Tag Archives: Sierra Leone

Sep 16, 2009

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Post conflict recovery in Sierra Leone: the spiritual self and the transformational state

“We need to get back to the old time mobilization of our grandmothers”, said Regina Amadi, Regional Director for Africa, of the International Labor Organization (ILO), May 8 at the 2009 African Women Changing the Global Outlook Empowerment Conference in Washington D.C. As she spoke before Somali intellectuals, Ugandan business women, Nigerian journalists, and Tanzanian political leaders, she and other global leaders shared their concerns about Africa’s political, economic and environmental and health condition. The British Embassy and National Geographic sponsored the conference by bringing together noted international panelists to respond to audience questions. While the usual suspects brought up age old hot topics such as good governance, the role of Ngo’s, and male political power structures, participants challenged female panel members on what they are doing to empower those who do not have the privilege to attend the conference. American Journalist, Makeda Crane asked, “What are we doing NOW to help the women in the Congo?” Makeda’s overarching question brought to light the complicated tier of injustices that make women’s goal to “help” and “improve” Africa a task bound by time, space, and resources.

What are women doing “now”? The journalist’s urgent demand for change in the Congo is not the first and likely not the last time the international community has called for an intervention on behalf those who cannot seemingly fend for themselves. But what about the women who are fending for themselves while waiting for high powered intellectuals to lobby for an action plan. How do we understand the emotional resources and coping skills of women staring into the face of immediate danger? Ten years ago, in Sierra Leone, the world faced the same challenges as a civil war resulted in violent and humiliating acts along the countryside of Kenema and into the city of Freetown. The devastations were massive, unpredictable and in most cases unpreventable by even well-equipped European military fleets. In the context of conflict and trauma, immediacy is a haunting fog that forces one to think and act in survival mode. While organizations descended to assist villages and communities with their most pressing needs, the women who survived the ten-year ordeal were forced to address their emotional state with the resources that were readily available.

Immediate Healing and Long Term Recovery

This impulsivity for immediate action comes at a historical nexus for rebuilding in Rwanda and Sierra Leone while overlapping with the political unrest in Congo-Kinshasa, the Sudan, and Zimbabwe. We know that women are simultaneously recovering while others are living through unspeakable crimes. We know that they go on to forgive, forget or suppress what they have witnessed. However, what curiously reoccurs in women’s war testimonies are references to spirituality. Sierra Leonean women’s use of spirituality offers psychological clues as to how women continue to press forward and emotionally sustain themselves in the face of trauma. Spirituality aids in women’s ability to transcend their immediate experience and redefine themselves, creating a new world based on a self-tested transformation. Women uphold spiritual relationships as a core component for managing their emotional recovery. Women use spirituality as a self-affirming, personal, and private vehicle for recuperation in areas where organized religion can not sufficiently address the deep interpersonal areas of their lives. Spirituality functions as a regenerative force for individual empowerment by offering the individual an internal source of hope to overcome difficult circumstances. By first developing herself, a woman can then take her strength to catalyze others in similar situations. Spirituality as a healing mechanism is not a new concept. However, spirituality as a tool for African women’s “self then state” transformation is an under-explored topic of post-conflict gender studies.

Me, then We

Western psychology focuses on treating trauma within the frameworks of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) emphasizing individualism and self reliance.[1]1 Though post conflict nations such as Sierra Leone have collectivist attributes, collectivist psychological assumptions ignore the dichotomous nature of individualism and collectivism during traumatic recovery. Individualistic recovery is not limited to a western theoretical psychological outlook. Woman, as an individual in a post conflict setting often are socially mandated to sustain communal relationships. Women are the first ones expected to forgive the sons, brothers, fathers and husbands who carried out heinous crimes. These same women create self-development tools to remind themselves of their purpose and a connection to the “whole”. Gendered spirituality serves as a core component in the overall communities’ capacity to recover and transform after extreme trauma. Anthropologist Dr. Chris Coulter’s (2008)[2]2 reflects upon witnessing a Kuranko girl’s initiation ceremony three years after Sierra Leone’s peace declaration. She ultimately concludes that the gendered ceremony is an opportunity for the Kuranko to reinstitute normalcy. Coulter says,

