Unemployment and illiteracy rates are at eighty percent. We have read that the older generations are more educated than the young, school-aged, generation. We heard during our time there that many Liberians are frustrated as they are not yet experiencing any benefit from the country’s growth. Despite this, taxi drivers we spoke with all expressed sincere satisfaction in the work of their president and acknowledged the importance of being patient with the reconstruction of their country: “destroying is very easy, but rebuilding a country, it takes time…” Billboards abound educating the population about rape, HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, reconciliation efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and fighting corruption. Education up to the age of 6 years old is now free and the President is known to be working hard to eradicate corruption in the government.

Cautious optimism is what I left Liberia feeling. President Johnson Sirleaf seems to be investing in the right things – long-term development - and Liberia is heading in a positive direction. But the immediate needs of the average Liberian is not being met – employment, electricity, education… there is a sense that the peace is still very fragile.

Meet Aloysius: Aloysius was ten years old in 1992, when he was abducted in Grand Gedeh County. He was placed in a Small Boys Unit (SBU), consisting of about 25 boys ranging from the age of approximately 7-13. Because Aloysius is a Krahn, one of the 16 main ethnic groups in Liberia, but was taken by Gio rebels, he was forced to cook, clean and do the wash for the forces when he was not actively fighting; the Gio/Krahn conflict took place along ethnic lines and is a result of the former President Samuel Doe who gave preferential treatment to his own ethnic group, the Krahn. Aloysius was able to escape in 1996, during an attack in Maryland County. He made his way through the Ivory Coast and arrived in Buduburam in 2006, where he is the Officer in Charge for VECSAOL.

Meet Houston: A former child soldier and member of VECSAOL, Houston has earned a certificate in Community Health, First Aid and General Medicine and managed to pay for his school by fixing bricks in the settlement and buy living with friends or sleeping in churches. In 2002, he was hired as the Chief Medical Record Officer at the clinic in Buduburam settlement, where he worked until July of 2006. During his tenure, he was consistently confronted by staff members or patients who would argue that he should not be working there on account of the fact that he is a former child soldier. He was later accused of being insulting to the staff and patients, resulting in his dismissal, though he believes that he was dismissed due to his status as an ex-combatant. Houston has not been able to find another job, though he has helped to start an after-school program in the local vicinity. Unfortunately, cases like this are frequent and likely to continue without the proper education and sensitization of the community regarding reintegration of former child soldiers.

Meet Brocks: In 1990, at the start of the war, Brocks was 13 years old and his sister was 15 years old. His sister befriended a young rebel in town, who helped his family get some food. Shortly thereafter, this young man took Brocks with him to Kataka to train him to fight; Brocks followed, believing that his family would be guaranteed safety if he were to fight with the rebels, he wanted to be able to provide food and money for his family, to protect them. He stayed with the rebels until 1994, when he went to the Ivory Coast and has been in Buduburam since 2001. Brocks still has family in Liberia who would like him to go home to them, the same family that he fought to protect. Sadly, the only way he knew to protect them has caused him to remain separated from him loved ones, as many former child soldiers like himself are too concerned about revenge killings to return to their country.

