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