Lighting the darkness.

Hazel Aicken well remembers her fear during June 1995 that the IRA ceasefire was about to collapse. `We just knew something was going to happen--tensions were building and building.' As Vice Chair of Women Together at the time, Hazel wanted to be ready with a powerful way to show the world that Northern Ireland's people wanted peace. An artist, she visualized thousands of people taking to the streets, waving white paper doves.

Women Together produced 3,000 doves. Seven months later, in February, the doves were put to use as Hazel's fear came true.

Five years ago, Hazel was a struggling community development worker in Belfast. Deeply disillusioned, she moved to a country farm and cut off her 20-year involvement with community work. `It was a total escape.'

For two years she recouped by painting and gardening until `I got a very powerful stirring. Something had started to move again.'

She accompanied a friend to a Women Together meeting and came home in shock. `I'd been nominated to go to Caux, MRA's international centre in Switzerland, to attend a conference for "Creators of Peace". I had never even heard of Caux!'

While there in August 1994, Hazel and Women Together Co-ordinator Anne Carr received word of the brutal sectarian murder of a pregnant mother in front of her five children. Hazel was devastated. `I said, "God, I don't know why you sent me here. Whatever you want me to do, I'll do it."'

A friend then showed her a video of Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize address. `It depicts art being used to show evil and pain and corruption. I'd always thought of art as showing the beautiful things. Suddenly I realized it didn't have to be like that.' Instead of a nature scene as she normally would have done, she painted a death scene--the death of the mother. Her next painting of candles, open hands and a sun surrounded by a crown of thorns portrayed hope in God's light.

She returned home sensing God had big plans in store. `All I knew was that my life would change.' Concerned about the victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland, she decided to open the farm where she lives to a cross-community group of bereaved families and individuals called Lifeline. Although a Protestant living in `a very strong traditional Unionist place', she refused to watch the annual Protestant parades on July 12 to celebrate William III's victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Instead, she invited Catholic and Protestant victims to the farm for hay rides and fun.

The farm has now developed into a place of `healing and relaxation' where bereavement support groups bring victims on day trips. Her landlady eagerly joins in, and the two are members of a group who plan to convert the derelict farm mill into a residential centre where bereaved families can have a break.

Hazel did not stop there. Last Christmas she initiated Northern Ireland's first adult nativity, which took place, naturally, on the firm. Catholic and Protestant members of the local community acted out the Christmas story to a crowd of around 300. `We even had to audition the donkey!' she laughs. `I wanted a cross-community project and I wanted worship. People from both sides of the community came.'

`It's just a tiny wee thing,' she says, `but if there were more small candles, the darkness would lessen.'