so, the other day i spent most of the afternoon with a former ex child soldier named emmanuel. claire and i had interviewed him already and i was letting him use one of my cameras to take pictures that represented himself and his relationships within the community. he’s by far the most unsettled ex child soldier we’ve met. even after coming to the refugee camp here, he left to fight in other wars — most notably, fighting three different times with the janjaweed in sudan, all that fighting and he’s only 24 years old. emmanuel can be aggressive — he was quite angry with claire because he thought we hadn’t shown up at a time we had “promised” to (his interpretation of our schedule!). but there’s a lot going on with this young man. when he sat down to be interviewed by us, he started by telling us the title he was giving the interview, “telling the truth far away from home. this is the name of my story.” we set out to make photos and he knew several places he wanted to go — but along the way, he offended one man who ran a small tailoring business by not properly asking him if he could take a picture. it turned into quite an argument, but we eventually were able to go on our way (the man didn’t want to let us leave). we talked a bit about what went wrong as we were heading on our way to our next destination, and we passed a group of women who gathered under a tree, singing. we had just moved out of sight of the women when emmanuel stopped and said, “can i take a picture of those women, as a way of apologizing to all the mothers i have hurt?” it was the last thing i expected him to say. he had not expressed much sorrow about being a soldier when we had interviewed him. i said, yes of course, and we went to greet the women, who had begun to pray. emmanuel took off his hat, waited respectfully, and when the woman in charge asked what he wanted, he told her that he had been an ex-child soldier and that he wanted to make a photograph with the women as a way of saying sorry, and to show that he was trying to be a changed man. . .well, i can guarantee you that just about every woman in that group had been affected by some great loss during the liberian wars — had probably lost at least one family member to the violence, possibly at the hands of a child soldier. and these women just looked at emmanuel, and invited him to sit with them so that i could take their photo. emmanuel was 11 when he was taken by rebels, 12 the first time he held a gun in battle. these women understood what had happened to him, and took him in in what felt to me like a collective embrace. emmanuel chose to sit at their feet when i took the picture, and they gathered around him. one woman called him over to speak to him privately, and told him, “God bless you.” there was a quietness among them all, a gentleness, a bit of sorrow. i think emmanuel was stunned by the reception he received. it was overwhelming to me, and i was really just an observer. . . after we left the women, we went on to talk to the director of a vocational school where emmanuel hopes to study plumbing. this director — who has ten ex-child soldiers as students at his school — was very patient with emmanuel, and very kind, urging him to know that he could build a new life if he focused his energy and his mind on accomplishing it. he said emmanuel would find support in doing these things — and i mentioned the women we had just been with, and the way they had embraced him. . i looked up at emmanuel and saw his eyes redden, then brim with tears. the kind of tears that don’t just come in a moment. the kind that have been building up inside you for a long long time, with no release, until something happens and they just start spilling over. that kind. one tear began rolling down emmanuel’s cheek, and then a few more. he didn’t say anything. he was just standing there, looking away, and it seemed like he was really far far away in his thoughts. maybe remembering who his own mother, who was wounded by rebel gunfire when she was trying to escape the violence with an 11-year-old emmanuel. she was bleeding and there was no one to help her as they were fleeing. a week after being shot, she passed away, in front of him. not long after that, emmanuel was taken by the rebels. i think he had been thinking about his mother because as we walked away from the school, he was quiet for a bit, and then the first thing he said was, “do you know how many years i have been homeless? how many years i have been motherless, fatherless?” i think he had been rocked to the core of his being by what he had just encountered — by the kindness of this man and even more, by the embrace of the women. many ex-child soldiers have told us the one thing they need is love. and i think that’s what emmanuel felt that day. i know i did. we saw him again the next day — he’d already been back to see the director of the school, and he’d asked me to write down the days the women would be under the tree again - -they had just started a baking school and said he was welcome to come back to see them. i don’t think it’s going to be easy for emmanuel. he got mad again that day about something — it’s hard for him to find the skills to get things done when obstacles are in his way, the kind of skills that most of us learned in some way or another as we grew up. but that’s something emmanuel never got to do. neither did any of the other ex child soldiers at the buduburam camp, or any of the other ex child soldiers in the world for that matter. i hope emmanuel goes back to see those women who sing and pray and bake. they have the heart, it seems to me, to embrace him again and again, to remind him of what it means to be somebody’s son — and not somebody’s soldier.

The 300-member strong organization is now working to encourage the ex-combatants to live in the present and to not have their future be dictated by the past.The civil war in Liberia, much like that in Sierra Leone, is known for the abduction and use of children in conflict, among other war crimes. The growing use of child soldiers has become an international trend and one we have also encountered in our trips to Sierra Leone and northern Uganda.

