Honestly, I was squirming in my seat when the 3 foot long guinea worm was pulled out of the girl’s foot in The Carter Center Health Programs video from Sudan. I was sitting side-by-side with the other summer interns during an informational session, and I’d like to point out that I was not the only one squirming. It wasn’t until quite a bit later in the day that I put the real pieces together: it’s not about killing disgusting worms; it’s about creating political stability.
The Carter Center (TCC) has several hallmark programs and outstanding accomplishments that solidify the NGO’s place as an effective implementer of social advancement. However, when you look at its list of activities and programs, it seems a little like a hodgepodge: programs focusing on disease eradication and mental health, peace programs furthering democratic principles and human rights, conflict resolution programs establishing judicial systems, national election monitoring, and increasing access to information in China. Hmmm…a hodgepodge?
Quite the contrary.
Instead, it is a systematic plan to create peace in some of the poorest areas of the world where “the bottom billion” fight to survive each and every day.
This weekend, all of the summer interns had the enjoyable opportunity of participating in a retreat. Unlike many “retreats” that consist of weird games and insufficient amounts of caffeine, this retreat was like a 24 hour crash course in organizational development. Guess who the case study was? The Carter Center.
After losing my appetite over the guinea worm, the light bulb went on in my head when I was listening to the incredibly informative Kelly Callahan discuss TCC’s Health Programs. After listing the unbelievable achievements in nearly eradicating guinea worm and reducing trachoma and river blindness, she said, “this is how The Carter Center creates peace.” Peace? But she’s talking about health programs. I swear I was listening. What did I miss?
There are so many reasons that lead a country to civil war, that divide groups of people within a state, that make religious factions take up arms, but what’s the controversial or divisive thought behind fighting disease? Both Khartoum and South Sudan want to eradicate guinea worm. The former government and the junta of Niger both want to eliminate trachoma. Here is something that unites people – something that can improve people’s lives and fight poverty, which one might argue, is the ultimate cause of civil war. In a world where Dr. John Stremlau says there are “no political solutions to these problems”, there are still answers - like fighting disease.
Dr. Stremlau, who is the Vice President of Peace Programs at TCC, is the kind of integrated thinker that sparks a young person to evaluate organizational development as it pertains to mission building. If TCC can figure out the right balance of programs, it can connect the steps from conflict resolution through political stability to peace. Look at Liberia - a country in the TCC portfolio. The Center started its work there with mediation in the early 1990s and is now working to improve the judicial system including citizen access to justice. In Sudan, The Center is working through its health programs and through election monitoring to get access to the country’s people while leading up to the January referendum that will decide the country’s fate. If TCC can leverage its comparative advantage in Africa to build a partnership with China’s recent intervention, it can broker a deeper dialogue about democratic reform in the People’s Republic. Then, maybe it will be possible for democracy to “win both the moral argument and the political argument”, and that pathway might include a joint trachoma elimination program in Ghana between TCC and China.
So if the goal is as Dr. Stremlau says, “creating politically stable states”, then that guinea worm is pretty important to world peace. No more squirming.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Week Two at The Carter Center: Thinking in Circles and Lines...
What would happen if you had Samantha Power and Twyla Tharp tackle the same problem? Power, arguably one of the best experts on mass atrocities and a member of Obama’s National Security Council, would develop a rigorous statistical analysis that documents the issue and assesses inherent biases from quoted sources. Tharp, on the other hand, would deconstruct musical phrases while intertwining professional dancers’ inherent expression to interpret and re-present the problem in a series of contemporary movements that make a thought-provoking statement. Now, what if Power and Tharp were to work together to produce one final product?
Welcome to week two of my internship.
My fellow intern and I have been tasked with an exciting, albeit depressing, assignment to research the problem of sexual gender-based violence (SGBV) in Liberia. I am familiar with SGBV as it relates to Rwanda and Darfur as those are issues that I’ve tackled first hand in our contemporary ballets over the last two years. However, given my limited knowledge of Liberia, I had not realized the extent of the problem as it manifested there during the civil war and now in the post-conflict period.
As interns, our first step was to gain a sense of the size of the problem through statistical analysis. There is no shortage of shocking anecdotal and qualitative evidence, but searching for well-researched quantitative data was more challenging. According to the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), 66% of girls between the ages of 10 – 19 years have been raped (2009). Medicins Sans Frontieres reports SGBV as the #1 or #2 monthly crime in Monrovia, however perpetrators are rarely tried or convicted. When expanding the analysis to include physical abuse against women as well as sexual violence, the statistics become even more unbelievable: 90.8% of respondents in Liberia’s 10 most populous counties have been subjected to at least one act of violence (World Health Organization, 2008).
