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The Center for Youth Empowerment in Monrovia, Liberia. Approaching Cosmopolitan Cooperation. by Ingrid Schittich (2009) When I stepped up to the desk at Frankfurt airport to fetch my ticket to Monrovia, capital of Liberia, the lady there was quite astonished. "Oh, there was a young gentleman this morning who had also booked a flight to Monrovia. Why are people going to Liberia??" CYE before Slabe Sennay, a young Liberian AWC member, and his friend, Linus Gedeo, founded a "Center for Youth Empowerment" (CYE) in Buduburam Camp in order to give young people a chance of education and to prepare them for their return to Liberia. We came to know Slabe Sennay through AWC network activities in 2006, and we have been in contact and supporting CYE ever since. We have learned a lot from Slabe: About the poverty and the monotony of life in a refugee camp, about unprotected children who have not experienced the loving ties of family life, but the aggression of life in the streets instead, making their hearts empty and their souls lonely. To these people, kids and adults, future literally does not exist, their presence consists of a non-ending chain of unconnected moments. As civil wars have stopped and Liberia has become a democracy under the lady president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a UN repatriation program was established, and many refugees have gone back to Liberia. The country where they return to and which, so they are told, is their home country, does not offer any perspectives for or any outlook to a better future for them. Many young people do not know Liberia, as they were young when they had to leave, or they were born in a refugee camp. Again their lives resemble endless chains of single moments leading to nowhere. Many refugees had expected to find their families and relatives in Monrovia after years of separation. To them, Liberia has often turned out to be a place of shattered hopes. CYE -back home Slabe Sennay and most of the CYE team returned to Monrovia in November 2008. Linus Gedeo had gone back earlier to prepare the return of CYE. I went to Monrovia late in April 2009, to get an impression of the life and the working conditions for CYE there, and to find out how we - the German branch of AWC - could best help. Liberia - facts and figures Actually there are no reliable facts and figures as official statistics do not exist in Liberia. We draw our data from various NGO sources and the CIA World Factbook. They might nevertheless give some impressions of the situation:
Such is life. My very first impression of the country:
Nothing actually works. The dearth of infrastructure constantly
shapes everyday life. No electricity - except you've got a generator.
People get exhausted by pumping up every drop of water from small
wells whenever they want to wash their dishes, do their laundry,
or have a wash. If you are thirsty, you got to buy your drinking
There is no health care except for NGO staff, the police is said to be corrupt and of no help to citizens, and there is virtually no public transport. Instead, clusters of people along the road
keep waiting for cars to take them along, for some money of course.
At daybreak, schoolchildren stand waiting to be taken way down
to their schools by someone, sometime later folks stand waiting
to get to some place where people sell all kinds of stuff, and
the lucky ones having a job somewhere stand waiting for a ride
there. For sure, nobody will arrive in time. Traffic is a risky adventure. Cars are
unbearably overloaded; there are only few tarred roads, potholed
anyway. There are neither traffic signs nor road signs, there
is no right side of the road nor a wrong side, you just pass
wherever it seems possible. All drivers are enthusiastic blowers
of their horns - anywhere, at any time, without any obvious reason,
but still without ever being aggressive. Due to the lack of smooth
traffic, petty dealers hurry between the cars offering stuff,
negotiating, discussing. As the cars move on, they have to run
in order to get paid or to give the client his change back. There
is a calm atmosphere, no shouting, no importunate On one of the overloaded cars I read a fine, comforting sentence: "With God all is possible", mocking the present situation and the past, when proselytizing missionaries told Africans what to believe. You can tell the missionary walking through the slums of Monrovia, severely, slowly, wearing a dark western-style suit under the African heat. You can tell the evangelized as well, by their clinging to the same old stereotypes using them like shields against worldly challenges; just like the ones their forefathers were taught: "With the help of God". We met a young man, who had lived in the same refugee camp in Ghana as my African friend. "Oh, you're back! How come that you're in Monrovia? How did you get here?" He answered, keeping a straight face:"With the help of God." My friend replied: "Well, you will certainly have contributed in some way or other to your coming here." The young man hopes to find some people of his family, or someone who knows someone of his family here in Monrovia. He looks lost, forlorn. He knows it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. With the help of God. My neighborhood Children do play, but their plays lack that kind of jubilating laughter which is familiar to me with the kids on our playing grounds. Children run about, but there are no happy leaps or funny zigzags, no playful frolicking. And suddenly, in the middle of a game, a child will stop moving, stop laughing, his or her face will turn serious, calm, attentive, as if listening to the story of an inner story-teller. I realized this sudden change in faces
and attitudes again and again, no matter if children or adults.
