Part two - in praise of tools

In my kitchen, I have about 10 cans of tuna.  When I am feeling particularly vulnerble or just plain tired, I like to whip up a pot of tuna and pasta which I usually follow with a comatose quality nap.  Given the recent numerous frustrations I have faced here, I have, on more than one occasion, reached for the cans of tuna, only to recall that I did not have the foresight to buy a can opener.

A unique phenonmenon in most African countries is that almost nothing is sold in its intended volume.  You can buy one cigarette, one wedge of laughing cow cheese, and even tiny plastic bags of tomato paste or peanut butter at a price most of the clients can afford.  It defnintely increases the amount of packaging and trash but it brings just about everything you can imagine within reach, just in smaller doses.  Having given up on finding small bags of tuna, I have gone into a dozen stores looking for a can opener only to encounter the same face blank faces, raised shoulders, and suggestions to check the guy across the street.  Nope, not there either.  The hunt continues but as you have probably already guessed, every life experience told in this blog leads to a larger life lesson.

Tools are a big deal in most parts of the world.  I know women dig tools too, but they are decidedly a male thing in the United States.  The New York Times does a huge spread advertising deals on tool boxes, new wrenches, and tool accessories every Father's Day.  Never mind  the fact that most guys today never touch the stuff.  My girlfriend could hardly conceal a chuckle, when I told her that I needed new tools to make the needed changes in my life and career.  She was not objecting to the idea, but the idea of a tooling up seemed a tad, well, mechanical for something as fragile as peace work or someone's life.  Yet, tools are huge.

USAID's agency on Conflict Mangement and Mitigation, the US Institute of Peace, and many other national and international organizations have published reams of manuals on how to manage conflict. These toolkits - as they are actually called - underscore the potential pitfalls of a particular approach and recommend possible ways around thorny issues and problems, drawing on the experiences of other organizations that have been there before me.  When I first set out on this search, I was certain that a toolkit with my name on it was just around the digital google search corner. And there are a lot of excellent kits out there.  Accord has a great publication series that covers every angle of peace talks in various parts of the world.  CMM's toolkits are concise and provide good recommendations that I believe any field practitioner should heed. But I was still finding myself falling short of the type of approach needed to avoid some of the attention I drew in Darfur, Rwanda, and Senegal thus far. Plus none of the toolkits really addresses the question of what to do when operating in hostile territory, when key political interests in the government do not want you there?

Epiphanies come at strange moments for me. I have the habit of carrying a pen and pad of paper for just such occasions. I scratched the barely legible words "same tools, smaller doses" during my bumpy taxi ride home. It is still a work in progress but I like the idea of small and accessible.  I look forward to developing it into something "bigger," but is definitely going to be our approach.  Same goals, same outcomes, but workng in doses small enough not to ruffle political feathers and big enough to bring measureable change to the conflict climate in which I work.  I look forward to breaking this down in my next installment.

Afternoon comatose naps are overrated anyway.

Part One - Come equipped

This morning I left my apartment and waited in my usual spot for a yellow taxi to take me on my daily 15-minute commute to work. A small child appeared on the other side of the road. He could not have been more than 5 years old.  He looked left and right.  A car passed,  A moped moved slowly across the intersection.  A few bicycles struggled across the many potholes in the road.  And the boy waited.  I admired his cautious attention to traffic.  He kept looking right and left and right again.  Bicycles blocks away were enough to make him hesitate. I imagined a mother taking her child aside and drilling him on the perils of road crossing - perhaps to excess because this child was literally frozen in his tracks. After 10 minutes of this, I crossed the road, offered my hand and we crossed together.  The boy remained at my side for a bit, looked up, and then decided that he could make the rest of the way on his own.  The school was less than 20 feet away.  I think it took him another 10 minutes to get that far.  I cannot say for certain.  I had found a taxi and was on my way as the boy stooped to examine an interesting pebble.  Everyday is an adventure worthy of exploration when one is a child. Such a blessing to have that kind of outlook on life.

I feel like I got a second chance to look on the world with new eyes, the day I walked out of the Joyce Center auditorium and returned my rented graduation cap and gown.  I felt ready to tackle the world.  I had already spent nearly 6 years in Africa before starting my graduate degree at the Kroc Institute for International Studies. The daily tomes of reading and intense regime of role play exercises and lectures had prepared me for a new adventure - a life of as a peacebuilder.  For my first post abroad, I relied on my informal academic advisor, Juan Mendez, who called me into his office, made a few phone calls, and handed me a 6-month unpaid internship in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.  

The International Human Rights Law Group could neither pay for my flight out there nor provide housing or transportation, but a desk was available and they were interested in someone with knowledge about transitional justice.  With the help of a 3,000 dollar grant from the Kroc Institute and the blessings of family, I was off to start a new career. You are probably expecting me to say that life in the field was different from what I had experienced in the classroom.  It was and it wasn't.  An interesting fact about peacebuilding is that there are very few people doing it.  Instead of arriving in a area where you have to adapt to existing norms and customs, the practitioner is very free to create the world he or she wishes to build. If you are a pessimist then, I imagine, the experience will be excruciating.  But I am, by nature, a hopeful idealist.  I used to challenge my political science professor at Notre Dame by saying that I was a utopian realist.  I believe in a perfect world but recognize our current starting point. Thus, the field was as I had decided it would be.  It is as simple as that.

With idealism as my lens, Congo became a wonderous playground for learning traditional approaches to fostering dialogue and transforming conflict into opportunities for growth. Politically, Congo was a mess. Perhaps, if I had decided to focus on all the politics involved in maintaining the status quo of managed chaos, then I would have been unwilling to give it a shot.  But people have always been my focus, and I remained on that path even after CARE International recruited me to work in my first active war zone in a district in northeastern Congo called Ituri.  

