Rotary’s new peace fellows converged on Istanbul’s Bahçeşehir University from countries thousands of miles apart: Egypt, Bulgaria, Kenya, Jordan, and beyond. But they lost no time in finding out what they had in common.

“Where else on Earth would I have met with an Israeli participant and sat and talked and debated and laughed together?” says Suaad Abdo, a Yemeni fellow who now lives in Germany. “Having different opinions can enrich our discussions and expand our horizons.”

Abdo is one of 13 fellows in the first class at Rotary’s most recently opened peace center, the Otto and Fran Walter Rotary Peace Center at Bahçeşehir. Over the course of their yearlong professional development certificate program, which they began in February, the fellows are learning the theory and practice of sustainable peace, conflict resolution, and diplomacy. After 10 weeks studying together at the center, they returned home to carry out social change initiatives they designed.

Suaad Abdo, Yemen

Suaad Abdo first made the connection between education and women’s rights when she was a university student. A girl in her neighborhood in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, wanted to attend college, but the girl’s guardians refused to allow it.

“That got me thinking. I realized that the way I lived — the way my parents raised me — wasn’t the same for everyone. The society I lived in had a different reality,” says Abdo.

It’s no wonder then that Abdo has prioritized education in her own life. She’s studied in Malaysia, Ethiopia, and Germany and holds two advanced degrees: an MBA and a master’s degree in public policy with a focus on conflict studies and management. She was inspired to pursue the latter by the violence she witnessed in her home country during the Arab Spring uprisings of the early 2010s. She wasn’t at the pro-democracy demonstrations that were targeted by government loyalist gunmen, but she felt the danger as she encouraged her neighbors, particularly her female neighbors, to vote in elections that followed.

The whole experience left her with new questions. “I wanted to understand: What does democracy mean?” she says. “When conflict happens, what kind of decision making is behind that?”

Abdo got a scholarship to study in Germany and planned to stay only long enough to complete her master’s degree. But while she was there, Yemen was once again gripped by political violence as the country’s Houthi rebels seized control of the capital in 2014. She stayed on, learned to speak German, and came to see Germany as her home.

Abdo sought out work assisting the large numbers of migrants arriving in Germany in the mid-2010s. After volunteering as a translator at a government reception center and working at a nongovernmental organization that provided care to migrant children, she went on to lead a team at the International Organization for Migration that helped migrants returning to their home countries.

Abdo unites her two areas of interest — democracy and migration — in her social change initiative to forge relationships between female migrants and German women who act as mentors. The migrant women learn the basics of the German language along with computer and financial skills. The German women learn the migrants’ stories.

“I wanted to create a space where they could ask uncomfortable questions like, ‘You wear a headscarf. What does that mean to you?’” Abdo says. She quickly discovered they were inclined to talk about what they had in common.

“Women are women everywhere, regardless of where they come from,” she says. “They talk about family, about kids, about love, about career. These issues are universal.”