From this landscape, we are asked the impossible question: “what works to prevent SGBV in Liberia?” The problem has been addressed by the Government of Liberia. High level coordination mechanisms and a national taskforce have been established. There is a SGBV Crimes Unit that has a 24-hour hotline, and it vertically prosecutes rape cases so that resolution is possible. However, such resources are confined to just one of Liberia’s fifteen counties, and there is no supporting quantitative evidence to show these efforts have diminished the widespread sexual violence throughout the country.
Like in Darfur and Rwanda, perpetrators have become skilled at understanding the power of rape as a tool of war. It destroys families and communities, destabilizing gender roles in a post-conflict environment. It is nearly outside my scope of imagination to understand what it is like to be a woman in any one of these countries. Even when I addressed the issue as a choreographer in our Darfur ballet, the dancers and I used analogies from our own lives in order to create the tension and fear embedded in the movement; simply imagining “reality” left our artistry disconnected from the enormity of the pain.
However, until this point, this has been the way I process information and communicate it back to people. Now, in the setting of this internship, I have the perfect learning ground to re-work how I connect data in my head and report it back in a coherent manner. And this leads me to the question at hand: how do two people with different approaches generate the same final product?
In writing this research paper for The Carter Center, my counterpart and I will need to find the answer to that question. Whereas I think nonlinearly – pulling from emotions and analogies – the other intern thinks logically and directly. She has been very patient with me as I sort out the legal terminology which is second nature for her, and I am grateful that I have the opportunity to observe how she assesses and synthesizes information. So, hopefully, when we put together our final thoughts on this difficult topic, we will have answered that initial question: what would happen if Samantha Power and Twyla Tharp tackle the same problem?
Nevertheless, I don’t think there’s a spot on the Security Council waiting for Twyla...
A video response to Rebecca Davis Dance Company’s “Darfur”:
http://www.youtube.com/rebeccadavisdance#p/c/015FE8EBA6D748B3/0/gprLqCFTrJg
Welcome to week two of my internship.
My fellow intern and I have been tasked with an exciting, albeit depressing, assignment to research the problem of sexual gender-based violence (SGBV) in Liberia. I am familiar with SGBV as it relates to Rwanda and Darfur as those are issues that I’ve tackled first hand in our contemporary ballets over the last two years. However, given my limited knowledge of Liberia, I had not realized the extent of the problem as it manifested there during the civil war and now in the post-conflict period.
As interns, our first step was to gain a sense of the size of the problem through statistical analysis. There is no shortage of shocking anecdotal and qualitative evidence, but searching for well-researched quantitative data was more challenging. According to the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), 66% of girls between the ages of 10 – 19 years have been raped (2009). Medicins Sans Frontieres reports SGBV as the #1 or #2 monthly crime in Monrovia, however perpetrators are rarely tried or convicted. When expanding the analysis to include physical abuse against women as well as sexual violence, the statistics become even more unbelievable: 90.8% of respondents in Liberia’s 10 most populous counties have been subjected to at least one act of violence (World Health Organization, 2008).
From this landscape, we are asked the impossible question: “what works to prevent SGBV in Liberia?” The problem has been addressed by the Government of Liberia. High level coordination mechanisms and a national taskforce have been established. There is a SGBV Crimes Unit that has a 24-hour hotline, and it vertically prosecutes rape cases so that resolution is possible. However, such resources are confined to just one of Liberia’s fifteen counties, and there is no supporting quantitative evidence to show these efforts have diminished the widespread sexual violence throughout the country.
Like in Darfur and Rwanda, perpetrators have become skilled at understanding the power of rape as a tool of war. It destroys families and communities, destabilizing gender roles in a post-conflict environment. It is nearly outside my scope of imagination to understand what it is like to be a woman in any one of these countries. Even when I addressed the issue as a choreographer in our Darfur ballet, the dancers and I used analogies from our own lives in order to create the tension and fear embedded in the movement; simply imagining “reality” left our artistry disconnected from the enormity of the pain.
However, until this point, this has been the way I process information and communicate it back to people. Now, in the setting of this internship, I have the perfect learning ground to re-work how I connect data in my head and report it back in a coherent manner. And this leads me to the question at hand: how do two people with different approaches generate the same final product?