“The social significance of the ritual is particularly emphasized; the ceremony is not only a social event but has become a key event in reconfiguring social relations after a decade of civil war.” (433)

Similarly, University of Sierra Leone’s Dr. Aisha Fofana Ibrahim’s (2006)[3] 3 research revealed that most of the women she contacted participated in or desired some form of cleansing ceremony, because rituals are “an important catharsis”,

“In Sierra Leone, cleansing ceremonies can last from a day to a month depending on the physical and emotional state of the person seeking a “cure” and the amount of money they can afford to spend. Such ceremonies often include ritual baths in which people are bathed by herbalists with a mixture of herbs and then given herbal and/or lasmami potions to drink. Lasmami is a kind of holy water made in two different ways. A wooden slate inscribed with a specific Quranic verse is hung over a container then washed clean or pieces of paper with the Quarnic inscriptions are soaked in the water- the water collected in these processes is what is called. Lasmami. (Fofana 188)

More so, in a post-colonial, post conflict atmosphere, women’s spiritual self-care alludes to a larger national liberation and transformation movement that demands her participation in a self-reflective process in order to move the nation toward healing. Dr. Philomena Okeke-Ihejirika (2008) [4]4 credits spirituality as source of stability amidst the rise of rapid global movements requiring that people hold onto to something steadfast and reliable.

“Movements of spiritual revival have become global phenomena in response to the contemporary ontological insecurity fostered by rapid shifts, uncertainties and extreme fluidity” (87)

What appears as a spiritual “revival” also represents an external manifestation of women’s inner orientation toward transformation giving birth to a new post-conflict social movement.

Rhetoric and Politics of Recovery

Social healing during and after post – conflict arise out of an individual’s will to inflict change functions as form of recovery that taps into longing for connectedness in a fractured community. However, a forced social healing program urging communities to recover so the nation can “move on” undermines the inner work that must happen first. The rhetoric of post conflict recovery in Africa is often painted with a broad brush of reconciliation, forgiveness and national healing. These concepts appear abstract in the face of most women’s immediate reality. Her life is lumped together with overall national healing. Her personal experiences are simply one of many who survived to tell their story. Religious leaders are complicit in this umbrella approach by promoting healing in a package of confession and apology performances. Should these techniques automatically act as a catalyst for healing across all countries and conflicts? Dr. John Hatch’s essay (2006) [5] on religion and reconciliation in South Africa rightly criticizes how formal religion pollutes recovery because of its unregulated influence in politics.

Hatch’s assessment of reconciliation highlights the blurred lines of religion and politics. Here collective healing trumps individual recovery. Women’s personal transformation challenges the definition of recovery and healing by circumventing traditional patriarchal spiritual guidelines.

Prescribed Healing and Personal Recuperation

Like South Africa, Sierra Leone’s reconciliation process was put in place under the hands of religious leaders and political enforcement. For example, during Sierra Leone’s truth commission, participants were urged to “forgive the rebels” (Schroven 17).[6]6 Recovery and healing are more than a harmonious prescribed notion of forgiveness. Recovery and healing operate on a spectrum of living conditions that make life easier for women. Again the outsider’s gaze and longing for immediate recovery is bound in its own form of neocolonialism. Expecting a community to recuperate via force in a government mandated healing process suppresses the true healing work and pushes recovery further away from the nation’s grasp. Women out of post-conflict nations are moving away from the controlled psychological healing by designing personal pathways toward emotional recovery. Women’s transformation occurs at multiple points along the continuum of trauma. Personal transformation within this socio-cultural context indicates that women are positioned to change their well-being by using their personal networks and resources. Transformation as a spiritual ideology symbolizes the power and plasticity of spiritual beliefs as an easily accessible tool for coping and recovery.