Ituri was a fertile ground for peace work.  I was holed up in a recently evacuated convent.  I had a beat up but working cherry red Land Rover pick up truck and a dedicated staff.  The days were long and interesting (Angelina Jolie visited my office to learn more about the conflict) but it was in the evenings that the magic happened.  When I was not under my bunk trying to avoid stray bullets from the weekly gun battles, I would be meeting with rebel leaders who had sent messengers to join them at the local bar.  The conversations were about anything but politics.  I got to know these leaders as men and quickly earned their trust.  Perhaps trust is going too far, but at least they no longer saw me as a potential threat.  My nationality was also a motivator for continued contact in case they should  one day need the support of the United States government.  (It is amazing how much people read into one's nationality)  My team and I managed to make significant in-roads just before the program was canceled. CARE had not managed the program to the donor's satisfaction. I set my sights on home for a much needed breather.

Since that experience, I have worked in more politically charged environments, where an American peace builder could not go about his business without raising concerns and alarm. Darfur was one such example. While local authorities eventually dropped their guard to some extent, the continued naming and shaming tactics of the Enough and Save Darfur campaigns painted me as a troublemaker. I was detained in Rwanda and briefly held for trial during a time when pressure on the Rwanda regime was increasing.  Fortunately all charges were dropped and I was allowed to leave after an extended 5 days stay in Kigali. Chad, Angola, and Cameroon had all become arenas where it was important to tread softly and often discretely if you wanted to have any positive impact at all.

So it was no surprise that Senegal presented similar hiccups to peace work. It also sent a message to me that I needed to update my toolkit. But what kind of tools does an idealist need?

Part Two - Finding the right toolkit

More pictures from today's event in Dakar

 

Distraction and frustration

The marches promised for March 19th have been taking place across the city in the approved designated areas. For the most part, the marches have been peaceful.  At one point in the Place de l'Indépendance, youth began throwing rocks at the police and surrounding buildings breaking windows and causing some damage to local stands.  The police intervened immedately, firing tear gas and dispersing the crowds.  Minutes later, people returned to the square and resumed a peaceful demonstration in favor of better living conditions, more transparency, lower food prices, electricity in their homes, and lower taxes.  The populations most affected by poorer standards of living live in the suburbs of Dakar, but several attempts during the day to organize impromptu marches in these areas were immediately put to a halt by riot police.  The right to march is guaranteed by the Senegal constitution, but the organizers must inform the government in advance of the plan to march, the route, and the duration.  I will send a final update on how the day ended.  But it looks like the demonstrations are already winding down.  Peacefully.

Accusations of a coup d'etat undermines momentum for march

Senegal is one of the few African states that has never experienced a coup d'état. So when I read this morning's news, I was startled intially.  The military had been warning the government about corruption among the brass and how civilians leaders had also been siphoning off money owed to them by the United Nations for their participation in international peacekeeping operations.  Naturally, I assumed the threat came from the military.  The lack of any news about this "coup d'état"on the radio made it seem even more ominous.  None of my neighbors had heard of it.  I called around to people in Dakar and they were equally in the dark.

Then one article got through the temporary internet black out this morning - the headline read "Senegal says arrests suspected coup plotters." The article states quite succintly that the state prosecutor decided to nip in the bud a plot aimed at a coup d'etat by arresting a number of individuals identified as members of the plot.  What was revealed later was the coup planners were some of the same people organizing today's march.  How convenient!  Another internet site rattled off the names of the suspects, many of them youth organizers.

Hard to say what impact this will have and whether it will indeed nip in the bud the momentum for this march.  I will send an update later this afternoon. 

Here is a longer article on this event : Senegal arrests suspected coup plotters

March 19 approaches

I apologize for the long pause since my last entry.  Our activities have resumed - albeit under another name to appease those threatened by the heading "peace" - and I am happy to report that we will be maintaining a focus on grassroots-driven ideas to create stable and healthy communities.

I was waiting until I had some clarification about the fate of our program since AED announced that it was folding, but it appears that we will not reach anything remotely resembling clarity until the month of June at the earliest. So we press on.  I have a large number of activities to develop and execute in the coming weeks and that has meant relighting the fires under my staff and myself.  We had all become rather complacent after months of relative inactivity.

Tomorrow is the full moon and the spring equinox. It is also "supermoon day" apparently because of the unusual promixity of the moon to the earth.  If you read the Internet, you will also see it is for some folks the "End of Days" day or just a "cataclysmic events"day.  I had no idea this day was so important.  I have not had a lot of time to research all the significance but in Senegal it carries another importance. It is the date the Senegalese opposition has chosen to hold what the press is calling a "large-scale Egyptian styled demonstration to topple President Wade."  It is interesting that Egypt is now the phenomenon of reference; it is as though Tunisia never happened.  But I digress.  According the press, the government ordered a new batch of crowd-control equipment for this special occassion and has already stationed units in the vicinity of the planned marches.  It is very unlikely that we will see any of that here in Ziguinchor. But I plan to follow the course of events via radio.  None of my colleagues believes the marches will last past dinner time because no one is expecting them to produce any real change.

I started writing an entry for the blog a week ago that became a bit too long.  It is a recap of what led me to this project in Senegal and the possible avenues forward.  I will post it to the internet on Sunday - after the march update - and add more pieces as the week wears on.

Here are some links the upcoming march.  Enjoy your weekend!

Senegal Braces for "Tahrir Square" Protests  and Tension brews in Senegal ahead of protest