It also helped that Gbowee knew ˛ÝÝŽÉçÇř well. She had earned a in 2007.

Gbowee, a social worker who led a women’s peace movement that helped end Liberia’s civil war 10 years ago, addressed a fundraising dinner for over 100 people at EMU on Feb. 7. Organized by the school’s International Student Organization, the event was followed by a public address to about 200 attendees, who put contributions into baskets passed by the students.

The events raised over $4,000 after expenses for the care of children whose parents died from Ebola. The funds will go to the Nobel winner’s in the Liberian capital of Monrovia. The foundation makes grants to grassroots groups, including two Liberian organizations founded by graduates of .

The countries hardest hit by Ebola, which started in March 2014, were Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, said Gbowee in her public address. The 3.4 million people of her country had only 51 doctors. “We were not prepared for Ebola, but Liberian civil society rose to the occasion,” she said. “We didn’t wait around for the international community to come and help us.”

Gbowee told the stories of three Liberian heroes – a doctor who cared for Ebola victims in his humble clinic at the risk of his own life, a taxi driver who transported dangerously infectious patients to the hospital, and a young man with a full-time job who provides care for orphans in his off hours.

The epidemic has finally abated in Africa, she said. The Ebola clinics are emptying and students are going back to school. But, she added, the people still live in fear, the economy is ruined and orphans abound.

“We appreciate the help of international organizations,” Gbowee said. “But sometimes they didn’t bother to consult with the local people about how to fight Ebola. They thought they had the expertise, but if you don’t really listen to what the people want, then it’s not much use.”

Gbowee has a reputation for speaking truth to power, most notably when she publicly confronted the president of Liberia during the country’s civil war. Most recently she criticized the United Nations’ humanitarian aid efforts during a meeting of the UN Security Council.

During a question-and-answer session at the conclusion of her speech, Gbowee praised young people for their idealism and gave advice on how to start on the path to activism. “Ideas that are ground-breaking and keep you awake at night might seem like crazy ideas,” she said. “But write them down, tell a friend and step out boldly. Getting angry about an unjust situation is not only okay, she added, but a good thing.

The students who organized the fundraiser represented five continents: Kaltuma Noorow and Nandi Onetu of Kenya, Winifred Gray-Johnson and Gee Paegar of Liberia, Sun Ju Lee of South Korea, Wael Gamtessa of Ethiopia, Brenda Soka of Tanzania, Zoe Parakuo of the United States, Norah Alobikan of Saudi Arabia, Danika Saucedo of Bolivia, Victoria Gunawan of Indonesia, and Marcus Ekman of Sweden. , EMU’s director of , is the advisor for the International Student Organization.

Gbowee’s last trip to EMU was in April 2014, when she was the that included her son, Joshua Mensah. Before that she came to campus in . Just prior to her arrival, the was announced, and thus her appearance made for a frenzied weekend.

Editor’s note: Kara Lofton, a 2014 EMU grad, reported on Gbowee’s appearance at the Ebola fundraiser for local public radio station WMRA; her four-minute report can be heard.

These are the messages being spread by alumni of the of ˛ÝÝŽÉçÇř who are working in West African countries affected by Ebola.

“Local communities should not be seen simply as the source of problems or as victims,” writes Libby Hoffman in an published this month (January 2015). “Ebola is not just a medical problem – it is a community problem, and this dimension is being largely ignored within the current international response.”

Liberian peacebuilding alums Nathaniel Walker ( ’10) and Gwendolyn Myers ( ’14) offered similar sentiments in commentaries published in The Guardian and the Liberian Daily Observer, respectively.

“Communities that have taken Ebola prevention and control matters into their hands have recorded [a] significantly low number of cases,” wrote Myers in a . “Whereas, in communities that are yet to fully embrace the outbreak and to take action to avoid infection, we have seen an increase in transmission.”

Local efforts include developing the Pen-Pen Peace Network, an initiative of motorcycle taxi drivers. The Network has communicated about Ebola prevention through text messages, billboards, social media and loud speakers, distributed 3,000 fact sheets through communities, and built handwashing sanitation stations for citizens, wrote Walker and co-author Kai Kuang in an .