Spirituality alone does not adequately answer how women recover. Spirituality is still mired in patriarchy and gender roles that limit an introspective process toward self- transformation and self re-connection. Yet, when one asks what can we do now, we must also ask what are women living in conflict doing now for themselves? We must always consider how they resolve their own problems and what resources they access to do so. As we in the west draft our action plans and brainstorm for solutions, we must be mindful of the dynamic psycho-spiritual process that each woman must experience in order to rebuild. If we expect our well thought out plans to take root, we need to learn more about the psychological evolutions that are currently underway. Who are the new generation of women who grew up only knowing a country of conflict, how do they rationalize their self in relation to the state? Can Regina Amadi’s theoretical recommendation to follow the “way of our grandmothers” address the mutli-layered challenges of a new era of the self-empowered, self transformed “African Woman”? These questions can only be answered by positioning women to speak for themselves in spaces that can mindfully transform their thoughts into action. As new global female leaders emerge out of Africa, we must not forgo individual development with hopes of a mass healing movement. Post-conflict nations are entering a new era of identity. Women’s individual and collective psychosocial state are critical to long term stability and set the rhythm to which the country will march. Spirituality is currently operating in the places where think tanks, political leaders, non-profit organizations cannot… the inner working of women’s will and commitment to herself and thus the state.

From ACAS Bulletin 83: Sexual and gender based violence in Africa

About the author
Sariane Leigh recently completed the Master of Arts in Women’s Studies, George Washington University. Her work focuses on African Diaspora female responses to trauma and recovery.

Notes

1. Audergon, Arlene ‘Hot Spots: Post-conflict trauma and transformation’, Critical Half Vol. 4, No 1 (July 2006), pp.41-44. Women for Women International.

2. Coulter. C. Social Thought and Commentary: Reflections from the Field: A Girl’s Initiation Ceremony in Northern Sierra Leone Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Spring, 2005), pp. 431-441. The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research.

3. Ibrahim, Aisha Fofana. “War’s other voices:Testimonies by Sierra Leonean Women.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Illinois State University, United States — Illinois. 2006

4. Okeke-Ihejirika, Philomina E., and Chima J. Korieh (eds). Gendering global transformations: gender, culture, race, and identity. Routledge: New York, 2008.

5. Hatch, John D. Between Religious Visions and Secular Realities:(Dia)logology and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation. ‘Coming to Terms’ with Reconciliation, Working Paper Library. http://global.wisc.edu/reconciliation/library/papers_open/hatch.pdf

6. Schroven, Anita. Women after War: Gender Mainstreaming and the Social Construction of Identity in Contemporary Sierra Leone 2007.

Sep 16, 2009

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Sexual and gender based violence: everyday, everywhere, and yet …

The mathematics of contemporary sexual and gender based violence offer a grim graph of today’s world. In a number of countries, evenly distributed across the globe, up to one-third of adolescent girls report forced sexual initiation. For example, a recent study suggests that in the United Kingdom one in three teenage girls has suffered sexual abuse from a boyfriend, one in four has experienced violence in a relationship, one in six has been pressured into sexual intercourse, one in sixteen say they had been raped. Mass rape of women and girls continues to be seen as somehow a legitimate military weapon. Reports suggest that, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in a war that lasted a mere three years, somewhere between 10,000 and 60,000 women and girls were raped. Sexual violence against men and boys continues undaunted, unreported, understudied, and too often a source of ridicule and derision. According to a number of studies, somewhere between 5 and 10% of adult males report having been sexually abused in their childhood. Women suffer violence in health care settings, “including sexual harassment, genital mutilation, forced gynecological procedures, threatened or forced abortions, and inspections of virginity.” Sexual violence in schools is off the charts. In Canada, 23% of girls experience sexual harassment.