In writing this research paper for The Carter Center, my counterpart and I will need to find the answer to that question. Whereas I think nonlinearly – pulling from emotions and analogies – the other intern thinks logically and directly. She has been very patient with me as I sort out the legal terminology which is second nature for her, and I am grateful that I have the opportunity to observe how she assesses and synthesizes information. So, hopefully, when we put together our final thoughts on this difficult topic, we will have answered that initial question: what would happen if Samantha Power and Twyla Tharp tackle the same problem?
Nevertheless, I don’t think there’s a spot on the Security Council waiting for Twyla...
A video response to Rebecca Davis Dance Company’s “Darfur”:
http://www.youtube.com/rebeccadavisdance#p/c/015FE8EBA6D748B3/0/gprLqCFTrJg
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
First Impressions of The Carter Center & Atlanta
Founded in 1982 by former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn, The Carter Center (TCC) occupies 37 acres in the heart of Atlanta, housing offices, a library, a museum, and (of course) a performance stage. When I arrived here one week ago - my first time in Atlanta - it struck me within moments that TCC is a rarity in the middle of this urban center wrestling with diversity and economic development. The flowering grounds of The Center feel almost like a sanctuary, but TCC operates field offices in some of the most dilapidated places around the world.
I don’t quite know what to make of this juxtaposition. Why would I get to go to work in a safe, secure building, using a computer with high-speed internet access to write reports on a post-conflict country that ranks 169th out of 182 countries according to the Human Development Index? I guess this is really just a re-positioning of the same question that was posed to me two years ago when I first set foot in Rwanda…Why does a 16 year-old boy with malaria become the head of a household of self-taught hip hop orphans, while kids in Philadelphia drive to dance schools in their cars and sport new dance wear everyday? I know it’s possible to build that bridge to connect our disparate worlds, but I don’t know how to do it.
And that’s why I am here in Atlanta. If the TCC can do such a marvelous job of this work through their programs, how do artists achieve the same? How does creative capital get leveraged in a way that produces economic gain for the people in other countries? I am optimistic that this experience will help me understand more of this puzzle.
DAY ONE at The Carter Center…The Bolshoi and Liberia
Was it coincidental that the Bolshoi Ballet Academy of Russia was on the cover of the New York Times on the same day that I started scanning the paper for Liberia articles? However as much as I will always hail Agrippina Vaganova as the goddess of ballet, the content of the Liberia article was qualitatively (and I believe factually) superior.
Intern orientation was most enlightening. For instance, I learned that interns should always make office coffee and never wear sneakers when meeting with the former President. (Glad I took notes as this really contradicts common sense.) Then, I was introduced to the staff for my specific program, which is the Conflict Resolution division of the Peace Programs at TCC. My focus area is to be Liberia. (And no, Rebecca Davis Dance Company is not planning to do a new choreographic work on Charles Taylor, nor will we ever for that matter.) Tom Crick is the Associate Director and Robert Pitman is the Program Associate. Within a few minutes, it was very clear to me that I am going to learn an unbelievable amount from these two individuals - ranging from the specifics of integrating and expanding formal and customary judicial systems, to the general methods of working vertically and horizontally in an organization of 150 employees. Beyond that, I have the good fortune of working alongside an exceptionally intelligent and delightful fellow intern, Courtney Rusin.
So after this positive moment and feeling of exhilaration of what the next ten weeks of my life might bring, the more important question hit me: what on earth do I know about Liberia?
WEEK ONE: Learning About Liberia
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in Accra finally brought an end to Liberia’s civil war in 2003. Since its outbreak in 1989, the war resulted in 250,000 deaths and 350,000 were externally displaced. From this devastation, TCC has been a partner with the Government of Liberia in bringing two rounds of free and fair elections to the country and spearheading a far-reaching initiative to strengthen the justice system, particularly in the rural areas of the country.
Thus far, one particular aspect of TCC’s work stands out to me: devolving problem solving to local citizens. This can easily be misunderstood by thinking that people simply hold open events or distribute publications to different sectors of society. However, TCC establishes strong partnerships with civil society organizations through its Access to Justice program. Working with the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, TCC has trained 32 Community Legal Advisors that make trips to teach people their rights, resolve local disputes and advocate justice. In fact, clever new initiatives are underway to have citizens use their cell phones to connect with the advisors for legal assistance.
A short video about the Community Legal Advisors in Liberia is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DErwpCIRCzM
What’s fascinating to me is how The Carter Center is gathering information on the ground, assessing it, and then implementing appropriate programs to increase the likelihood that justice is being served in a country where the average income is $228 a year. Indeed, there is proof to TCC’s slogan of “building hope.”
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