SOCIAL ISSUES : A Smile, a Handshake, a Path to Peace : Friendship Force brings people from around the globe together, so that one-on-one, understanding can bloom.

The women stood shoulder to shoulder in a great circle on the damp soccer field at Camp Mikell here in the mountains of North Georgia. Dressed in warm-up suits and sweaters to ward off the late autumn chill, they listened intently to an interpreter who repeated to them in Russian the words of their program director.

“When we were children, some of us feared our lives could be over because of some of our neighbors on the other side of the ocean. And, across the ocean, you were fearing that your lives could be lost because of us. I cherish this moment when those fears are gone,” said Mildred Neville, program director of Outdoor Paths, an organization that teaches wilderness games. “Women are coming together from around the world. . . . There is no limit to the dreams we can bring into reality--together.”

As the last words were spoken, many of the women had tears rolling down their cheeks.

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Fifty-four women from the former Soviet Union had come to Atlanta to participate in a program designed to help them start services to deal with domestic violence intheir countries. With non-governmental agencies being formed for the first time in their homelands, the timing was perfect for the women to learn the skills necessary to develop their own grass-roots support organizations.

The program was one of many exchanges sponsored this year by the Friendship Force, an Atlanta-based nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering peace through international friendships. While little known in this country, the group’s efforts in Germany, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and China earned it a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

For three weeks the women, natives of Russia, Armenia, Siberia and Soviet Georgia, had immersed themselves in classes, workshops and lectures. Many worked as interns in Atlanta shelters for battered women, in rape crisis centers and at abuse hot lines. After being in the urban Atlanta setting, they delighted in the outdoor activities. They played team-building games, hiked the mountain trails and sat around campfires sharing what they had learned.

Galina Stardseva, program coordinator for a women’s center in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russia, said sitting down and talking with women from across her own country had been arevelation. “They all talk about their problems. Now I start to realize the scale of the catastrophic changes that are occurring,” Stardseva said.

It has been 30 years since Friendship Force founder Wayne Smith first dreamed of an organization that would bring people together from all points on the globe.

Smith, then a young Presbyterian missionary in the jungles of Brazil, wanted others to share the excitement of going to a foreign land, staying in the homes of local citizens, eating at their tables, becoming friends. He felt more peace and understanding would evolve from people sitting across a dinner table than from ambassadors sitting around a conference table.

More than a half-million people have participated in Friendship Force exchanges, including travel in and out of the United States and between foreign countries. The 350 Friendship Force clubs in 50 countries include one in Los Angeles and one in Orange County.

“Breaking down cultural and language barriers and getting to know and understand people of other nations can lead to a more peaceful world,” said former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who has been honorary chairwoman of the Friendship Force since its inauguration in 1977.

Jill Hubbs joined the first Friendship Force flight to Vietnam a year ago with the hope of tracking down information about her father, missing in action since his S-2 reconnaissance airplane disappeared off the coast of Vinh on March 17, 1968.

Hubbs, 37, a schoolteacher from Jacksonville, Fla., said she was prepared to dislike the Vietnamese. After all, they had “fought with our country, killed lots of people and ultimately were responsible for taking my dad.”

Vietnamese officials gave Hubbs new documents regarding her father, and although they did not answer her questions about his fate, she felt satisfied that she was closer to the truth. And after meeting the people of Vietnam one-on-one, she realized many of them had experienced tragic losses like her own.

One part of the trip that Hubbs recalls vividly was visiting an older Vietnamese woman who invited her, through an interpreter, to see a shrine she had built to the memory of the two sons she had lost in the war. Hubbs was led to a table arranged with candles, incense, fruit and two black-and-white photographs of the sons. Hubbs showed a snapshot of her father and explained that she too had lost a loved one in the same war.

“She took my dad’s picture from my hands and put it on the shrine between her sons. She lit a candle and spoke a prayer in Vietnamese. We hugged. It made me look at the war in a different way. . . . When you become acquainted with a person and form a friendship, you can no longer be enemies.”