ISSUE VII • WINTER 2010/11
Rebuilding Bridges to Peace by cynthia travis
O
ur focus for 2011 will be on ex-combatants, especially in vulnerable and volatile border areas. With post-election unrest in two of Liberia’s closest neighbors, Ivory Coast and Guinea, maintaining calm among Liberian ex-combatants is more important than ever so that they are not encouraged to return to fighting. This urgency is magnified by the fact that Liberia’s next elections will be held in October 2011. If the forces of corruption and trauma prevail, violence could return to Liberia and easily spread throughout the sub-region.
In Liberia, as in other, once land-based cultures, the living are not the only ones who are hungry. The desire for connection, community and feeding are understood to be necessary for the dead as well, allowing those who have perished to find their way to a peaceful afterlife in which they can be of assistance to the living. This understanding is a common refrain in towns and villages and in the national media. Mourning feasts are held to honor the dead for just this reason. liberian women for peace: photo by cynthia travis
There are still thousands of traumatized and hungry former fighters, uneducated and restless, and understandably impatient for solutions to the hardships of daily life. In recent months, many ex-combatants have begun illegally mining gold and diamonds in wilderness areas. These attacks on the natural world are a vivid expression of desperation and trauma, not unlike the ex-combatants raping women and machine-gunning hippos and other animals in the Congo. Destruction of nature echoes all forms of violence against women. This is why the healing of the land and the healing of the human community are so closely linked. In our permaculture work, through restoring and re-storying the land and the people together, both can flourish.
Recent talk shows have highlighted a rising belief among Liberians of many different backgrounds that the dead must be attended to more fully, bringing us to wonder whether a national cycle of mourning feasts, like those everyday gandhis sponsored in Voinjama in 2004, would be timely. During that first mourning feast, over 5,000 people participated peacefully, mourning together, resolving conflicts and sending those conflicts ‘across the river’ with the dead to find a final resting place. Subsequent mourning feasts helped ‘cross’ and ‘feed’ deceased medicine people, youth, and women, as well as tending to the forests, rivers and land. Collective healing requires collective grieving, bringing a renewed sense of community and uniting people in a common purpose. continued on page 3