Dear peace educators, researchers and community activists in the Asia Pacific Peace Research Association.

best of wishes to you and a very peaceful new year for you, your families, friends and communities. We have made excellent progress this year in establishing the new APPRA website and I hope you are accessing it regularly. We have not received much in the way of material from you that we can place up on the site - such as sharing your stories and information about your peace work and programmes. So why not take the time to send in some information to share with each other, including photographs and we will try to post these? I am hoping next year we will really build our site as a valuable resource for all APPA members and others wanting to build peace in the A-P. it is your site so you must contribute to make it more interesting and informative Next year will be the IPRA conference and hopefully significant numbers from APPRA will be able to attend. [see my previous email about this] We are working now towards organising an APPRA conference for 2009 and I am keen to receive suggestions from you. At the moment there are a few potential locations _ Mindanao, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Taipei. However none of these are committed at all, and I am keen to hear any other possible suggestions of specific institutions/locations that might be interested in hosting APPRA in 2009, of course any possible location must have suitable conference facilities - not lavish but adequate. If you have any suggestions or offers, please contact me.

Best wishes to all,

John Synott