First, for us, there was Peacenet. Peacenet was (and I think still is, though we aren’t subscribed to it any more) an Internet Service Provider with a particular focus on facilitating activism for peace. Joel and I had an account on this service, and there Joel set up a Quaker discussion group, which several people participated in (I’m not sure whether any of the current Quaker bloggers were among them). Joel moved from facilitating this Quaker conference to doing similar work, for Peacenet, managing a group they had on Middle Eastern issues, during the first Gulf War, and, from there, got involved in managing another forum of theirs, which concerned promoting peace as Yugoslavia very unpeacefully broke into pieces. Somewhere in this process he began an Internet correspondence with someone called Wam Kat, a Dutch activist who was working with Croatian peace activists in Zagreb, and that resulted in Joel spending the summer of 1992 in former Yugoslavia, visiting peace activists in every country there except Bosnia.

Now, in parallel with all this online activity at Peacenet, some other Quaker Internet activity had been going on. Sometime after Joel had started the Quaker conference on Peacenet, we learned about a couple of mailing lists (Quaker-L and Quaker-P, the former for Quaker discussion and the latter for Quaker discussion around peace and social concerns issues), started by Bruce Dienes, and we subscribed. So, at the time that Joel went to former Yugoslavia, we put out the word on the Quaker email lists about his trip.

Before Joel’s trip to former Yugoslavia, our Meeting had appointed a clearness committee for him. I was in email contact with Joel the whole time, and would pass on requests for help to members of our meeting, and, more occasionally, to the Quaker mailing lists as well (my memory is that Joel had given me a list of email addresses of Friends who had made a particular commitment to support his work, though I no longer remember who all of them were). Joel had lots of requests, some of which I met, and some of which fell by the wayside. The six Barbies and other toys for refugee children - done. The request that I arrange to have Joan Baez come to former Yugoslavia to do a concert I set aside as too time consuming for me to manage. (Though Joel, now that he has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, thinks he may have been in mania at the time of his trip, the Joan Baez concert idea wasn’t altogether a manic flight of fancy. There was a peace activist at the Zagreb center, whose idea this was, who was greatly inspired by her, and I did actually know Joan Baez personally, though not especially intimately.) The request for resources for women who had been raped during the war I think I put out to people I knew through the Quaker lists, and I think I remember getting some suggestions, but I also remember getting too preoccupied with other stuff to carry out my original idea of taking the issue to Catherine MacKinnon (whom I didn’t know in real life, but whom it wouldn’t have been that hard to approach, since she was at Stanford and I was a Stanford alumna living near Stanford at the time).

Anyway, there were more than enough requests from Joel to keep me busy, during the months before the last few weeks when I joined him.

Where the Quaker lists really came into play was after Joel got back. At that point, he got speaking engagements arranged that involved travelling to various places and telling what he’d seen, and got articles published in a couple of Quaker publications. I think at this point he met Johan Maurer in real life (whom we both knew through Bruce Dienes’ lists, but whom I have never met in person, since I didn’t travel with Joel at this time).

Now, I do have to say that there was a downside; the support Joel got from our meeting proved to be less than he needed, and he sunk into a depression under the stress that followed on his trip. The fact that he suffered, unknown to either of us at the time, from bipolar disorder undoubtedly contributed. This was when I first encouraged him to see a psychiatrist, and he got his first diagnosis of depression (changed years later to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder). In later years, someone else from our meeting, inspired by Joel’s work, also travelled to former Yugoslavia (where by this time the focus of conflict had shifted to Kosovo), and I’ve been told that our meeting at that time attempted to learn from what had happened with Joel, and provide more support.

Another Quaker peace activist, this one from the UK, who was active in former Yugoslavia at around the same time as Joel (and for longer than we were able to be active, given what we learned about Joel’s mental health) was Adam Curle.

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