In Iraq, which is engaged in a so-called nation-building exercise, part of that nation-building seems to involve, or require, sexual and gender based violence: “An increase in “honor” killings currently haunts the Iraqi political landscape but is receiving little U.S. media attention. Such killings are rooted in ancient patriarchal culture and represent the most severe expression of a rebellion against modernity, the secularism of the global market. They bespeak Iraq’s mounting social crisis.” Women’s corpses, and some men’s, are the collateral damage, not of warfare but of so-called peacetime reconciliation and reconstruction. If this is peace, what constitutes war?

Meanwhile, the engineer of that nation-building project, the United States, experienced a 25% rise in rape and sexual assaults between 2005 and 2007: “Among all violent crimes, domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault showed the largest increases. Except for simple assault, which increased by 3 percent, the incidence of every other crime surveyed decreased.” From this perspective, which is the developed and which the developing country?

Across the border, women, especially low-income women workers, disappear, repeatedly and violently. The State finally calls it femicide and passes a law. Women continue to disappear. Over 400 women have been murdered in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. The numbers of women, mostly low-income workers, who have been murdered in the state of Chihuahua, where Ciudad Juarez is located, qualifies the entire state as a femicide hotspot. And it’s not alone. In Mexico, Baja California, had 105 women murder victims in 2006 – 2007. Chihuahua counted 84. Since 2005, over 650 women have been murdered in Mexico State, and the state of Guerrero has the highest murder rate of any state in Mexico, 5 of every 100,000 women.

And Guatemala continues to experience a femicide crisis. In 2007, over 700 women and girls were reported murdered.

Around the world, the numbers speak for themselves, but to whom do they speak, and who is listening, who is taking the count and who is assessing accountability? It seems the whole globe, in its entirety and in each of its parts, is haunted by sexual and gender-based violence. Around and about the world daily, reports and studies on sexual and gender based violence are published.

Other reports look at the ways in which sexual and gender based violence spike in conflict zones and persist in post-conflict zones.

Some consider institutions. For example, many, and yet not enough, consider prison rape. There are reports of rape of juvenile offenders, rape of immigrant detainees, rape of remand prisoners, rape of convicted prisoners. And rape is only a small, if critical, part of the picture of sexual and gender based violence. Others look at workplace violence, such as sexual violence against domestic workers. There’s sexual and gender based violence in schools, schools of all sorts. Physical households as well as family and kin structures are sites of sexual and gender based violence. The public is regularly scandalized, or not, by clerics and clergy of any and all denominations engaged in sexual and gender based abuse, of parishioners, of acolytes, of one another. Women in the military generally suffer sexual and gender based violence. Women in offices, women on farms, women on streets, women on public transport suffer sexual violence, suffer gender based violence.

Women, gay men, lesbians, transgenders, transexuals, intersex, girls, boys around the world suffer sexual and gender based violence because of their attire. In some places, it’s State policy. Wear a burqa, suffer both humiliation and State sanctions. In other States, don’t wear a veil and you could end up in jail … or worse. In other places, it’s culture. Wear a short skirt, and be prepared for violence. Be prepared to be treated as a sex worker, because of course violence against sex workers is, if not acceptable, understandable.

Honor killings haunt the world, although they’re not always referred to as such. Indigenous women disappear, other women disappear as well. This is but a partial picture, but it will suffice.

There is no geographical border to sexual and gender-based violence. It happens everywhere, and all the time. This is neither paranoia nor dystopia, nor is it an invitation to panic or despair. It is merely descriptive, and, again, barely so. If sexual and gender based violence is so prevalent, can it really be said to haunt the world, or is that statement itself a specimen of naive optimism? Perhaps it should be said to constitute the world. Either way, whether a specter or a basic element, or both, the absolute ordinariness, the everydayness and everywhereness, of sexual and gender based violence suggests many questions, many avenues for research, many possibilities for collaboration and action.

