Day 49 - Nitin Sonawane

The Name of Hope: A Lesson from a Peace Walk in Serbia
By Nitin Sonawane Gandhi Peace Walker, September 2020
(Pune, Maharashtra, India)

Serbia is a beautiful country, and walking for peace across its landscape felt like a true blessing. At the time, the world was still reeling from the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. In September 2020, along with my fellow peace walker, the Japanese Buddhist monk Ikeda Shonin, I set out from the Gandhi Statue in Belgrade.

By then, I had walked through nearly 40 countries to promote the message of nonviolence. Ikeda and I had already spent a year walking together across Asia and Africa, but nothing could have prepared me for the emotional rollercoaster of our third day in Serbia.

A Night of Fear in Udovice

We reached the small town of Udovice and pitched our tents for the night near an open football field. Around 10:00 PM, the silence was shattered. Stones began hitting our camp. One struck my tent; another hit Ikeda Shonin on the cheek.

As he cried out in pain, I rushed outside into the pitch black, seeing nothing but feeling a heavy sense of dread. Eventually, a local man approached us. He explained that the villagers—on edge due to the regional refugee crisis—had mistaken us for thieves or refugees.

That night was the first time in four years of global travel that I felt truly broken. I remember thinking: Is this what I deserve after all this effort for world peace? For the first time, I felt the flickering light of hope start to go out.

The Encounter at Sunset

The following day felt heavy. Because I am Indian and Ikeda is a Japanese Buddhist monk, we were "aliens" to this land. Out of fear, people locked their doors as we passed.

Then, at sunset, something changed.

An elderly lady on a bicycle began chasing us. She stopped, offered us two pears from her own tree, and asked why we were there. When we told her we were walking for world peace, she began to cry right there on the road.

"Thank you for doing this," she sobbed. "We need more of this. We don’t know what to do."

Meeting "Hope"

She invited us to her home—a modest, broken-down house where she lived alone at 75 years old. She had very little, yet she gave us everything. She baked us apple pie, shared her dinner, and gave us a safe place to rest.

She was a person who appeared exactly when I was at my lowest, offering total love without hesitation. In the morning, I asked her what her name meant.

She looked at me and said, "Nada."

In her language, Nada means "Hope."

She lived up to her name. She was the one who brought the spirit of peace back to our walk.
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Thank you, Nada.