ISSUE X • FALL 2011
Nothing to Undo by cynthia travis
W
hat do we mean when we say we are ‘bringing the stories home’? For the past seven years, everyday gandhis has been working with traditional communities and ex-combatants in post-war Liberia. The tagline for our mission statement has morphed from, ‘Infusing the media with stories of peacebuilding, in the words of those who have experienced violence and war’ to a more complex understanding of our purpose: ‘Promoting dialogue about the nature of healing from war, through councils, films, writing and photography.’ Bringing the stories home also means re-imagining the role and structure of nonprofit organizations, starting with everyday gandhis. Except for my remarks here, all the stories in this issue were all written by young peacebuilders in Liberia and in the U.S.
of this newsletter), says, “I must take the blame and the responsibility for my actions during the war. And behind me is a line of people who share that blame and responsibility, including for what they did to me. Behind them is another line of people who share the blame and responsibility also. And behind them are others, and so on.” Similarly, in one way or another all of them (future guardians) told us, “Now we understand that when we talk about repaying your generosity in supporting us in school, it doesn’t mean that we have to earn and pay that exact amount for someone else. In fact, we may never know or see the ways our own healing has helped others. It might be seen in our children, or in their children, or in members of the community we may never know.”
This sophisticated understandAs peacebuilders we are always ing came, in part, because of our wondering, How do we know visit to the Elmina Slave Castle in that the changes we see are real Ghana in July. Learning about the continued on page 2 and lasting? How do we know horrendous history of the slave our contribution was meaningtrade helped to locate the atrociful? Often, relationships that ties of Liberia’s civil war, in which bring peace can’t be measured in these young people fought, on a terms of cause and effect or linear Mohammed Kamara, photo by Morris Kamara deep-time continuum – spanning achievement. Instead, we look for ancient times to the far future – patterns, resilience, and small, meaningful gestures that either bring of trauma and suffering, especially since Liberia was founded by freed or indicate positive change. At everyday gandhis we seek the smallest slaves, perhaps the descendents of some of the very slaves who passed possible gesture, intervention, or comment. We seek to catalyze and re- through Elmina’s Gate of No Return. This larger landscape of brutallease untapped creativity in individuals and communities. We look for ity does not exonerate or even explain what any child soldier or other relationships that are reciprocal in positive ways and that can endure victim or perpetrator of war goes through. What it does is offer simuland absorb stresses, or, better yet, ‘aikido’ those stresses into learning taneous comfort and urgency to their task as peacemakers. One by one, and strength. We listen for incremental positive changes in attitude, many of the Future Guardians told, for the first time, in public and on insights, and point of view. We look for moments of spontaneous com- film, of acts of brutality they had committed and now regretted, and passion, for honesty, for amends being made and relationships restored. of their sadness that they did not know who to apologize to or who to seek forgiveness from. An example of this happened while I was visiting Liberia last month, in a conversation about forgiveness with the Future Guardians of Peace. The Future Guardians of Peace spend a great deal of time contemLassana Kanneh (who wrote the articles that appear on pages 3 and 9 plating what forgiveness means and what it actually means to live as a Continued on page 7