The 31-year-old Zimbabwean, who was awarded a to attend ˛ÝÝ®ÉçÇř’s , is the program officer for (YETT). YETT partners with over 33 youth civil society organizations, each with a different focus such as women’s health, environmental protection and education. YETT builds the capacity of youth leaders from these organizations to advocate peacefully for their rights.

A history of violence, instability

Nonviolent advocacy is a tough goal in a country that has been shaped by long-term economic instability and a culture of violence as exemplified by a waged against the Ndebele people of western Zimbabwe in the 1980s. Current president Robert Mugabe was the prime minister during this period.

Election cycles from 1980 to 2013 also witnessed varying levels of election-related violence in which young people were involved as both the perpetrators and victims of this violence. Use of force in dealing with those holding “divergent views” and the utilization of young people to perpetrate that violence was recorded in a e issued by the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum.

In 2001, Mugabe established the Youth National Training Service as “the vehicle for youth empowerment, social transformation and a catalyst for the transformation of national values,” according to a government website. In reality, the camps, run by liberation fighters loyal to Mugabe, produced “state-sponsored youth gangs,” according to a . The youth militia would to support the ruling party right before an election. The camps were supposedly suspended in 2007, according to an , but news services reported as late as 2011 that the camps never fully disbanded and .

The ongoing economic and political instability since the early 1980s also resulted in mass emigration. The emigration weakened social structures, including most importantly the social network provided by extended families, traditionally the providers of support and conflict mediation.

“Violence starts with conflict within families, then spreads to conflict with other tribes and communities and then manifests at the national level,” Machiwana says. For example, a soccer match between the Highlanders and the Dynamos can end up being tribalised as a conflict between the Ndebele and Shona peoples.

“Hence, when you see young people being violent within the home, in the community and at the national level, one should not just see the violence in itself,” Machiwana said “It is in essence an expression of unmet needs of the youth which have been allowed to build up and have reached boiling point. ”

Helping youth talk together

Machiwana’s first job, a volunteer position with Youth Dialogue Zimbabwe, was to facilitate conversations between youths with different political ideologies. Within these youth groups were some who had been victims of political violence and their victimizers. The youth, who often came from poorly educated, rural families, had few other prospects in the crippled Zimbabwean economy and returned home after their time in the National Youth Service camps to live side-by-side with those they had victimized.

“We didn’t even use the word peace in the beginning,” Machiwana said. Rather he organized sporting events and established youth-led market gardening initiatives, often furthering his strategic goals by relying on neutral church leaders who were also using religion and faith as a tool for peacebuilding within their communities.

“Zimbabweans love sports, particularly soccer,” he said. “So soccer matches were a good place to draw people together to get them used to each other again. As they got more comfortable being around one another, it was easier for them to coexist and open up to more direct dialogue.”

In 2013, Machiwana joined YETT. In his role as program officer, Machiwana says he tries “to promote the culture of conflict transformation” through facilitating Trainer of Trainer (TOT) trainings. Participants learn to define and analyze conflict, as well as strategies for dealing with it and how to advocate nonviolently. He then helps participants create plans for the implementation of nonviolent advocacy within their communities. Throughout the year, he visits participants to see how well the plan is working, provide feedback, and report back to YETT.

“It is much more effective to train trainers who then return to their own tribe or community where they speak the language, know the people and are familiar with the culture, than for me to come in and try to do the same thing,” said Machiwana. (Zimbabwe has 16 official languages and two major ethnic groups). “We have empowered them with knowledge and skills to go back to their own communities and teach others.”

Pushing politicians to pay attention to youth issues

In a way, YETT is attempting to restructure the social gap left by broken families. But Machiwana also wants to help focus efforts on change at a higher level. He hopes that the youth will also use their new skills to hold policymakers accountable at both the local level and national level to enforce Zimbabwe’s two-year-old constitution.

When Machiwana isn’t conducting trainings, he tries to set up meetings between policy makers and youth representatives. “We want these members of policymakers in their various capacities to treat youth issues with the urgency and seriousness they deserve,” he said. “A lot of times when we elect someone to parliament, they think they are too senior to come back and actually hear what the young people want, but how can you represent us if you don’t know what is important to us?”

Machiwana said young people, whom his organization defines as ages 16-35, want jobs, education and access to services and resources such as clean drinking water. By empowering young people to speak out and hold policymakers accountable nonviolently, he hopes a new strong coalition will help to break the culture of violence and create true change.

L. to r.: Jacinta Makokha, Kenya; Alice Warigia Hinga, Kenya; and Belinda Gumbo, Zimbabwe, enjoy a free moment between SPI classes. Photo by Jim Bishop

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

In Zimbabwe, administrator and trainer Belinda Gumbo works with the Habakkuk Trust’s Local Level Capacity Building Program, training communities in participatory citizenship. Funded by agencies including the 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.

Although this process is structurally modern, accompanied by position papers, it aims at restoring the strengths traditional African communities had before colonialism.

Restoring communities hard work

Conditions entail tough compromises. In regions hardest-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: “We try to find that balance of what is work and what is abuse.” 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.

In the wake of Zimbabwe’s disputed 2008 election, Gumbo says, “We feel powerless.” Yet she notes a small community such as hers, working for clean water in a dry area, may find its struggles not unique, and join with nearby villages to get a pipeline built. Such grass-roots empowerment may plant seeds for better governance.

At SPI, Gumbo studied with fellow-peacebuilders from around the world in the courses “Conflict Sensitive Development,” “Restorative Justice” and “STAR: Breaking Cycles of Violence, Building Healthy Communities.”

“For me it’s exciting because of the transitions we are in,” she says.

Peacebuilding in Africa’s Great Lakes region

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.

Here is how Makokha (also an administrator and trainer) 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,” Makokha points out.

The Quaker-based Ministry for Peace and Reconciliation serves Great Lakes communities and neighbors arriving home after war, mediating such crises as a husband bringing home a new wife or a family returning to find strangers occupying its home.

Discussion and creativity important tools

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. Another, the American Jewish World Service, supports Congolese war survivors in creative expressions such as theater.

SPI’s 2009 session had many Kenyan guests. Makokha – whose high-school classmates included President Obama’s Kenyan half-sister, Auma – observed that among her countrymen, “People had lost trust in democracy.” Following America’s historic election, she began hearing Kenyans say, “See? Democracy can work.”

Alice Warigia Hinga, also from Kenya, hopes to return for future SPI sessions and earn a master’s 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. They opened a church “comprised of the children” – a school.

“We had 60 children within three months,” Warigia recalls. The school serves meals, and has added a grade each year. The first children are now starting high school.

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

Warigia has helped bring the school’s mothers together. These women – often single teenagers – meet to learn about family planning and HIV and receive testing and counseling.

Warigia, who also works as program officer for the UK Department for International Development, finds inspiration for children’s education in Luke 2:52: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man.”

Chris Edwards is a freelance writer living in Harrisonburg.

by Jeff Mellott, Daily News-Record

Securing a student visa to study in the United States already was getting harder by the time foreign terrorists flew jet airliners into the World Trade Center in September 2001.

The now-even-tougher visa stance by the U.S. government is contributing to a decline in foreign students studying in this country.

Anne Nyambura, 35, of Kenya and Andile Dube, 21, of Zimbabwe have both noticed the trend.

They both reported little trouble in getting visas to study at ˛ÝÝ®ÉçÇř, but the pair knew of others who were not as fortunate. “For most, it is not easy at all to get all the paperwork that you need to get into this country,” Dube said.

Some of Nyambura