Piyusha Sumanapala is a 2026 master of global affairs graduate from Sri Lanka who majored in international peace studies.
“We were told that those were lies.”
These words that I heard during a visit to the House Museum of Memory (Museo Casa de la Memoria ) in Medellín, Colombia will stay with me for the rest of my life. In many ways, it is the sentiment that will guide my journey ahead. It was a reminder that while conflict claims lives and brings destruction, it also attempts to erase lived truths. This moment was when I understood that as a peacebuilder and an artist, memory is the space I want to shape.
I traveled to Colombia over spring break as part of the course Peace Agreements: Global Perspectives and the Colombian Experience. Led by Professor Josefina Echavarría Álvarez and our teaching assistant Paul Lee, our group traded the grey shades of South Bend for the greens of Bogotá and Medellín. We had spent the semester studying the 2016 Colombian Peace Accord in theory and now, we were there to see its living, breathing reality.
Who deserves to be remembered?
The experience at the Museo Casa de la Memoria in Medellín struck a chord in me because it transformed abstract history into a physical and symbolic sanctuary for truths. By the end of the 1980s, Medellín was considered one of the most dangerous cities in the world, caught in a wave of violence. This violence didn't only come from criminal groups; it also came from those who claimed to be providing security. The museum was born out of the need to provide a place for these lived realities that were for years denied and suppressed — not just as an archive, but as an active space where memory is kept alive and discussed, ensuring these lessons protect the future from repeating the past.
Standing before exhibits detailing decades of violence, I found myself asking: Who deserves to be remembered? In a society where victims’ testimonies were once ignored or labeled as lies, the museum acts as an intervention. It houses interactive maps of massacres and thousands of testimonies through song, art and artifacts, ensuring that the body that still remembers is finally heard.
I have realized that honoring these lived, messy truths requires more than academic detachment; it demands our raw, human empathy. I realized then that there is no separation between my personal and professional lives. Who I am as a person — with all my own sensitivity, creativity and capacity to feel — is exactly who I must bring to my work. Peace begins with the courage to hold these memories close, acknowledging that they are alive, and understanding that only by tending to what happened can we cultivate a future without violence.
Okay, then what?
On our first day in Bogotá, we joined a walking tour led by a street artist named Camilo, who introduced us to a mural that spelled out reparar (repair). This mural is a social and artistic masterpiece, created in collaboration with victims of the conflict. Camilo explained that the project was designed to bring silenced stories from the rural regions into the political and urban heart of the capital. It serves as a visual bridge over the long-standing disconnect between Bogotá’s politics and the lived realities of the regions beyond.
Each letter in the mural unfolds into stories of restoration, using metaphors that stretch from the microscopic to the infinite. On one end of the scale, tiny networks of mycelium (a component of fungi) represent our multidimensional connections; on the other, plowing the cosmos represents the labor of personal and collective change. We are invited to hold healing in this same dual light — as a quiet process of neural repair, and as a grand cosmic duty. To restore what connects us is to nourish the constellations of the universe.
This mural became special to me because it goes beyond acknowledging that something unspeakable has happened. It asks the question: Okay, then what? How does a society stitch together a social fabric that has been torn for decades? It taught me that harm cannot be undone, but we certainly can recognize and recalibrate how we choose to honor what we have lost.
Where can we find hope?
Throughout the trip, I kept returning to peacebuilder John Paul Lederach’s idea that the center that holds a society together is an invisible web of relationships. Often, our ignorance of this web is what allows us to turn away, retreating into quiet indifference. We tend to think we should only care if an injustice reaches our own doorstep. But the true power of the web is the realization that because we are interconnected, any effort toward change, no matter how small, can have a collective impact.
Even in contexts of repeating violence, there is often a quiet, resilient agency that remains within our reach. This is what can allow us to begin breaking the cycles of violence.
Colombia holds a special place in my heart now because of the hope it planted in me. It showed me that when people across every layer of society, from victims to political representatives, decide that something must change, it actually can — even if the road is long and slow, and even if it doesn't show big enough results soon enough. It isn’t about waiting for a perfect, static solution but about cultivating space where communities can safely live, breathe, hear birds sing and begin to flourish again.
Living through conflict can easily throw us into despair, and these are the exact moments where we must show up. Colombia shows that hope lasts only as long as we make it last. It is within our hands to push forward the humanity that gets crowded out by the noise of conflict.
And for us?
If my time in Colombia taught me anything, it is that peacebuilding is a way of being. It is the intentional act of stitching together what has been torn. As my time at at the Keough School comes to a close, I carry these lessons with me:
- Memory is a foundation. We must ask whose stories are being silenced and how we can amplify them.
- Repair is collective. We cannot mend a torn social fabric alone, for it requires weaving mutually with those who have carried the weight of the harm.
- Hope is an action. It is a choice we make every day to show up, even when change feels impossibly far away.