suffered and look to the future.
We know better now. We have heard so many victims of child sexual abuse speak of how important it has been to them to confront their abusers in court and give their accounts of what happened to them.
It is not only the victims who need this. As a society we have to bring the dark stories of our own history into the daylight if we are to do better in the future. Only this week the first of Mary Raftery's series for RTE on industrial schools and other institutions has made for harrowing viewing and listening.
But the courage of the victims in telling their stories may help to ensure that these things will not happen again.
In Macedonia and Albania the refugees beg the journalists to listen to what has happened to them. It is as if, in some way, the act of telling their individual stories is necessary if they are to have any hope of rebuilding their lives and their shattered communities. It is a process which has hardly begun in Northern Ireland but which will have to take place if the hopes enshrined in the Belfast Agreement are to be fulfilled.