Mennonite Weekly Review

HARRISONBURG, Va. — Hunger. Child soldiers. Orphaned children raising siblings.

From left, Jacinta Makokha of Kenya, Alice Warigia Hinga of Kenya and Belinda Gumbo of Zimbabwe enjoy a free moment between Summer Peacebuilding Institute classes. — Photo by Jim Bishop/EMU

Such tragedies might readily connote despair. But not to three African women who studied this year at Eastern Mennonite University’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

When these women speak of the staggering tasks they and their colleagues have undertaken to heal lives and communities, they convey unflagging hope.

In Zimbabwe, administrator/trainer Belinda Gumbo works with the Habakkuk Trust’s Local Level Capacity Building Program, training communities in participatory citizenship. Funded by agencies including Mennonite Central Committee, the program has helped communities in Gumbo’s area form 16 advocacy teams.

These teams work toward agreements with service providers and local governments. For example, officials might agree to collect refuse regularly, while residents agree not to litter.

In regions hard-hit by AIDS, with many households headed by children, Gumbo’s agency is working with Zimbabwe’s Minister of Social Welfare for compromises on child labor. They want to eliminate the practice of children selling cigarettes late into the night, while desiring that child-farmworkers have time for school and play.

Jacinta Makokha works for the Nairobi-based Change Agents for Peace International. CAPI works with churches to transform conflict in the Africa’s Great Lakes region (including Congo, Rwanda and Burundi); with a women’s organization in Southern Sudan; and with the Hope for Kenya Forum.

Makokha explains the underlying approach: “I talk to Belinda. We talk to Alice. Then we all go together and talk to you.” Eventually, all may find “we no longer need revenge.”

In Rwanda, women widowed by the 1994 genocide dialogue with others whose husbands are serving prison time for the killings — sharing “common widowhood issues,” she said.

Makokha tells of a women’s group comprising participants from different tribes. They work half a day in a cooperative tailoring business and spend the other half discussing peacebuilding. She cites an organization that has created jobs for more than 200 former child soldiers, while encouraging them to exchange weapons for bicycles.

Alice Warigia Hinga, also from Kenya, hopes to return for future SPI sessions and earn a master’s degree from EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

In 1999, when she and her husband, a Pentecostal pastor, were starting a church for coffee-plantation workers in the Kiambu District, they discovered the workers’ children lacked educational opportunities, often worked and sometimes went hungry. So they opened a school.

The school has supplied food to families willing to take in orphaned children and started a day care unit. Previously, babies had been dying because mothers had to carry them to the coffee fields, where they inhaled pesticides, or had to leave them home with siblings.