War
and Peace
If two Guerzé women
have a dispute, another woman comes and takes their pagnes
(their wrap-around skirts) so they are butt-nekked until they
can come to an understanding. Collecting such stories and traditional
means of conflict resolution is one of the more fun and interesting
aspects of my new job for the Mano River Women’s Peace Network.
I’m proud to be the first white chick in the ranks of this
network of strong, big-hearted revolutionary women, though working
with them isn’t easy in many respects. Our national headquarters
is in a run-down building without regular electricity or running
water; the small generator, when we have fuel for it, can only
take one desktop and a laptop before it overloads, though there
are four or five of us regularly working in the office. The women,
though proclaiming to be the bearers of peace, sometimes fight
worse than my cat Kéké and dog Quatorze. And my
boss, the network’s founding president and Guinea’s
former minister of social and women’s affairs, is a short,
squat tigress of a woman who finds fault in most everything that
crosses her desk.
“Hadja” (the female term for one who has made the
pilgrimage to Mecca) enjoys an near-cult following with the Network’s
members, women who regularly sacrifice their precious time and
money to make things happen in the organization. While her brusqueness
can be frightening, and I bristle at the way she treats some of
her underlings, we enjoy an inspired dynamic and she gives me
great latitude in my work.
In my first three months, I’ve created a website (www.marwopnet.org),
developed a half-dozen grant proposals, and started developing
a bi-lingual newsletter, and designed a pilot project for Guinea’s
ex-volunteers, who defended their country against the rebel attacks
in 2000 but were left with nothing when the government refused
to either recruit them into the army or give them the means to
restart their schooling or businesses afterwards.
I’ve also been charged with helping supervise, evaluate
and support the work of the eight field offices the network opened
this year in prefectures bordering Sierra Leone, Liberia and Côte
d’Ivoire. Though even more under-funded, under-equipped
and under-trained than the national office, they’ve done
a lot with a little– solving conflicts between Liberian
and Guinean women in the marketplace, developing workshops in
ethnically-divided communities, working with sages, military,
youth, griots, refugees and imams to put aside their differences
and personal interests in the name of guarding the peace in Guinea,
a pillar of relative stability in a war-torn region.
Compared to the decades of terror the people of neighboring Sierra
Leone and Liberia have lived through or died from, Guinea’s
armed skirmishes have been relegated to a series of rebel attacks
in 2000-2001. But they left an unforgettable mark on the country,
and people have started to see that the costs of maintaining peace
are little compared to the price of war.
On mission to visit the new offices and evaluate their progress,
we visit shell-shocked Gueckedou, where rebels destroyed thousands
of buildings and families in 2000, taking testimony from an 80-year-old
woman who was kidnapped by the rebels and forced to march hundreds
of miles in the bush, seeing her colleagues eliminated before
her eyes for having uttered nostalgic words about Guinea, hoping
she would not be the next one to fall sick and be slaughtered
rather than slow down the group.
Another woman I met can no longer be present for “sacrifices”
-- the common Muslim custom of slaughtering a goat or a sheep
– after she saw her own husband slain in front of her. She
seems unsure if she was the lucky one or not, her life spared
but only to live on forever disturbed. It filters into my dreams,
nightmares of sadistic women who are not out to kill me so much
as terrify me, play with me, make me feel the depths to which
evil can occupy a person’s soul.
But the kindness encountered is just as profound. Though we had
received per diems for our voyage, we were either treated to hotel
rooms by the authorities or offered beds from volunteers, huge
plates of rice and chicken placed before us though our visit was
a surprise one. I was also touched by the dedication of my colleagues
on the evaluation team, two of the most capable, caring people
I’ve yet to work with in Guinea. There’s Kourouma,
a Malinké consultant with his PhD in management who provoked
us like a schoolboy pulling the pigtails of his secret crush,
and Madame Diaby, who was Hadja’s Chef du Cabinet, and is
one of the finest orators and diplomats I’ve met. After
long days problem-solving in the field, we would work on our reports
into the wee hours, until I, an early bird, asked them to have
mercy on me and call it a night.
As soon as we return we are thrown into the hard work of MARWOPNET’s
bi-annual general assembly, which brought together the network’s
founding members from Sierra Leone and Liberia. These lovely,
graying Liberia and Sierra Leonean ladies made the sessions gay,
singing old songs like “Save the Last Dance for Me”
and “Go Tell it on the Mountain” in their adorable
American-African (not to be confused with African-American) and
British-African accents. We’re talking big ladies, in the
flesh as well as in the scale of their accomplishments: Bringing
together the three heads of state of the Mano River countries
at a time when each was pouting in their respective corners; forcing
their way into closed summits where civil society groups and notably
women were barred from the table; crossing dangerous invisible
boundaries into rebel territory to meet with the chief rebels
at a time when they had refused to speak to anyone outside of
their inner circle, whether UN Special Envoy or political opposition;
setting up alternative mobile community radio stations so they
could broadcast their messages of peace without their location
being known. Yet the way they quibbled over a few words in their
constitution and engaged in catty interpersonal politics, neglecting
the larger headlines of their work, sometimes made it hard for
me to believe they had accomplished what they had.
In spite of the group’s internal problems, a fierce faith
and passion in their mission shines through, working in the air-conditioned
chambers of the Novotel Hotel until 3 a.m. some nights to get
the work done, and praying and singing in closure each time. It’s
an infectious faith that touches even agnostic-leaning souls like
me.
For
more stories, past, present and future, keep visiting www.aprilwrites.com.