It might happen in the middle of a conversation or a light chat,
any time, for no plausible reason. Generally, expressions of feelings are rather low-key, they seem to be choked and kept locked within that cloud of gloom Even when an atmosphere of trust is developing, even when some joyous kidding around emerges, any conversation remains stuck in the present, entangled in the very moment of the talk. The yesterdays have gone, the tomorrow has not yet been given a place in the flow of time. I quickly learned not to ask questions about the past, about family members, about brothers and sisters. "They were killed during the war," "they have been maimed, mutilated," "I've lost my mum and dad during the flight from our village". You would be at a loss if you tried to express the pity and sadness you feel. You don't talk about "the war", about child soldiers; you hesitate to talk about combatants. People want to feel their todays and to live their lives. CYE - grassroots workers in Liberia I wonder how people who carry such heavy emotional burdens have got the strength to get their lives organized, and still have time to care for others, and to ponder about ways of reconciliation. Slabe, Linus and their friends of CYE are convinced that reconciliation is the only way to move forward and to secure a peaceful future. They say: "Unless we learn to live together, the vicious circle of hatred and violence will continue." Will it be possible that members of different
tribes can make a start and live together, when nearly everybody
has suffered cruelties of one of the "hostile" tribes?
Isn't it beyond forgiveness if your family, your children, your
friends have been killed or mutilated? A young Liberian woman
tells me passionately: "I want those people who are responsible
for crimes to be called to account. I want them to take responsibility
for what they have done. They will have to pay for it. How do
you expect me to think of reconciliation? I have suffered too
much from what they have done to my Slabe and Linus will not stop working for peace in their country. They do know that reconciliation is a word which gets easily stuck in your throat when you just have survived a long and cruel war. Renouncing revenge would be a first step to go towards reconciliation, a goal within reach. To end tribal hostility is a task to be fulfilled not by policy makers alone, but to a larger part by citizens, men and women, who have made up their minds to put an end to violence. Their activities, their dedication to bringing about peace will pave the way to reconciliation. That's why CYE is not an educational approach only, but an approach to peace-building through nonviolence. If there is a chance for war-stricken Liberia to overcome war, the first does not go without the latter. Slabe and Linus conceive their work as grassroots work of a Liberian civil society group. I pay a visit to the CYE school the day right after my arrival. A long drawn clay building, five bare rooms at ground level, next to each other. The walls were brought up to seven eights only, leaving a band of light and air under the roof. No windows, window-sized elements showing brickwork rosettes instead. Roughly made benches for the kids, offering seating for four, seven of them actually being squeezed in. There is no blackboard; part of the wall in front is painted in black to serve as a blackboard. As it is immovable, the smaller kids cannot reach up, when they should write at it. "Good morning, visitor, how are you this morning? You are welcome to our class." resounds from every class I visit. The pupils stand upright, and won't sit down unless I say some words of welcome. Again I have to help the youngest to lose their timidity when they see the color of my skin.I am not good at snapping my fingers. Paradoxically this inability helps me a lot. As the boys and girls want to teach me the Liberian ritual of shaking hands which ends in the snapping of two fingers, in the end even the intimidated younger ones join in teaching and practicing - and laughing.The CYE school staff give me a warm and genuine welcome. We start on a short conference in a small room. Chairs have to be fetched from a nearby classroom as there are not enough of them in the tiny "staff room". The school Everyone introduces himself or herself, each explaining what he or she wants to achieve by his or her work here. Some of them wish to extend the work they do for the 200 children here to the countless children stranded in Monrovia. Very often kids are brought to the capital to live with relatives, friends, or acquaintances and, most important, to go to school. The countryside does not offer any chance for any schooling. But a schooling career is generally considered as the key to a better future. But at present this figured future for these kids ends up in sexual abuse and living on the street. Slabe once passionately declared: "I would walk the streets of Monrovia every morning and ask all these kids hanging out why they did not go to school, and I would bring them to CYE!" All of us in our small staff room would like to do so, but the budget limits our euphoria. There is simply no money. We get to an almost depressed mood. In our conference we soon establish a two-level system. One for projects "possibly to be achieved". Another for "visions". We share plenty of visions, among them being a sort of home or boarding school. This should give shelter to children and youths, mainly girls, and provide access to schooling and access to a home different from the one the street offers them. I am deeply impressed by the strong will and the dedication of the CYE team defying the dismal conditions of life in Liberia. They are willing to contribute their share to bring about change. Josef, one of the team, says with a smile: "We agree to disagree." That's it. They start from the bottom, with the children, the most vulnerable. The project is also aimed at empowering girls and women, girls still being under represented at school and women being underestimated in Liberia, as in so many other countries. The auditorium After the conference the pupils gather in a large room, the "auditorium", normally serving as a double class room, where two classes are instructed at the same time. Slabe introduces the co-operation of CYE with the AWC German branch, the boys and girls perform small scenes, dances, songs, and poems. I warmly thank them all. The lessons are given under poorest circumstances. Not all of the pupils have got school material such as paper and pens, very few have got books. They learn from the blackboard. Speaking in an "all-together-now" mode seems to be the most constituent element of the schooling methods. Orthography is exclusively taught by spelling words all together. The boys and girls exercise this all-together method zealously and loudly, quickly finding their rhythm, I notice their long experience. There is one problem, still. As there is that airy architecture, one cannot escape listening to the vociferous all-togethers from all sides. A classroom Teaching is hard for the teachers. They have nearly no teaching material, they design everything on their own. There is an enormous lack of trained teachers in Liberia, and one is happy if people are ready to do some teaching, passing on the things they had been taught themselves some time. There are some state schools in Monrovia, but they are by far not enough to provide schooling for all children and youths. That is why private initiatives are so needed. In theory school is free in Liberia. Again and again one hears of teachers taking money from their pupils. This problem has already become a topic in Liberian newspapers. Shoes are another problem. As a rule all over Liberia, children who want to attend school must wear shoes. If they have no shoes on, simply because they don't have any, they will be sent home. So you see young kids wearing far too large shoes, obviously borrowed from elder sisters or brothers or friends. CYE, however, is one of the schools who accept bare-footed pupils. CYE is a private initiative. That means that CYE has to demand school fees. The fees are not high, but still too high for a great number of families. So the German AWC branch tries to help from Germany by arranging school sponsorships. The school fees and the help from abroad, among it the donations from Germany, pay for the teachers' salaries and for the rent paid for the building. For the latter they have a leasing contract with a church, so that within three to four years the building will belong to CYE. At the moment CYE accepts children from the age of four on, schooling runs up to the sixth form. The costs of living are extremely high in Monrovia, even staple food is expensive. A bag of rice (50 kilograms) - rice being the staple food of Liberia - costs USD 35,00. Thus many people can afford one meal a day only, mainly as an evening meal. Malnutrition is a general and serious problem in Liberia. By the statistics of the UN World Food Programme 50 percent of the Liberian population are considered to be undernourished. The children at CYE often do not come to school, because they are too hungry, they stay at home, lethargic from hunger, and unmotivated. Three days during my stay at the CYE school were a kind of feast considering food: All of the kids got one cooked meal a day at school. The money for this offer came from German school children of a primary school of Jena, a university town in the Eastern part of Germany. They boys and girls there had started a baking and selling cake action for their black "colleagues" of the same age, encouraged to do so by a co-worker of the One-World-House of Jena. Queuing for a meal Good! In different talks to the CYE representatives the idea of creating "food sponsorships" from Germany as an urgent action grew. We all hope that we will not have to push this idea onto the "visions" level. A sewing school project, initiated and successfully started already in Buduburam, will be continued. At the moment it is pausing, because there are no tables, no chairs, and no working materials. Empowering girls and women is of utmost importance, as girls are significantly under represented in schools, as already stated, and women are the last to get jobs. Each CYE team member has ambitious ideas and plans, but our talks nearly always end up in the sigh: funding, funding, funding. Traditions unlived I met the "Chief "of my neighborhood, too, who particularly and formally welcomed me to Liberia. At my second meeting with him I introduced Slabe Sennay, Linus Gedeo, and their CYE project to him. Thus CYE is "officially" rooted in the community now. As it is difficult to promote ideas or events in the community - generally there are no advertising pillars or anything of that kind - it is good to know the Chief who will surely help to promote CYE ideas. The Chief is responsible for what is going on in his community. In that way the Chief embodies old African traditions, which are disappearing or are already lost in Liberia. Apart from the colonial heritage which has unfolded its cultural destructiveness in Africa, during the long years of war Liberia has lost her elder people, in the memories of whom traditions used to be kept enshrined. In Liberian tradition, clans and their chiefs play an outstanding role in society. The Chief is responsible for a peaceful societal life, he settles disputes and represents jurisdiction in his tribe. Jurisdiction in this context resembles, as it seems to me, the victim-offender mediation Europeans try to further in the context of a restorative justice. He who offended tribal law has to appear in a palaver hut. The offender will confess his offense, he will show remorse, and then he will be sentenced to performing something in favour of the offended. The offender might e.g. have to repair something at the house of the offended, help him on the fields. After that, the offender is welcome back to the community. A spotlight on history Sad to say that Liberia's history seems to follow Western patterns rather than pre-colonial African traditions. On the initiative of the American Colonization Society, Liberia was founded in 1822 by freed Afro-American slaves. The first settlement, Christopolis, was later renamed Monrovia after the American president Monroe, one of the founder members of the American Colonization Society. In 1847 Liberia was declared an independent republic, the first in Africa. "They brought us civilization and
Christianity" was the mocking comment of my Liberian friends.
Indeed, they brought the American language and they certainly
brought the potential for violence and oppression of the white
America. Slaves as they were, they had suffered from oppression,
violence and lawlessness. Nevertheless, the Americo-Liberians,
as they called themselves after their arrival, quickly became
the oppressors of the indigenous population who had been living
in that area. The indigenous tribes were expelled, slaughtered
- the spiral of violence continued. The Flag and canon I have got the impression that insights which psychologists have gained into individuals can be applied to nations: Beaten children will become beating parents. When schools were built in Liberia and
school systems developed, only children with American first names
- that means sons and daughters of the Americo-Liberian upper-class
- were admitted to school. Consequently, many young people gave
up their African first names and adopted American ones.Statistically,
Americo-Liberians today constitute a minority of 2,5% of the
population. But they hold nearly all influential positions in
politics and society. The first name of the current president
is not an African name, as we all know. However, Ms Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf tries her best to communicate with all political and
ethnic groups in Liberia, to be open to their American influence is the red thread running through the history of Liberia: The flag resembles the American one. The constitution shows American influence. During the Cold War, Liberia was one of the most reliable dominoes of America. For a hundred years, from 1877 until 1980, the True Whig Party of the Americo-Liberians dominated government. In 1980 president William Tolbert was killed. This was the end of the Americo-Liberian political domination. Samuel Doe, a member of an indigenous tribe, was his successor. He, too, was killed. Then came Charles Taylor, who, at the end of his presidency, was re-elected by the Liberian people. Riots and civil wars follow, Sierra Leone and other neighbour states get involved until finally in 2003, after 14 years of war, a peace treaty is signed. The country slowly moves ahead towards democracy and peace. Charles Taylor was lately brought before the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. The curse of resources Liberia is a rich country, rich in natural resources, such as timber, iron ore, rubber, and, needless to say, diamonds. Movies such as "Blood Diamonds" or "Africa: War is business" have recently drawn the attention of a vast international public to the issue of Liberia and her natural resources. The UNO prefer the expression "diamonds of conflict", which does indeed sound more gently than the words "blood diamonds", which clearly indicate weapons and war. To a large extent, diamonds are extracted illegally under working conditions where human dignity counts little, where working force is recklessly exploited. The workers are said to earn about one US dollar a day. Often there are illicit agreements between Liberian warlords and concessionaires. The diamonds are sold as illegally as they are mined; the profit is used to buy weapons. And the next warlord is already waiting to come to power and money. His soldiers cross the country, looting villages, and killing people. Gangs of soldiers, mercenaries, criminals, dominate the country, waging their ugly wars. Ordinary people are not needed in this process; they are a disturbing nuisance, mere crowds in absurd migration flows either from their villages into the cities, where they are labeled "internal displaced persons". Or they flee to some neighboring countries such as Sierra Leone and Ghana. Simultaneously flows of refugees from Sierra Leone come to Liberia. The greed for power, money, and war has been shaping the fate and history of Liberia, it has been shaping the fate and history of Sierra Leone and other countries, in Africa and elsewhere. It is striking that the illegal side of
the story generally is black, which means the Africans usually
are the scapegoats. Those who live safely in their rich cities
in western countries, in Antwerp, in Brussels, in Frankfort,
wash their hands of this. In their surroundings, arms traders
are appreciated as honorable members of society. Honorable businessmen
sell precious diamonds fabricated into jewelry to highly respected
members of the High Society. And all of them, of course, are
very convinced that there is no connection whatsoever between
their luxury and the misery in faraway Liberia. Minding one's
own business - that is the underlying hypocritical philosophy.
Admittedly, there have been nice little gestures demonstrating
the good-will Anyway, arms trade blossoms under the reliable cover of silence. However, in an age of unrestricted globalization, using access to knowledge is not an amusing pastime but an indispensable means of taking responsibility for the world we live in. Animal-rights activists have succeeded in creating awareness of animal suffering. Wearing animal fur has come under massive criticism. Showing off diamonds still goes without criticism. In Liberia, peace will remain fragile as long as precious resources such as diamonds remain the targets of the greediness of the rich, and as long as warlords push their interests through. As most of the states in that region of Africa are not in a position to guarantee security, security companies offer and sell security as a product. NGOs and UN institutions are among the buyers of security. Their imposing buildings are protected by huge white stone walls, barbed wire, and armed soldiers or security people protecting the entrances. There is surely well-intentioned foreign aid. Since 2003, UNMIL, the UN Mission for Liberia, endeavors to keep the fragile peace. Many Africans maintain that the UN had better taken Africans for that task from the very beginning. Foreign soldiers coming to Africa from distant countries and different cultures suffer from a culture shock. Language barriers add to their problems with the service in Africa. Probably this is a general problem, when so called protecting forces simply lack any language competence. In Afghanistan as well nearly no one of the foreign military speaks Dari or Pashto or any other language spoken in the country. So how could they communicate with the people there, apart from the fact that the military are rather trained in non-verbal forms of "communication". Furthermore, aid organizations, international NGOs and churches should critically reflect their way of exercising "charity". Charity may be needed as a first step to mitigate poverty and suffering. Charity is no useful means of aid, if it is not accompanied by political will. Politically non-binding charity activities, which do not lead to any change of the politics or the political system of the country supported, will empower transnational companies and their puppet policy makers to continue making profits from misery, poverty, and death. To be continued Until these changes in politics and political systems happen, we simply have to continue our efforts to at least alleviate poverty at the place we feel obliged to, still having in mind the changes needed. "My" place is Liberia. My short visit to Monrovia has given me courage to support the project of my Liberian friends as efficiently as possible.We do hope that we will find good-willing people, generous people, walking down the path with us. Our first common goal could be providing the children at CYE with one cooked meal a day. We do hope that CYE will be able to continue their peace-efforts and their education-work after the summer holiday in September 2009. At the moment, we hear from CYE, funding is not yet secured. I truly hope that in Liberia and elsewhere civil societies stand up against current policies of violence and economic exploitation and demand justice to prevail as a precondition to peace. I hope, that one day the most imposing buildings of big cities, among them Monrovia, will not be the ones owned by governments, companies, and churches, but the buildings hosting kindergartens and schools. Then, when I travel to Monrovia, and I step up to the desk at Frankfort airport to fetch my ticket, the lady there will smile at me and say:"Oh, what a wonderful country you are going to. I would love to come with you."
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