The organization is mostly comprised of men – not because young women and girls were not taken as participants in the conflict but because we have found that the women are more fearful of identifying themselves as former combatants/sex slaves. We have met some extraordinary former child soldiers who are working hard to demonstrate to their community that today they are neither a security threat nor “bad people”; they have started an art school and after-school programs, they are farming land to be able to feed their community, they are teachers and students. They do not like to reminisce about the past and are adamant that they want to focus on who they are today and who they want to be in the future. Each one is desperate for education to be able to make a living and give back in some way. The work of VECSAOL and the support it provides for its members have been a crucial ingredient to the decreased tension between the non-combatants and the former combatants in the community.

VECSAOL is not without its management problems or other issues that a small organization may encounter, and this is also not to say that every former child soldier in Buduburam is working hard to build a new life for themselves so they can contribute positively to the development of their community. But it is truly remarkable that the former child soldiers that we have been fortunate enough to get to know during our time here have been able to at least begin to overcome the many psychological, emotional and physical consequences of their forced participation in conflict. They have taught me that the only way to move forward is to accept responsibility for their actions while balancing the difficult reality that their contribution to the war was not their choice. Forgiveness of self is paramount.

our introduction into the buduburam refugee camp has been through the liberian dance troupe — a remarkable group founded by two refugees, “jake” jacobs and emmanuel lavelah (who likes to be called by his last name). lavelah was our guide from day one — greeting us at the camp gates and showing us through the camps. we’ve gotten to know him a bit, and have been amazed by his committment to his community. lavelah was a dancer before the war, and started the troupe here in the camp as a way to help liberians remain connected to their culture. he teaches traditional liberian dances to anyone who wants to learn — from little children, to teenagers, to western aid workers living in the camp. with sponsorship from war child canada, the troupe also holds a series of workshops for children in the community — everything from computer classes to conflict resolution. lavelah believes that only by being rooted in traditional culture, and its values of reconciliation and forgiveness, will liberians be able to build a just and peaceful society. one of the things children learn at the cultural center he runs is the nation’s pledge of allegiance (similar to the u.s. pledge), and also the words to the rather lengthy national anthem (much longer than the star spangled banner!). we heard lavelah talking with the children one day before the dance class started, helping them to understand the meaning of the pledge. he told them that if liberians had really believed the pledge, and lived it, there would never have been a war. he’s learned forgiveness in his own life — his mother was killed in a mortar attack during the war. and when he was in ivory coast (as a refugee) he learned that the woman who had been in charge of mortar attacks during the war was staying in a nearby house. he told us he wanted to revenge, he wanted to hurt the woman for what she had done. but as he sat, just twenty or thirty feet away from the house where she was staying, he began to think about what revenge would accomplish — and he said he realized that if he killed this woman, someone who cared about her would come after him and kill him, and then someone who cared about him would go and kill the killers. . . and on and on. “that’s how generational conflict begins,” he said. and he chose to forgive the woman, chose to not what she had done govern his feelings and life. the result, he said, was feeling free, feeling free to live. . . lavelah is a man full of kindness, full of care. his dream is to return to liberia and to hold a series of reconciliation festivals around the country, using dance as a way of celebrating peace and relationships between people, while also using the festivals as a way to hold community workshops about reconciliation and conflict management. he’s a visionary, a big thinker, a man of great heart. we are fortunate that he has been our guide.

Liberians in the camp are rightly proud of how well they are managing. You can find anything that you may need directly in the camp, including a large choice of Converse and Adidas sneakers! There is a clinic, many schools and churches, clean water (for purchase), a few places for internet, and many stalls selling fruits, vegetables, and peppers… Although there is some farmland, no one has large enough land to be able to produce enough to sell; all of the food is actually bought in the town nearby, Kasoa, and then re-sold in the camp.

Some say they want to go back to Liberia but don’t have the resources, some say they will never return out of fear, some wish to be resettled in the US, where there are several large Liberian communities…  what will become of the camp is unknown, but in the meantime, life goes on in Buduburam.

