ISSUE XIV • FALL 2013
A Decade Within Centuries by cynthia travis
Next year, everyday gandhis will celebrate 10 years of peacebuilding work in Liberia. How do we measure the results and determine whether we have been successful? Conventional NGO’s measure success in terms of quantifiable results. Expenditures have to be justified to funders but not necessarily to the people they are supposedly there to serve. Projects are often designed by outside ‘experts’. ‘Target communities’ are seldom asked what people need or want, why, or how. Few aid workers are trained in skillful community entry and may not know who the true stakeholders are. Who are the real experts, especially in violence-torn communities? Are they outsiders with advanced degrees and, often, vested economic or political interests, who design projects in far-away offices, or are they the local people who know the culture, the land, the community and the problems people face? Add to these questions the long histories of corruption and competition for resources (among aid agencies, governments and corporations) and also the very real and legitimate need of donors to know how aid dollars are being spent. Peacebuilding pioneer John Paul Lederach has said that ‘it takes about as long to get out of a conflict as it took to get in’. Aid projects are often designed, and their success teepee, by amy teal measured, in quantifiable numbers: schools built, wells dug, children vaccinated, women who voted, etc. Time frames are typically weeks, months or at most a few years. Liberia’s civil war lasted 14 years. Is this is how long it should take to create lasting peace there? Applying Lederach’s maxim, we’d have to trace back to the beginning of the slave trade in West Africa in the 1750’s, followed by over one hundred years of slavery, then the traumatic return voyage of freed slaves sent back to colonize Liberia in the 1820’s, and the approximately 150 years before the Liberian civil war erupted in 1989. By this calculation, now that the war has been over for 10 years, we have another 250 years to go before we’ll know whether peace in Liberia is sustainable and healing is complete. In this light, how should aid projects
be designed? If we are working on a 1-5 year timeline, with current political agendas on the current global chess board, including current levels of resource availability, use and depletion, climate change, etc., then how can we claim that our efforts are going to bring the desired results? And what are the desired results? Liberia is resource rich. Chinese and others are buying up African farmland; America, Europe, China and other countries are vying for Africa’s (and Liberia’s) fresh water, timber, oil, gold, and other raw materials. Donor countries want to see certain kinds of economic, educational and political systems in place. Are they aligned with local people who have a rich and complex culture very different from, say, Western or Chinese culture? And, given that the US is the world’s largest consumer of non-renewable resources, the world’s largest contributor to global warming, the world’s largest supplier of weapons and the world’s primary destination for the modern slave trade, are we necessarily the best ‘experts’ on what is right for the rest of the world? Projects arising from local needs and local culture, that are inclusive of as many stakeholders as possible and calibrated to attain long-term cultural, social, ecological and economic sustainability on a 200-500 year timeline involve a different way of thinking altogether, with an entirely different set of questions and goals. During our first 10 years of work in Liberia, perhaps 10,000 people or more have participated in the ceremonies, negotiations, soccer games and storytelling we have sponsored. We have 14 Liberian scholarship students, with 3 college graduates, and about 40 trained permaculture designers. But what do these numbers actually mean? In Liberia people say, “If I am healed, I can heal 20 people just by interacting with them. Each of them can heal 20 more, who heal 20 more, and so on.” By that measure, we may have reached Continued on page 3…