Page 33 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

Most afternoons, she and her husband would sit outside in the shade with their Congolese church

guests, at a low formica table with broken chairs. One by one the men told their stories and began to

weep. As they spoke, their tears became so copious they flooded the tabletop. Tears sheeted into their

laps and poured onto the ground. As her husband leaned in to listen, Jean would wipe the table and

wring out the towel. When Jean finished the story she shrugged. We may have hugged, I don’t

remember. I sat, stunned, as she went into the bathroom, turned off the faucet, and closed the door.

During the next several years, I returned frequently to Eastern Mennonite for their Summer

Peacebuilding Institute, where grassroots peacebuilders from more than fifty countries gather to teach

and learn the art of building peace: In South Africa, Mennonite peacebuilders worked behind the

scenes to build ‘human safety nets’ because they anticipated – correctly – that the fragile negotiations

between Mandela and de Klerk would likely fall apart. In the US, peacebuilders from EMU helped

sensitize both prosecution and defense lawyers in high-­‐profile capital cases so that victims and their

families were not re-­‐traumatized. Liberian peacebuilder S. G. Doe explained his work with child soldiers

and warlords in the civil war that was still raging when I met him. He told me, “...We must deliberately

move into the field and lavish love on those incapable of loving.” I realized that, as I slept, someone on

the other side of the world was awake and working for peace.

In late 1999, as a result of meeting some of these extraordinary ordinary people, I founded the non-­‐

profit everyday gandhis7 in hopes of making their stories more widely known. Five years later, I found

myself in Liberia, in the wake of the civil war that had just ended there. I was soon to learn that even

the best ideas born of the human mind benefit from collaboration with unseen sources. On the eve of

that trip I dreamed that the dead from the war were asking to be properly buried and mourned.

I am standing with two colleagues on the banks of an underground river. On the landing where we

stand, near the water, I see three small suitcases that become three coffins that turn into three wooden

boats. On the other side of the river is a burning tower, like the Tower card in the Tarot. In front of the

tower is a Liberian friend whose name is Roosevelt. He stands quietly, holding a shaft of gray light. Ours

eyes meet. He says, “Everything is ready.”

7 http://www.everydaygandhis.org; name suggested by Bill Goldberg in conversations at Eastern Mennonite University

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