Headline: Respect Uganda’s brand of justice
Byline: Claire Putzeys
Date: 09/24/2007
Gulu, uganda - Uganda has enjoyed relative calm since the rebel Lord’s Resistance
Army (LRA) joined the government in peace talks last year. The talks
have been on-and-off at best, with the third round just starting this
month.

At stake is whether peace will continue. The people of northern
Uganda believe it can, if the international community allows them to
practice their own cultural traditions of justice.

In dealing with war crimes, the West has emphasized criminal
proceedings and punishment, including use of the International
Criminal Court (ICC); anything less, advocates say, leads to impunity
and possibly future violence. Without justice, the adage goes, there
is no peace.

But the people of northern Uganda, the Acholi, are convinced peace
talks will fail if Western-based standards of prosecution prevail.
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” says Ojara Bosco
(quoting Gandhi), a member of the peace committee at Unyama camp for
internally displaced persons (IDPs).

The LRA will leave the negotiating table, they believe, and continue
the violence that has touched virtually every family in Acholi-land.
Already they have endured two decades of atrocities: mutilation,
rape, murder, the forced relocation of 1.6 million people into camps
for IDPs, and the abduction of 30,000 children turned into combatants
by the LRA.

Thus, the Acholi want this round of talks to prioritize their
traditional systems of justice over what the West prefers. “Since the
wrongs were committed on the Acholi people, we want to deal with them
in the Acholi way,” says Okiedi Raymond, chairman of the peace
committee in Unyama camp. Indeed, it is imperative that the Acholi be
able to confront issues of accountability and reconciliation not as
the West deems acceptable, but as their culture dictates.

For northern Ugandans, without forgiveness, there is no peace;
justice is achieved through the restoration of relationships. And
they have a cultural tradition in place for achieving this: mato
oput, a longstanding practice that involves truth-telling and
accountability, forgiveness, and reparations.

The traditional Acholi mechanism seeks to attain peace, justice, and
reconciliation for perpetrators and victims. Its practice developed
long ago, according to Acholi legend, after a disagreement between
two brothers led to escalating levels of retaliation and violence.

In mato oput, alienation of a perpetrator through punishment and
incarceration only further ruptures broken relationships in
communities – and communal harmony is paramount to the restoration of
peace. Justice is peace, and “peace is when you can live and eat
together,” said Bishop Macleord Ochola, a founding member of the
Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, in an interview. “If
justice is punishment, then the victim is left with bitterness and
the perpetrator is left with guilt,” he concluded.

The limitations of mato oput will certainly be tested, given the
extreme scale of atrocities. A vital component of mato oput is the
coming together of communities from both sides of the offense;
unfortunately, most victims and perpetrators are unable to identify
their offenders or the offended due to the rampant violence.

Still, while mato oput may not be the only mechanism for peace
recognized at the peace talks, it should be a vital and central
component. The international community should help the people of
northern Uganda find justice through mato oput by contributing to a
victims’ reparations fund or making material contributions.

It should also confront the well-meaning but harmful attitude that
Africa needs to be “saved,” a theme in much of today’s social
activism. It is not for Western societies to determine what justice
is or looks like – that would, in fact, do a great injustice to the
victims of northern Uganda. This is the moment for them to stand
behind an African people and tradition, to demonstrate that Ugandans
hold the key to their own future and that the rest of the world may,
in fact, have much to learn from the Acholi.

Claire Putzeys is a research fellow for Catalyst Peacebuilding’s
Voice to Vision project (catalystpb.org) , which tells stories of
forgiveness and reconciliation in post-conflict Africa.

