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By Lauren Kramer
Special to the Express-News 

It's not every day that a farm girl from small-town Illinois develops a passion for the bright stars of a clear Texas night, and an even deeper desire and commitment to promote peace in the world.
 
 

Anne Helmke's newest project is promoting the Decade for a Culture of Nonviolence, which was declared by the United Nations. Photo by Charles Barksdale/Staff

Look into Anne Helmke's penetrating blue eyes and you see the disarming frankness of a woman who has found her calling and responds to it daily with unabashed enthusiasm. 

As the director of the peaceCENTER, Helmke's role is to promote the principles of nonviolence to the larger community, and to connect individuals and organizations dedicated to promoting world peace.

 Working from the trunk of her car, Helmke spearheads the center's efforts to teach and demonstrate peace in the community. 

She organizes peace vigils at sites where violence occurred and talks peace at meetings she calls "table gatherings," "teach-ins" or "peace labs." And she brings together people and organizations in the name of peace.

 These days, she's working on a millennial peace effort — promoting the U.N.'s "Decade for a Culture of Nonviolence" from 2000 to 2010.

 She started that campaign a few days ago with a tree planting downtown near the corner of Avenue E and McCullough. She called the event "a labor of peace" in sync with the Labor Day weekend.

 It was the first of many tree plantings she will be orchestrating to promote the Decade for a Culture of Nonviolence, a declaration signed by 20 Nobel Peace laureates "for the children of the world" and adopted by the United Nations in November 1998.

 Peace is her life's work, but she confesses to feeling "odd" about an interview about herself.

 "I don't like the idea of becoming a peace princess, because what I do is not really about me," she says. "It's much more about connecting other people who are doing wonderful things in our community."

 But Helmke has become a symbol of those peace-making connections, and the veritable lifeblood of the peaceCENTER. 

How she got there is a story that begins in Hartsburg, a small town somewhere between St. Louis and Chicago, where she grew up on a farm.

 Her appreciation for Texas came at age 6, while on a family trip. Looking up at the night sky, Helmke said she was entranced by the bright stars, and decided there and then that someday, she wanted to live in Texas, "where the stars really are bigger."

 Years later, once she had completed a degree in interior design, that memory came to mind, and she persuaded her husband, Mark, to select a law school in Austin for his studies. 

Helmke accepted a job in retail at Joske's (now a Dillard's store), moving to the human resources department in the early '80s when the family moved to San Antonio and Helmke was pregnant with her daughter.

 The turning point in Helmke's life came when she returned home to Hartsburg for the funerals of two aunts who passed away in close succession.

 "In small-town U.S.A., when someone dies, school closes and everyone goes to the funeral," she explained. A close community, most Hartsburg residents showed up for the funerals, and as they reminisced about the deceased, Helmke found herself fascinated and intrigued.

 "It was amazing to hear people talk about the impact my aunts had, and how the world was transformed while they were a part of it. When I returned to work and reflected on the lives of my aunts, I knew that whatever they had, I wanted it in my life," she said.

 The same day, Helmke handed in her resignation at Joske's and embarked on a nine-month process of figuring out how her life differed from those of her aunts. It was their faithfulness, she concluded at the end.

 "Whatever they did, they carried their faith with them, be it organizing church activities or making quilts for people in Africa," Helmke said. "I realized my church and my work life were separate, not integrated, and that's when I felt the call to ministry."

 By 1990, Helmke had graduated from the Lutheran Seminary Program of the Southwest in Austin and accepted a position as associate pastor at Grace Lutheran Church, a few blocks from her previous job at Joske's downtown.

 But as her family expanded, she found herself deeply troubled by the heritage of the world she was leaving to her two daughters, Rachel and Kara. 

"The world they are growing up in is very different to the one I grew up in — much more violent. I'd like to leave a different legacy than I think our world might be leaving, and I believe that change is possible," she said.

 In San Antonio, the crime rate reached its zenith in 1993, and Helmke was spurred to action. Her involvement in the peace process began at a global peace conference, organized at the Church Center of the United Nations in New York. 

There, Helmke was regaled and inspired by stories about people all over the world who were participating in creative acts of nonviolence.

 She returned to San Antonio convinced of the need to form peace tables where issues of nonviolence could be discussed and explored, and to invite young people to participate in the conversations.

 Her first project was a gang peace seminar, to talk about violence in the Alamo City. Within two months, Helmke had recruited the assistance of 200 volunteers committed to promoting peace. A year later, she organized a second conference, called "Farewell to Violence."

 And from these efforts, the peaceCENTER was born as a place for people to connect.

 "This is a gathering point, an incubator, a place where people can dream of peace and work collaboratively for peace in this world," Helmke says.

 The center is in a small house in the historic Irish Flat neighborhood, just removed from the bustle of downtown traffic. 

Though she sometimes wonders what a farm girl is doing with an urban ministry in a large metropolis, Helmke has found a haven in the peaceCENTER, a place from which she can promote the concept of peacemaking, and the responsibility of each individual to pursue it.

 "People always say, 'Shouldn't someone be doing something about the violence?' Well, each of us is a new generation of peacemakers, and each of us is capable of doing something," she says. "The only way a world of peace is possible is if each one of us is committed to it."

Saturday, Sep 4,1999

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