Osterhaus given lifetime peace award

Shirley Osterhaus, a senior instructor at Western Washington University's Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, has been awarded the Whatcom Peace and Justice Center’s “Howard Harris Lifetime Peacemaker Award.”

This award, given for the past nine years to someone committed to peacemaking, is in honor of Howard Harris, a retired anthropology professor and one of the last World War II conscientious objectors; he was the person who started the peace vigil in front of the downtown Bellingham Federal Building 45 years ago. This vigil is the longest weekly vigil happening in the United States.

As an educator, organizer and activist, Osterhaus has been involved in solidarity and human rights work for the greater part of her life. Having lived in Bellingham for over 20 years, she was one of the co-founders of the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force, Central American Refugee Assistance and the Bellingham-El Salvador Sister City Organization. She has traveled on multiple educational delegations to various conflict areas of the world to better understand the reality of people on the ground. Most consistently, she has stood in solidarity with the people of Mexico and Central and South America. For more than a decade as Catholic Campus Minister at Western, she organized and took groups of students on cross-cultural, educational/service trips to Tijuana, Mexico.