issue XV • SPRING 2014
Let the Story of Peace Be Told by cynthia travis
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tarting in the mid-1400’s, millions of West Africans were sold into slavery and sent to the United States and elsewhere. The economic prosperity of Europe, England and the United States was literally built on the backs of African slaves who were torn from their ancestral homelands as well as on the resources that were torn from the land, including diamonds, gold and oil. One of the ways people survive that kind of trauma is that they mistakenly believe they can gain power by behaving like the people who mistreated them. In 1824, freed slaves from America were sent back to Africa to colonize what is now Liberia. They took the best land, installed themselves as the ruling class, and brutalized the indigenous people. In 1989, multiple generations of trauma erupted in a civil war that lasted almost 15 years.
In Africa, as in many other parts of the world, international corporations are now the new colonizers. They care little about the earth and less about the traditional people who know how to live in harmony with each other and the land. It serves their interests to have local people continuously fighting amongst themselves because it keeps them divided. However, when the people unite for peace and environmental restoration, those corporations and governments must stop and listen. People can create peace for themselves when they decide to work together.
We at everyday gandhis have a particular respect for traditional culture because we see its power to unite people in a communal, nature-based identity that is deeply nourishing because it includes the community of humans, nature and the ancestors. With this understanding, we can see that healing moves in multiple directions and through multiple realms. We have so many stories and experiences of inexplicable synchronicities with dreams and the appearance of animals and birds where our peacebuilding work is taking place.
As you will see in this newsletter, Kamara and the Future Guardians of Peace have begun working with villages in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone to create Mobile Peace Teams comprised of ex-combatants, women, traditional elders, religious leaders, and local government officials. They are all working together to keep the peace along the borders of those three countries, and are doing this themselves by coming together.
At everyday gandhis, we are a mixed group of Liberians, Americans, black, white, traditional people, Muslims, Christians, and Jews. We work in very unconventional ways: We listen to the people in small, far-off villages; we One of the biggest casualties listen to each other; we listen of war in a place like Liberia to the land and the trees and is that Western culture, with the animals and the water; its focus on material wealth, we listen to the spirits; we sit supplants the richness of together and tell dreams; we traditional community life, honor the ancestors; we do and destroys the relationship traditional ceremonies, and we between elders and youth. go to churches and mosques Most people who have been to pray together. By talking through war become severely and listening in these ways, disconnected from the natural we know what is needed and world. Long after the shooting peace celebration in the village of samodu, photo by andre lambertson what to do. Recently we have stops, nature continues to sufshifted our time frame to confer from human heedlessness. And, as we are seeing in Congo, Liberia sider the effects of our actions 100 years or more into the future. Our and so many other places, trauma and the loss of an earth-based iden- goal is to seed a culture of peace that will outlast ourselves and our tity are often expressed through violence towards women and nature. projects and sustain future generations of peacebuilders.
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