Residents mutter darkly about rulers putting most profits in their own pockets.State agencies are "riddled with inefficiencies", says Melody Atil, who runs Peace Dividend, a microfinance organisation that funnels capital from the Sudanese diaspora to local borrowers.
The organization that runs peace education programs for children in Rwanda couldn't house me during my stay, but it's school vacation and the Catholic boarding school downhill is empty and willing to take me in.
The first lines of Iraq's new anthem run: "Peace be upon Iraq's hills, its two rivers, their banks and their bends/ Peace be upon the palm trees, and the lofty mountains spreading light".
"We are all part of this spiral of violence," says the small, forceful woman, who runs peace-building social projects in some of the most dangerous areas of Mexico.
"I was running against peace and prosperity and incumbency".
But although well-suited to winning a war, the government was inept at running a peace.
And that's why Al Gore, the incumbent Vice President running with peace in the world, record low unemployment, record levels of household wealth, the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history, and facing a flawed challenger in an issueless campaign, is fighting for his political survival.
UNICEF has been running the peace and tolerance programme in the North Caucasus since 2005, when a survey given to young people there revealed that approximately 60 per cent of them expressed strong negative stereotypes about other ethnic groups and more than 72 per cent had little interaction with representatives of other ethnic and religious groups.
In the long run, peace can be a killer, too.
Nevertheless, Mr Arafat must be calculating that making the plea might at least shame the United Nations, the Europeans and the Russians into taking a bigger part in what was previously an American-run peace process.
