After the call went out for nominations for the 2003 Peacemaker of the Year, more than a dozen letters arrived saying the choice was clear: Rita Jankowska-Bradley.
They came from all quarters, said Jeannette Rankin Peace Center director Anita Doyle, and all the writers thought they were the only ones.
"For so long, she has been such an outstanding example of someone working to make the world a better place," Doyle said. "She is an outstanding example of what a peacemaker should be."
Jankowska-Bradley's work for peace and justice is so wide that it touches two hemispheres.
She stands on the Higgins Avenue Bridge for peace on Tuesday evenings, and she's back on Fridays at noon with the peace vigil group Women in Black, of which she was the principal organizer. She works on international debt reduction, trying to help developing countries resolve the debt that keep them in poverty, as a member of the coordinating council of Jubilee USA. She traveled to Nicaragua to observe the impact of that debt and of globalization of agriculture, which is leading to hunger when cash crops for export displace local subsistence crops.
She's the youngest member, at 55, of Missoula Women for Peace and is devoted to their work. She has traveled to Georgia twice for the annual demonstration against the School of the Americas, where many believe the United States trains Third World soldiers to return home and foster paramilitary terrorism. She works against nuclear weapons and for years was part of the Easter vigils at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls. A dietitian by profession, she worked on the health of low-income mothers and children through Head Start in Butte.
We can't have peace without justice, she says, and justice does not exist when people are malnourished, impoverished and lacking health care.
"She is incredible," said Flo Chessin, a founder of Missoula Women for Peace and one of the first people Jankowska-Bradley met when she and her family came to Missoula from Butte in 1997. "She has done so much."
As well as all the work she does, she is capable and lucid when she talks in public about peace, and she and her husband Clifford have raised three children devoted to peace and justice, Chessin said. When an elderly and ill member of Missoula Women for Peace wanted to join the weekly peace vigil of Women in Black on the bridge, Jankowska-Bradley was the one who took her there on Fridays in her wheelchair.
"She's just an all-around incredible person," Chessin said. "She's just very sweet and loving and concerned."
Says Jankowska-Bradley, "I just feel fortunate to be called to serve."
In fact, she could not refrain from working for peace and justice while, for instance, one in three children in Nicaragua lives with malnutrition.
"There's something wrong in a world that requires poverty and hunger and joblessness," she said in an interview. "We need to change that system."
"I believe we have to try to make a difference," she said. "If I didn't try to make a difference, my life wouldn't be worthwhile.
"And I do this work as part of an incredible community in Missoula. I'm just a little piece of it."
Jankowska-Bradley was raised her first 10 years in Buhl, Idaho, where her father had a vegetable farm and she went to a one-room schoolhouse. The middle child of five in the all-Polish family, she learned beyond her own grade listening to the older students.
She came naturally to her social justice bent.
"My mother was always working in her church, cooking meals and serving people," she said. "She was always warm to everybody. So there was that great generosity of heart."
When her father died, the family moved to Twin Falls. Rita went to college at the University of New Mexico for her first two and a half years, then transferred to the University of Idaho in Moscow as a foods and nutrition major. In one of her science classes, biochemistry student Clifford Bradley noticed her because she always came in late (and still does, everywhere, she admits). They were married in 1972.
The couple spent two years after college in Australia while Clifford worked on a graduate degree. Rita worked as a dietitian in a hospital. There, she saw the injustice of poverty and came to appreciate the skills of the Polish immigrant women who cleaned the hospital but were often called on to translate for patients.
"The people who would come and translate, they'd be the people who cleaned, the people in food service," she said. "But they didn't get the respect they should have."
Back home, the couple lived in Nampa, Idaho, and then Boise. There, they worked with the Snake River Alliance on nuclear issues and with the Idaho Citizens' Coalition, which advocated for family farms and affordable energy. They were influenced deeply by the coalition's well-known Alfred Fothergill, who taught Jankowska-Bradley the principle of peace through justice.
Rita and Clifford moved to Butte in 1979 when Clifford got a job with the National Center for Appropriate Technology. Rita worked in public health, and their family grew to five, two sons and a daughter. She was influenced by Sister Kathleen O'Sullivan's work with low-income people.
"It was really a good place to see people being empowered," she said.
"I loved Butte," she said, "and I loved the people. There are so many incredible people there who work so hard for people who don't have enough money."
Jankowska-Bradley worked in maternal and child health, which she still does, and worked on its related issues on her own time. She also became more dedicated to peace than ever during the Gulf War in 1991.
"Our children asked us would they ever have to go to war and kill people," she said. "They were very upset. We told them we would do everything we could to keep that from happening."
In Missoula, the children grown, Rita runs her small business, Community Nutrition Resource Center, and Clifford works in sustainable and appropriate biotechnology for agriculture. Her peace affiliations are numerous.
One that keeps her going and bolsters her belief in the future is CAJA, Community Action for Justice in the Americas, where several generations work together, including Jankowska-Bradley and her daughter, who's 22 now.
"That cross-generational work is really important and really touches my spirit," she said. "I know there is a massive groundswell of people, young people, around the world who know that a better world is possible."
And she thinks about brave people like the women in Nicaragua after Hurricane Mitch wiped out their entire villages: A group she visited formed a sewing cooperative, building the factory with their own hands. Now they sell to an organic cotton firm that makes American T-shirts.
"I've heard people say in Latin America that despair is a First World luxury," she said. "They really can't afford despair. They have to go on with their lives."
Reporter Ginny Merriam can be reached at 523-5251 or at gmerriam@missoulian.com
If you're interested
Rita Jankowska-Bradley will be honored as the 2003 Peacemaker of the Year at a ceremony at 5 p.m. Sunday at Christ the King Church at 1400 Gerald Ave. The Missoula Peace Quilters will present a quilt they designed and made for her as the honoree. The public is welcome. A reception will follow. Admission is free. Questions? Call the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center at 543-3955.
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