Teenagers Lead the Way to Peace: We Create Smiles

At first meeting Lilian’s wide, dark eyes betray a wariness, perhaps even a (well deserved) suspicion. With three other teenage girls she is sitting on the floor threading beads into brightly coloured sheets that will be transformed into brightly coloured bags and bangles.

The three teenagers are amongst thirty other South Sudanese teenage boys and girls who form the leadership of the World Vision trained Peace Clubs. They represent young people from across the five villages that form one of the refugee settlements in West Nile, Uganda. As the teenagers come together to talk to the visitors about their lives and activities I watch a wonderful (and yet not completely unexpected) metamorphosis occur. I’ve seen this happen before, in other places, and here again, and before my eyes, Lilian is transformed from a shy, suspicious child into a passionate, articulate and energised young woman.

Like many other children, Lilian has made the long and dangerous journey from her home across the border in South Sudan to Uganda, and like too many others she has done it unaccompanied by parents. With her father killed in the conflict and her mother unable to flee – Lilian joined with neighbours to bring her two younger siblings to safety.

When Lilian was approached by World Vision and heard about the Peace Clubs she jumped at the chance to be involved. With seven other teenagers she attended a three-day workshop on Empowering Children as Peace Builders (ECPB) which teaches young people about how to be advocates of peace in their own social and community structures. Following the training each teenager was challenged to go back to their village and recruit and train thirty other teenagers and to form them into Peace Clubs that designed and promoted their own peace initiatives.

And so today across the settlement teenagers meet to play football, to debate, to dance and to present dramas. Lilian tells us that, “We organize football matches between different zones in the camp and before playing starts, we tell the spectators that the aim of the match is to promote peace and no fights are allowed on the pitch”.

These young people tell us that they want to promote peace and build trust between young people of all tribes so that when they go home the same thing doesn’t happen again. "Back home in South Sudan", Lilian says "there are so many [about 64] different tribes – tribalism is the problem. Here in Uganda we don’t want tribalism, we don’t want fighting because of tribe."

She adds that they frequently stage community based plays whose main theme is peace. “We engage the community members during interlude and show them why peace is important to us. But also, we engage in community work as members of the peace clubs and we help the elderly and disabled. For example, when you help a person from a different tribe, it leaves a different impression about your personality and in the end we create smiles on people’s faces.”

A Sweet Peace Initiative

Before the 2014 Israeli offensive on Gaza, Abd Kareem and his neighbours had a good business from their citrus trees, vegetables and honey. But, by the time the 50 day war was finished this farming community "looked like hell". The bombs had left huge craters in the fields, the irrigation pipelines and infrastructure were destroyed by military hardware and the trees were uprooted and destroyed.

When I was here in February this year the community had already filled in the craters, levelled out the land, erected fences and with help (from Australian Government funds) were repairing and rebuilding the water infrastructure. And despite these setbacks most of the farmers in the area re-planted crops in time for the season. Water is life, and today, with the repair of the water pump and the other work, the farming area is almost unrecognisable. Talk about resilience, this is not a behaviour that you can teach, this is not an attitude that is natural - but here in Gaza, as in many fragile contexts, people have learnt that if it is going to get done, they need to do it.

The neighbours came together and replanted, repaired and rehabilitated. Today, citrus trees are in fruit, vegetables are being harvested and the bees are producing honey. (But not a lot yet.) Before the war Abd Kareem's bees were producing about 50kg of honey per hive, but today, with a limited supply of food, while the production is improving, it is only about 6-8kg per hive. The citrus trees have flowered but, take a quick panoramic view of the area and there are not many other trees or flowers, it's pretty barren on this, the Gaza side, of the separation wall.

But on the other side of the impenetrable 60km, 7-9m high grey concrete slabs punctuated regularly by imposing fortified guard towers - on the Israeli side of the separation wall - there is lots of food for bees. And so it is that these Gazan bees are ignoring the blockade rules, the separation wall, the dual purpose list and the politics of humankind. They are buzzing the wall, helping out the Israeli farmers by pollinating their crops, pinching the nectar and returning to produce Gazan honey.

Now that's what I call a peace initiative.

Lukenya IPACS

Flying into Nairobi this afternoon reminded me of flying over North Western or Central Victoria (Australia). The landscape is brown, flat and arid. It's not the red dirt of the Centre, but the browns and blues of the desert. It should be wet, the monsoons should have started, but the wet season has not come yet, which the tourists are loving, but the locals are worried, it means hardship for them.

I'm here attending (and helping to facilitate) a course to be accredited to train the art and science of Integrating Peace-building and Conflict Sensitivity into Programming (IPACS). And here is in the bush at the Lukenya Getaway, off the Mombassa-Nairobi Highway, in the middle of nowhere. The drive in found us slowing down and navigating around herds of Zebra and Impala (Zulu for gazelle). In the evenings, they tell me, we will be visited by giraffe and other animals.

But for now, I sit looking out over the wide empty brown, sparse trees dot the horizon, tall with high branches and flat tops. I sit separated from the 'wild' by a fence of brilliant red bougainvillea, listening to the birds and some annoying loud neighbours. In the other direction a dusty, slow parade of trucks carrying goods along the african arterial from Mombassa to Nairobi and beyond to Uganda and Rwanda is constant and apparently unending. It feels like a long way from anywhere here in Lukenya.