(c) Copyright 2007 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

ARLPI headquarters in Gulu.

this past weekend saw the election campaign kick into full swing, as the parties trotted out their candidates for next month’s elections. . kirsten and i unwittingly found ourselves in the thick of it on saturday afternoon, when we headed east out of town to find mariam, a girl ex-combatant, we met a few weeks ago, who was eager to have kirsten help her learn how to write a poem. . .we set off under sunny skies. . . and along the way, our journey turned into something of a fellini-esque adventure. . .first, we began encountering crowds of all manner of green-clad people (t-shirts, blazers, fedoras, scarves, you name it); turns out saturday was the day the ruling political party here was officially parading its presidential candidate through town (green is the party color, as you may have guessed). . . as we drove east out of town, the crowds just kept getting bigger, throngs along the streets, yelling, singing, chanting, drinking; cars and vans coming by, loaded with yelling, singing, chanting, driving supporters (using the term “supporters” loosely, however, since this kind of “support” comes from paying people a small sum of money to turn out for the candidate du jour). . .anyways, as the crowds get thicker, we see these oncoming dark, dark rain clouds (it is, after all rainy season). . but suddenly we’re in the middle of the storm, lashing waves of rain, lightning, thunder – and a traffic jam you wouldn’t believe. There were a few hundred vehicles coming into town (as we were heading out), all of them green people. . . it was a bit surreal. I mean, it was pouring down rain – buckets of it – and these people were piled on top of cars, hanging out of windows. . . there were even several trucks in a row that were piled high with people, all soaking wet (and cheering, singing, etc). i turned to look at one particularly overflowing truck and through our rain-wet car windows, it looked like the people who were dangling off the back of the truck were actually dripping off it, in that kind of dali-esque, dripping watch way. . . one of the most highly absurd moments came when a group of young men – dressed in variations of green – came jogging down the middle of the road, past our car, and our driver actually said, “hey, there go some of the guys you interviewed a few weeks ago” – referring to the day that we had actually met 24 ex-combatants (adults who’d signed up for the army before becoming rebels and also young men and women who’d been abducted as children). We were, in fact, near the village where we had met then, but i was astonished at the fact that our driver (mohammed), had actually recognized them in the pouring rain, in green hats, etc. . . while most of this was going on, we were at a dead-stop, about 5 minutes away from mariam’s village, stuck behind a huge truck, which we assumed was sitting behind a line of cars in front of us (due to the fact that oncoming traffic in support of the green candidate was actually coming at us in two lines, turning a two-lane road into a rather crowded three-lane road, which it was never meant to be). . .we sat there for at least a half an hour, until somebody yelled at mohammed and asked why he didn’t go around the truck, which of course he couldn’t do by passing in the normal way, cuz of the circus convoy coming our way. . however, he does eventually manage, barely, to inch the four-wheel drive around the right hand side of the truck in front of us – and we discover that there is no line of traffic on our side of the road. the truck itself is broken down, and we have simply been sitting behind it, forever. . .. yep. . . so, off we go, finally making it to mariam’s house – only to discover that she isn’t there, that she is in fact at her boyfriend’s house. . . which is back in the direction we came. yep. back into the madness, which by this time has subsided a bit, so it only takes us twenty minutes or so to travel a distance that should have taken us about five minutes. . we get to the boyfriend’s house, only to discover that mariam has – yep. . . jumped on the green caravan, and headed into freetown. . . somewhere along the way, we have probably passed whatever crammed-to-the-brim vehicle she was riding in. . . we took it all in stride. . kirsten left a notebook for mariam, with a pen, and a note about it being for poems that she could write in the future. . i was pleased to see mariam’s two daughters, who were at the boyfriend’s house – they ran to me for hugs, and stayed close to me, particularly the oldest girl who is the one who was born to mariamin the bush, during the war (when she was a bush “wife” to one of the commanders, who abducted her at the age of 11). whe’s an incredibly sweet child, and very shy; we hadn’t interacted much the first two times i saw her, so i was really touched that she just wanted me to hug her and hold her close. . . . i was glad we made the effort, because i had promised mariam that i would come back with “the poet” for her. . mariam is working so hard to keep her family together, to deal with the demons from her past that make it hard for her to deal with her oldest daughter. . . the sweetest postscript in this is that last night mariam called the woman who first introduced us to her. she was so sorry that she had missed us, that she is coming into town this morning, to meet kirsten, and to learn to write poem with her. . it will be a lovely ending to the trip. . .