Do sexual and gender based violence have a history, globally? It’s one thing to say that in a particular place at a particular time, there was an increase or an abatement in sexual and gender based violence. It’s quite another to look across the expanse of the world, or even a continent.

And what if that continent were Africa?

This Bulletin began in response to news reports of “corrective” and “curative” gang rapes of lesbians in South Africa. These were then followed by news reports of a study in South Africa that found that one in four men in South Africa had committed rape, many of them more than once. We wanted to bring together concerned Africa scholars and committed African activists and practitioners, to help contextualize these reports. We wanted to address the ongoing situation of sexual and gender based violence on the continent, the media coverage of sexual and gender based violence in Africa, and possibilities for responses, however partial, that might offer alternatives to the discourse of the repeated profession of shock or the endless, and endlessly reiterated, cycle of lamentation.

To that end, we have brought together writers of prose fiction (Megan Voysey-Braig), lawyer-advocates (Salma Maoulidi, Ann Njogu), poets (Chinwe Azubuike), trauma scholars (Sariane Leigh), human righs and women’s rights advocates (Michelle McHardy), gender and transgender advocates (Liesl Theron), activist researchers (Sasha Gear). These categories are fluid, since every writer here is involved in various activist projects, advocates in many ways. The writers do not pretend to `cover Africa’, and neither does the collection of their writings. The writings treat South Africa, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Kenya, Sierra Leone. They are meant to continue certain conversations, to initiate others.

Methodologically, the authors argue for the importance of respecting the multiple intersections and convergences, the multiple layerings, that underwrite and comprise any single event of sexual or gender based violence, and that necessarily complicate any discussion of these at a broader level. For example, the study that reported that one in four South African men had raped women or girls, the study the news media reduced to that simple formula, actually was a research report that attempt to understand men’s health and the use of violence in the context of the interface of HIV and rape in South Africa. In the end, the report came up with three sensible recommendations: “1. Rape prevention must focus centrally on changing social norms around masculinity and sexual entitlement, and addressing the structural underpinnings of rape. 2. Post-exposure prophylaxis is a critical dimension of post-rape care, but it is just one dimension and a comprehensive care package needs to be delivered to all victims and should include support for the psychological responses to rape. 3. HIV prevention must embrace and incorporate promoting more gender equitable models of masculinity. Intervention that do this effectively must be promoted as part of HIV prevention” That is, sexual and gender based violence begins and ends at the intersection of sexual inequality and gender inequality. Health and well-being begin with the work of transformation.

From varied perspectives and in different genres, each of the authors speaks a single truth. Conjuring away the specter of sexual and gender based violence is not good enough. Professing shock at the discovery of sexual and gender based violence is worse yet. Treating sexual and gender based violence as exceptional likewise leaves the conditions and situation intact. The work of transformation, in Africa as around the world, is slow, long, and necessary.

About the author

Daniel Moshenberg is the Director of the Women’s Studies Program of the George Washington University, Washington, DC, and Co-convener of Women In and Beyond the Global. He has taught at the University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town. With Shereen Essof, he has co-edited Searching for South Africa, forthcoming from UNISA Press.

From ACAS Bulletin 83: Sexual and gender based violence in Africa

Mar 17, 2000

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Boycott Conflict Diamonds

Physicians for Human Rights
July 17, 2000

Open Letter to the World Diamond Congress

Antwerp, Belgium

To whom it may concern:

We the undersigned human rights, religious, development, humanitarian, and consumer organizations call upon the international diamond industry to announce immediate, practical measures to end the international trade in conflict diamonds. We are dismayed that despite clear evidence that international trade in rebel-controlled diamonds has ignited, fueled, and sustained cruel conflicts in Sierra Leone, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for many years, to date neither the diamond industry nor diamond importing governments have taken actions to successfully limit or end that trade.