Women are playing important roles

In another grassroots initiative, Vaiba Flomo (CJP Grad. Cert. ’13) has rallied her close-knit Rock Hill community in Monrovia – where many of the 25,000 adults and children survive by hand-crushing rocks to sell for construction projects – to do health education. With her women’s team (called GSA Rock Hill Community Women), Flomo has distributed buckets, chlorine, and soap to various groups and centers where youths and adults typically gather, including clothing shops, prayer bands, video clubs, and drug stores. In an impoverished community largely ignored by governmental agencies, Flomo and her team have received .

Liberia is still recovering from a brutal civil war (as is Sierra Leone, one of the other West African countries hit hard by Ebola). For Walker and Myers, community-driven efforts toward Ebola prevention are vital not only to eradicate the disease, but to preserve the fragile peacebuilding steps that have been taken in recent years to heal these communities. (Guinea, the third West African country widely affected by Ebola, has suffered from political violence, but not outright civil war.)

In both Liberia and Sierra Leone, peace remains tenuous and distrust runs high (in many of these communities victims and perpetrators are living side-by-side), so fighting Ebola is intimately tied with communities’ ability to transcend past transgressions and develop open and honest communication.

“Lack of trust within communities is the unseen but powerful inhibiter of Ebola prevention and treatment initiatives,” writes Hoffman, whose charitable foundation, , is the main U.S. backer of , a Sierra Leonean peacebuilding initiative.

“Conversely, empowered and trusted local voices and leadership magnify the success of prevention efforts, and they do so while strengthening community capacity for post-Ebola recovery.”

Gaining strength to handle any crisis

Hoffman writes that building trust in communities actually provides a “social immunity” that goes beyond the disease at hand, and into the underlying fabric of society, leaving communities “stronger to face the next crisis, whatever it may be.”

Fambul Tok community members in Sierra Leone have been using their hard-earned trust to distribute soap to their communities, teach about prevention techniques, and develop the Bridging Communities Network, which functions much like the Pen-Pen Network in Liberia. [Hoffman attended EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) in 1996 and 2000; she has employed CJP graduates to work with Fambul Tok and sent Fambul Tok staffers to SPI sessions.]

As an example , who attended SPI ’14, heads a group called Peace Mothers under Fambul Tok. These mothers have been distributing soap and promoting handwashing in six mainly rural districts of Sierra Leone, seeking to reach about 250,000 households per district, often by going door to door.

“We believe that the outbreak will end when actors at all levels – the national and district governments, community-based organizations and the health sector – work cooperatively to engage local communities,” said a “project report” released Sept. 2, 2014, by the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, founded by Nobel Peace Laureate (MA ’07 in ).

The tide may be turning

This seems to be happening at last. The tide seems to be turning from Ebola in West Africa. On that weekly UN figures show a decline in new Ebola cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Even though the “death toll from the world’s worst Ebola outbreak has reached 8,429 with 21,296 cases so far,” schools in Guinea opened Jan. 19 after a five-month closure and the national daily infection rate in Sierra Leone is two-thirds lower now than it was in November. Liberia had its lowest weekly total since June and all three countries “have sufficient capacity to bury all the people known to have died from Ebola,” said the BBC.

In Sierra Leone, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman has found that the locals are proving amazingly resilient.

“Vigor seems to be part of Sierra Leone’s national ethos,” he wrote in a on Sierra Leone’s passionate surfers, “especially now, when so many people are fixated on staying healthy. Freetown’s streets thicken at dawn with men and women decked out in the latest and brightest spandex — jogging, stretching, jumping rope, or doing situps and push-ups in the grass.”

If one visits , you’ll see that interspersed with updates on trainings in handwashing to stop the spread of Ebola, are fun photos of Myers in colorful clothing and high heels, sometimes with color-coordinated decorations around her neck and in her hair. It’s as if she’s saying, “We are not all gloom and doom here! We’re resilient Liberians and proud of it!”

at a to. The money raised will be distributed by the to two Liberian service organizations founded by alumnae of : GSA Rock Hill Community Women in Monrovia, founded by Vaiba Flomo, and Messengers of Peace, a youth outreach group founded by Gwendolyn Myers. To or for more information, click .