as for thoughts on forgiveness. . .i haven’t written much while i’ve been here – too much to take in, in some ways, too much to think through, a lot of ground to cover. . . i usually need time to understand the images i’ve seen, the words i’ve heard, to begin to have a sense of where the work is leading me. . . in four weeks, we’ve seen and heard so much. . .we’ve been in koidu – the diamond mining district, which was at the heart of some of the bitterest fighting during the war and still is marked by ruins all over town and in the surrounding villages – and in a town called makeni, which, by contrast, was basically untouched during the war . . . because it served as the home base for the rebels. . . we’ve also been in many little villages, where people are still grieved about what happened during the war, while at the same time, former combatants/perpetrators have moved back in their midst – an astonishing thing that life goes on under these circumstances, in settings where no process of apology/repentance has been made by many perpetrators. . . there are many shades of gray here, i’m learning, when it comes to forgiveness and reconciliation and how it takes place, or doesn’t, or hasn’t yet. . . the international community basically came in at the end of the war and insisted on a blanket amnesty (except for a dozen or so of the top leaders from all three warring factions who have been put on trial, at a cost of MILLIONS of dollars – while there has been practically nothing spent on reparations to the victims of the war, including people like tamba ngaujah, the double amputee angie and claire wrote about in their op-ed piece), and holding a truth and reconciliation commission (which basically never reached the village level, where so many atrocities occurred), and on top of that, the government people told people that they had to forgive and move on. all of this in the context of a country which has a huge cultural tradition of forgiveness, of reintegrating perpetrators, a fabric of wholeness and an energy that is fed by community (what one person we interviewed referred to as a “centripedal” force, rather than a “centrifugal” one – a drawing of people in, rather than pushing them out). . . there have been many acts of reconciliation and forgiveness here, at both the community and individual level, yet i can’t help but feel that the country’s fabric of forgiveness has been severely stretched by this war and its aftermath. . . and yet still, the starting point here is that forgiveness is the right thing to do, that perpetrators should be reintegrated, that all sierra leoneans are in fact brothers and sisters. . .i’ve met many sierra leoneans who are discouraged by what they see as a surface kind of forgiveness, and a lack of the deep reconcilation work that is part of the traditions here. . . but i remind them all that they are already a thousand miles ahead of so much of the rest of the world, ahead of my own country, where getting even, or winning at all costs, or punishing others, takes precedence all too often over forgiveness.

i have learned more, and will be still learning in the months ahead, than i ever could have imagined when i wrote my first blog. . .

Although we are entering our last few days here, the stories will continue. As we return to the US, we will be posting more of the words and stories of those we have met with, those we have learned so much from, throughout the next few months.

It is hard to say goodbye to this beautiful country–especially the people. The sights, sounds, and voices that have meant so much in this short month will stay with me long after I return to the US:

I will miss…
1. Hearing “How De Body” as a morning greeting—and the feeling of broken krio rolling off my tongue
2. Fresh mangos, papaya (paw-paw) and pineapple for breakfast
3. Black eyed beans, rice, and Peppered guinea fowl
4. Overcrowded streets full of vendors, small refreshment stands, and people
5. Brightly colored fabrics and dresses that decorate the beautiful Sierra Leonean women

6. The powerful downpours that are only found in the African rainy season
7. A Cold Coke in a bottle on hot day
8. The smiles, greetings, and hands of children everywhere we go
9. Bargaining in the market
10. Mohamed, our driver
11. Mohamed’s cell phone ring: a recording of the call to prayer, which we get to hear from his phone about 20 times a day
12. The white sand beach—with the Atlantic Ocean stretching for miles in the distance
13. “Pack-n-Go”—the newest Sierra Leonean hip hop hit single—blaring from the trucks of the All People’s Congress and Sierra Leonean People’s Party as they try to rally support for the upcoming elections
14. The countless futbol matches being played on the beach and throughout the city during the day
15. And the many, many people whose stories, voices and friendships we will carry with us across the Atlantic…