Notwithstanding the promises of leading companies within the diamond industries that they do not deal in conflict diamonds, sales of such diamonds mined in rebel-controlled territory in Angola, the Congo, and Sierra Leone continue to the present day. Diamonds from these areas are laundered through such countries as Liberia, Togo, Zimbabwe, Congo-Kinshasa, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso; and then they are admitted to major cutting and export centers with few questions asked.

We are deeply concerned that Americans have unwittingly subsidized violence in Sierra Leone and Angola through their diamond purchases. According to U.S. State Department sources and independent experts, smuggled and illicit conflict diamonds may amount to as much as ten to fifteen percent of the $50 billion worth of diamond jewelry sold internationally every year. The United States accounts for sixty-five (65) percent of world diamond jewelry sales, which likely includes a significant portion of those conflict diamonds on the market. Thus, American purchases of diamonds provide substantial resources to insurgent forces which mine and/or steal rough stones, providing enormous profits to the diamond industry who export, cut, and sell these conflict diamonds.

Diamond smuggling has permitted the RUF in Sierra Leone and UNITA in Angola to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for weapons and equipment, transforming these insurgencies into formidable fighting forces that have wreaked devastation on their countries. The human cost of wars fueled by diamonds has been extraordinarily high: in Sierra Leone 75,000 have been killed since 1991; in Angola 500,000 have died during the return to civil war in the past decade.

The thousands of American citizens affiliated with our organizations will not knowingly subsidize war and violence in Africa through the purchase of conflict diamonds. Because the diamond industry has failed to impose any realistic or practical controls on its own members, failed to support and maintain a legitimate market that could marginalize the market in conflict diamonds, and failed to initiate a comprehensive, forgery-proof system for identifying, marking, and certifying the country of extraction from which it buys, cuts, and exports, then neither our members nor anyone else can exercise ethical choices when buying diamonds.

Important players in the diamond industry have very recently announced a number of positive steps, including the threat by De Beers, the Diamond High Council, the Israeli Diamond Exchange, and India to ban any member who knowingly trades in diamonds obtained from rebel movements in Africa. We are also aware that De Beers, which controls upwards of sixty percent of the world diamond industry, promised in March that all of its stones were conflict-free. But such threats and promises, while welcome, are largely symbolic unless the diamond industry, in collaboration with diamond producing, cutting, exporting, and importing countries, establishes a transparent, legitimate system that can force the trade in conflict stones out of business, or greatly reduce its profits.

Such a system will require a comprehensive, global system of transparency for establishing origin, legitimate export and import centers, customs and excise regimen in importing countries, international inspection of diamond packets, and other measures proposed by the Working Group on African Diamonds which met in Luanda in June 2000.

We support the Luanda recommendations and welcome the process that has been set in motion for an international ministerial meeting in September. However, the establishment of a comprehensive global system for the mining, export, manufacture and sale of legitimate diamonds will take time, and it may well be years before such a system dries up the flow of money and weapons to insurgents in Sierra Leone and Angola. But the diamond industry can take immediate action to deprive rebel movements of resources by identifying (or marking) diamonds or packets of diamonds and providing forgery-proof certificates of origin/legitimacy, without which no stone (or packet of stones) can be cut, exported, or sold.

The diamond industry has, to date, refused to initiate a system for assuring the legitimacy of the diamonds it buys, cuts and exports. It is past time to do so. We call upon the industry to announce that 1) it will no longer admit rough stones to cutting or export centers that do not have legitimate, internationally sanctioned certificates of origin from reputable diamond producing countries or government-controlled areas within diamond producing countries. 2) that the industry will not buy, or admit to exporting or cutting centers any diamonds or packets of diamonds that originate in the Democratic Republic of Congo, RUF-controlled Sierra Leone, or UNITA-controlled Angola or that have been transshipped through Liberia, Togo, Congo, Burkina Faso, or the Ivory Coast.

These actions could help in the short run, and will indicate the diamond industry’s good faith as a partner in longer-term actions that are needed. We urge you to announce these measures at your meeting in Antwerp on July 17.