She never imagined that desire, born from hours of long-distance conversation with her family members and prayer over the sufferings of fellow West Africans, would draw the attention and support of her university community – and a .

“Doing something was a way to help myself with the panic of thinking about my family and what was going on in my country,” said the economics major. “I didn’t want to be silent and just sit on my hands, so I started thinking, ‘What could I do?’”

That question quickly became “What can we do?” when shared with fellow members of EMU’s International Students Organization (ISO).

To Gray-Johnson’s surprise and delight, Liberian peace activist and ( ’07) learned of the fledging movement and enthusiastically agreed to headline a fundraising dinner.

at EMU’s Martin Chapel, with a seating capacity of 140, are $100, with $80 of that a tax-deductible donation to the Africa. Dinner guests will receive preferred seating at a public lecture later in the evening in Lehman Auditorium.

A freewill offering will be taken at the lecture, with an for those who cannot attend.

To those who need most help

“She is helping us raise awareness, but at the same time, we know that this money will go through her organization to those who most need it, [to] the children who have lost family members or been displaced,” Gray-Johnson said.

Gbowee, who received the 2011 prize for her work in ending Liberia’s civil war, says that her country’s decade-long peace is threatened by Ebola.

“We must face another enemy from within,” she wrote in an in Britain. “…Ebola is resurrecting old traumas from those who survived the war.”

Since the Ebola outbreak began, Gbowee’s Monrovia-based non-profit has contributed to community-based, . Donations from the EMU fundraiser will be shared by the foundation with two Liberian organizations founded by alumnae of : GSA Rock Hill Community Women in Monrovia, founded by Vaiba Flomo (CJP Grad. Cert. ’13), and Messengers of Peace, a youth outreach group founded by Gwendolyn Myers (CJP Grad. Cert. ’14).

Gbowee’s visit kicks off a series of events planned by the in March, including a color run, chapel talk, and movie showing.

Kaltuma Noorow, ISO co-president, said students have rallied to the cause, inspired first by Gray-Johnson’s willingness to share how she and her family were personally affected by the outbreak.

Wilfred Gray-Johnson, Winifred’s father, is executive director of the . During the outbreak, he and his team travelled frequently to rural areas “to work on an early warning and response mechanism to ensure that Ebola did not lead to a national conflict,” Gray-Johnson said. “While in the field, he could see firsthand what was happening.”

At later ISO planning meetings, student organizers discussed “the stigma of disease and who was getting aid and who wasn’t, which led to conversations about who needed help who wasn’t getting it. We’ve all seen that in our own countries,” said Noorow, a junior peacebuilding and development major from Kenya.

Learning from action-taking

In a year of new leadership and transition for the organization, Noorow credits ISO members for pulling together and taking on “huge responsibilities” to work on this fundraiser and the upcoming events in March, she said, adding that she’s reluctant for any one member of the group to be singled out for attention. “We’ve all learned a great deal from the process. It’s important that every member be recognized for their thoughts and all the time spent deliberating and processing.”

Her own involvement with the project has been empowering, Noorow added. “In class, we learn a lot of theory and just reading about it is great, but I’m interested in change. I’m a doer. This event shows that we students can actually do something given the platform. We never imagined it to reach this magnitude. It’s been a lot of work and a lot of time, but we’re all really excited.”

From following appropriate fundraising protocols to parsing out the correct wording for public relations releases and invitations, Gray-Johnson says the hands-on experience has taught her about the complex realities of fundraising for international causes.

“I’ve learned a lot about professionalism and credibility, about raising money for a cause,” she said. “It is important to me that the money raised here go through the right channels… [It helps that] Leymah’s giving us her credibility and that of her foundation.”

Noorow and Gray-Johnson both met Gbowee briefly when she came to campus in spring 2014 to deliver the commencement speech and celebrate the graduation of her son, Joshua Mensah, a major. They are looking forward to learning more about Gbowee’s peacebuilding experiences from the woman herself.

Gray-Johnson hopes to share the experience with her 14-year-old sister, Addy, who moved from Liberia this summer to Maryland, where she’s living with an aunt.