A history and cultural history professor at St. Paul's High School in Timor-Leste, Genoveva Alves is a peace trainer. She led the transformation of St. Paul’s into a school for peace.

A history and cultural history professor at St. Paul's High School in Timor-Leste, Genoveva Alves is a peace trainer and founding partner in the transformation of St. Paul’s into a school for peace. She trains, oversees, and assists the students in a peace program that teaches skills in dialogue, negotiation, and mediation. Prior to that, Genoveva worked in the forest with the East Timor resistance movement to fight the decades-long occupation by the Indonesian government. She played an integral role in the Timor Women’s Organization (OMT) in support of the liberation movement.

After nine years in the East Timor forest working for the clandestine resistance movement, Genoveva Alves and her husband became active members of Aileu district community and worked in the education system. In 1999, after the Indonesian government and military left East Timor, Genoveva was visible in community activities such as organizing the Timor Women’s Organization (OMT), volunteering and subsequently being contracted as a government secondary school teacher and conducting civic education and human rights trainings. She had played a key role in the OMT at the district level and then organized its support for the reconstruction movement. All schools in Aileu had been burned and looted during the Indonesian occupation. When the Ministry of Education under joint United Nations governance and local East Timor self-governance opened schools across the country, there were no desks, chairs, chalkboards, or textbooks. The District Education Officer, in cooperation with the Catholic parish, decided to open one secondary school, St. Paul's High School. Genoveva and others taught there first as volunteers in trying conditions. In the past four years, Genoveva has become School Treasurer and the senior professor on the faculty. As a faculty member and secretary for the OMT, she has participated in trainings in leadership, facilitation, peace, reconciliation, conflict resolution, gender issues, human rights, and civic education, using the opportunities well to increase her knowledge and skills as a community organizer and leader. In 2002, she was chosen to sit on the community reconciliation panel for Aileu District, as the mandate of the Truth, Reception, and Reconciliation Commission was carried out. Thus, she heard the truth telling, the victims' claims, the accuseds’ responses and admissions, and participated in the mediations of the panel.

Saint Paul’s High School Maryknoll Sisters