Sincerely,

Leonard S. Rubenstein
Executive Director
Physicians for Human Rights

Serge Duss
Director, Public Policy and Government Relations
World Vision

Vicki Ferguson
Director of Outreach and Education
Africa Policy Information Center

Gay McDougall
Executive Director
International Human Rights Law Group

Beverly Lacayo
Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa
North American Province

Reverend Phil Reed
Justice and Peace Office
Missionaries of Africa

Erin McCandless
Director
Cantilevers

Edward W. Stowe
Legislative Secretary
Friends Committee on National Legislation

Alan Graham
Chief Executive Officer
Air Serve International

Stephen G. Price, Director
Office of Justice and Peace
Society of African Missions

Daniel Hoffman, Africa Executive
Africa Office, Global Ministries
United Church of Christ/Disciples of Christ

Nina Bang-Jensen
Director
Center for International Justice

Larry Goodwin
Executive Director
Africa Faith and Justice Network

Daniel Volman
Director
Africa Research Project

Ezekiel Pajibo
Facilitator
Advocacy Network for Africa (ADNA)

The Africa Fund

United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR)

Jennifer A. Stewart
Manager, Product/Program Development
Citizens Development Corps

Charmain Gooch, Director
Alex Yearsley, Campaigner
Global Witness

Africa Office of Global Ministries
United Church of Christ/Disciples of Christ
Daniel Hoffman, Area Executive for Africa

Leon P. Spencer
Executive Director
Washington Office on Africa

Merle Bowen and WIlliam Martin
Co-Chairs
Association of Concerned Africa Scholars

Gail R. Carson
Director
Relief and Food Security Programs

David Mozer
Chairperson
Washington State Africa Network

American Committee on Africa

Roney A. Heinz
International Director
Canaan Christians Fellowship Fund

William Goodfellow
Executive Director
Center for International Policy

Peter Vandermeulen
Paul Kortenhoven
Christian Reform Church of North America

Abdul Lamin
Coalition for Democracy in Sierra Leone

Rob Williams
International Development Manager
Concern Worldwide – U.S.

Margaret Zeigler
Deputy Director
Congressional Hunger Center

Stanley W. Hoise
Chief Executive Officer
Counterpart International, Inc.

John Kvcij
Chairman of the Board
Friends of Liberia

Billie Day
Friends of Sierra Leone,

Loretta Bondi
Advocacy Director of the Arms and Conflict Program
The Fund for Peace

Lynn Sauls
International Aid

Kakuna Kerina,
Director, Africa Program
International League for Human Rights

Kathryn Wolford
President
Lutheran World Relief

Kathleen McNeely
Program Associate
Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

Terry Sawatsky
Co-director for Africa
Mennonite Central Committee

Bill Akin
Coordinator of Non-Violent Education Programs
Mid-South Peace and Justice Center

Rev. Kevin S. Kanouse, Bishop
Rev. Mark B. Herbener, Bishop Emeritus
Northern Texas – Louisiana Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

Jack Marrkand, Executive Director
Partners for Development

Gordon Clark
Executive Director
Peace Action Education Fund

Lionel Rosenblatt
President
Refugees International

Cecelia Gugu Vilakazi
Editor and Publisher
SIMUNYE Newsletter

Maureen Healy
Africa Liason
Society of St. Ursula

Mark Harrison
General Board of Church and Society
United Methodist Church

Susie Johnson
Director, Public Policy
United Methodist Women

Roger Winter
Executive Director
U.S. Committee for Refugees

Jeredine Williams
West African Women’s Crusade
for Peace and Democracy

Mary Diaz
Executive Director
Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children

Meredith Tax, President
Women’s World Organization for Rights, Literature and Development
(Women’s WORLD)

Clive Calver
President
World Relief

Arne Bergstrom
World Relief

Rev. Seamus P. Finn, OMI
Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate