FUTURE GUARDIANSHIP IN LIBERIA
By Nancy Myers

What happens when you take a concept like future guardianship to a country with a devastated past, a dreary present, and at best a highly uncertain future?

At the Science and Environmental Health Network our work is US-based and US-focused. I have sometimes wondered how relevant ideas like the precautionary principle and future guardianship are to the majority of the world's population who are struggling to survive. Is caring about the future a luxury available only to comfortable Westerners?

I had a chance to carry that question to West Africa in March 2008 as I observed and participated in the work of a small peacebuilding NGO called the everyday gandhis project or egp (they keep themselves deliberately lower case and low profile.) Egp is a US-Liberian organization that until recently has worked exclusively in one small section of Liberia, the northern tip, in and around a city called Voinjama, which was at the heart of the long, vicious civil war that ended in 2003.

Egp's directors, Cyndie Travis and Bill Saa, had learned about future guardianship from SEHN and were eager to bring it in some form to Liberia. They, like others, are taking this idea and running with it.

But what would it look like in Liberia? Egp does not operate from grand plans. Instead, it carefully takes the pulse of the community, building on impulses and resources for peacebuilding that come from the ground up. This yields a much richer, more deeply rooted transformation than what might come from Western minds.

Barely a year after the idea of future guardianship was seeded in Liberia, two dynamic developments have emerged from it. One involves child soldiers and one involves the land and forest. They are related.

Future Guardians of Peace

A handful of former child soldiers and other war-affected youths in Voinjama proudly call themselves "Future Guardians of Peace." Now in their late teens and early twenties, these kids have resumed their interrupted schooling, extricated themselves from the drug-and-alcohol culture of their war buddies, and are working hard to earn the respect of a suspicious community. Egp and other mentors have lent a helping hand.

The transformation of gaunt, hardened, physically and mentally wounded children into radiant, kind, generous, and responsible young people has been remarkable--miraculous, even. Those who have observed and helped in the transformation are mystified by it but at least four factors have been important.

•     The opportunity to tell their war stories--what they did, what was done to them--fully and repeatedly to trusted listeners. The stories emerge over time.  
•     The liberal application of love and advice from mentors. Father and mother figures, aunty and uncle figures abound in African society, even though these youths' families have been blasted apart by war.  
•     Security in life's essentials--food, clothes, school fees, and the prospect of a university education--have relieved the hard-scrabble stress of life before the youths encountered egp. They are working hard to merit these privileges and are effusively grateful to benefactors who make them possible.
•     Finally, there is the all-important opportunity to be of service to the community. This is where the Future Guardians of Peace role comes in.

The young people are devoting considerable energy to community involvement, acting as big brothers and sisters to their younger classmates in school, reconnecting to scattered family members, sharing their tiny allowances with former war buddies and listening to their stories. They relish the confident title of "guardian" and rise to the role almost instinctively.

During a stroll through the market, one of our Future Guardians of Peace intervened in a dispute between a young boy and his little sister, calming them with a hand on each child's shoulder and a few quiet questions. Another day the same young man took time to listen to the tale of a weeping market vendor who had just been swindled out of a large sum of money. Another Guardian paused to listen to two women screaming at each other and then passed on with a grin. "Man problems," he said. Not much he could do about that.

While I was in Liberia, Andre Lambertson, a gifted photography teacher from New York City, was coaching seven of these war-affected youths in photography. Not only did they immediately begin taking stunning photos; they also began using the cameras to build relationships in the community. Cyndie Travis and I interviewed these Future Guardians of Peace about their photos. Some stories and photos are here.

There is nothing abstract about the future for these young people--they are their country's future, and they are determined to get as much education as possible to take their place as nation builders. But they are not waiting. These young war veterans are cultivating a culture of peace right now. One outlet for their energy is restoring connections with the natural world.

Permaculture

Liberia's precious forests are being decimated not only by commercial logging but also by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture. Nowhere is this more evident than around the city of Voinjama. March is the end of dry season and that is burning season. At the egp compound on the edge of town we drank afternoon tea to the sound of chainsaws felling tall, gorgeous trees and went to sleep with smoke in our eyes. It was almost more than we could bear.

But this city, which was nearly emptied out during the war as inhabitants fled to Guinea and Sierra Leone, is now home again to upwards of 100,000 people and they must feed themselves. As in much of Africa, that means slash and burn--a practice introduced in colonial times. Small patches of forest are razed for farms; crops like rice, peanuts, and cassava are planted for a few years; and when the thin forest soil is depleted the patches are abandoned and new patches are cleared.

In sparsely populated areas the forest may regenerate in these patches but as the population grows, slash and burn becomes clearcutting. This is happening in Liberia.

Enter permaculture, an intensive form of agriculture aimed at creating ecologically complete and sustainable food systems. In Voinjama in March, instructor Warren Brush was completing Liberia's first permaculture training for 30-some men and women. The class was demanding, covering complex and artful methods of design, cultivation, water management, and soil-building as well as big-picture information on global warming, water issues, and toxic chemicals.

The students--some of them college graduates and some totally unlettered--listened attentively for hour after hour in the hot, crowded egp guest house living room. They all understood what permaculture was about. It was about saving the forests, about not having to move the farm every two years. They understood, too, that permaculture is not a quick fix. This was about investing hard work and creativity now to assure a healthy forest as well as a sustainable food supply for the future.

Our corps of young photographers, who were on an unexpected school holiday related to a national census, followed the permaculture trainees into the forest one day, listened to traditional healers explain the uses of native plants, and picked up a quick sense of sustainable design. Then they photographed the burning landscape and respectfully tried to explain to farmers why the burning had to stop.

Everywhere I traveled with egp, from the neighboring county to Vice President Boakai's office in Monrovia, news of the permaculture training created a buzz. When was the next training? Could egp do a training in this county, that county? Warren was interviewed repeatedly on UNMIL (UN Mission in Liberia) radio, Liberia's only national communication network.

Permaculture and the peace guardians are the precautionary principle and future guardianship in action, on the ground, in a country that is starting from less than scratch. Liberians are eager to learn new ways for the sake of the recovery and long-term survival of their beautiful country. Are we Americans willing to do the same?