Laughter. “Why do you ask us about corn flakes?” “Corn
flakes?” “Yes, you said: “How do you usually respond to corn flakes in your
community?” That was when I started exclusively using the Liberian synonyms for
conflict “confusion”, “palava” and “hala-hala” in trainings…
After having co-facilitated several trainings, a local
partner organization asked me to design and facilitate a training on basic
conflict resolution and communication skills for several women’s groups that
they support. These women face challenges in their communities where their
empowerment is seen with suspicion – by their husbands who feel excluded, by
other groups in the community who see them as competitors, and by anyone who
sees the white vehicles with USAID logos drive into the communities from time
to time to hold forums, provide trainings and provide other support to the
women’s groups, leading them to believe that the women are “eating” immense
sums of money as people say here. Development projects in general and women
empowerment in particular never come without their challenges as I have been
able to experience here several times. Especially in a deeply patriarchal
culture, women’s organizations can easily appear as a threat to the power
relations as they exist and therefore encounter many obstacles.
The mentor organization to these women’s groups thus
approached me to hold a short training with representatives from the groups to
introduce them to some basic concepts and tools from conflict resolution and
discuss basic communication challenges and tools. These can help them better
deal with the issues mentioned above but also with everyday problems within
their own groups and to a certain degree also with conflicts in their
communities, the most pressing of which according to the participants are land
disputes, sexual violence, men abandoning their families and other family
disputes. We discussed among other things the importance of recognizing and
addressing root causes, raising awareness about the various consequences of
conflicts, the benefit of staying calm and listening to all parties to the
conflict instead of immediately taking sides, and ways to communicate messages
clearly.
I had learned from a Liberian trainer the analogy of
peacemakers or mediators as cool water. People who have a confusion are hot
like fire and what you need to do is be water and cool them down. Don’t add
wood to the fire by taking sides or blaming or judging but remain calm and cool
the others down before doing anything else. This picture stayed with the
participants. In the beginning of the training, a participant had asked what we
would recommend for her to do if her sister wronged another person. I asked the
group and most participants suggested telling her in front of the entire
community that she’s wrong – open shaming basically. After the training I asked
what they would take home with them from the training. “I will talk to both
persons who have the confusion before judging”, “I will listen to the person
who started the confusion and try to understand why she did it”, “I will try to
stay calm and explain what I think”, “I want to be like water, fresh and cool,
and bring calm to the confusion”. These comments were encouraging.
As is often the case, I felt at the end that I had learned
just as much from the participants as they hopefully had from me. Such energy,
passion and commitment to bring change to their communities! Three women came
with their infants and toddlers and yet did not miss out on any session or
discussion, one young woman presenting a “conflict tree” on sexual and
gender-based violence in her community started a spontaneous passionate speech calling
on the other women to stand up against SGBV, and, before leaving, the women
encouraged each other through songs and calls to keep on fighting for their
rights. “Women ooooh”, one shouted and the rest answered “women!” Then the
mothers tied their kids onto their backs again, the groups left the room
clapping and singing and set out to carry what they had learned to their
communities.
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