Coração do perdão: Mulheres ugandesas uma vez Crianças Soldados Agora Liderem a Paz

Coração do perdão: Mulheres ugandesas uma vez Crianças Soldados Agora Liderem a Paz

Relatório Global Sisters (GRS) || Por Melanie Lidman || 31 de janeiro de 2018

Num dia ensolarado de Janeiro passado, Escola Profissional de Santa Mônica para Meninas em Gulu, Uganda, estava cheio de explosão. Mais de 5.000 pessoas cobriram cada centímetro do campus verdent, celebrando o GSemana Anual de Oração pela Paz Episcopal, que culminou em 13 de janeiro de 2017, com uma missa comemorativa.

"Que cada coração não promova a violência! Que cada boca não promova violência!" As palavras de Mons. John Baptist Odama, arcebispo de Gulu, ecoaram através da escola.

Há duas décadas, O Exército de Resistência de Joseph Kony assaltou St. Monica’s com armas disparadas, procurando crianças que poderiam coagir para serem novos soldados. Mas neste dia, em janeiro de 2017, os buracos de bala que ainda apimentam o teto das salas de aula foram contrastados com milhares de pessoas lá fora, apertando as mãos em uma oração pela paz.

Sentado entre a multidão estava o Sr. Rosemary Nyirumbe, ex-diretor da escola de Santa Mônica.

"Eu era muito observador, e uma coisa que notei foi que nenhuma mulher ou freira religiosa foi capaz de dar uma voz [durante a semana da paz]", disse Nyirumbe. "Eles nem sequer convidaram um! Quando falamos de construção da paz, eu esperava que eles dissessem: "Vamos levar algumas dessas mulheres que foram profundamente afetadas por este conflito para dar sua voz, para descobrir como eles estão envolvidos na construção da paz, quais são seus papéis."

Como resultado da semana de paz dominada pelos homens, Nyirumbe decidiu reunir algumas mulheres em Gulu para criar seu próprio fórum de paz. "Nós mulheres devemos dar uma voz para nós mesmos, por que estamos esperando por outras pessoas?", perguntou.

Marcas do Papa Francisco Dia Mundial da Paz em 1 de janeiro, oferecendo uma visão para um mundo mais pacífico no próximo ano, uma mensagem que Nyirumbe espera que as mulheres levem a peito.

Nyirumbe também está supervisionando um esforço para escrever um "curriculum de paz" específico de mulheres com sobreviventes dos anos de terror do norte de Uganda. O currículo usará exemplos e métodos da vida real que têm ajudado as mulheres em Gulu, ensinando as mulheres em outras áreas pós-conflito como encontrar paz dentro de si e dentro de suas comunidades.

Nyirumbe diz que a construção da paz requer uma abordagem de duas vertentes: as mulheres devem alcançar a independência financeira através de educação formal e treinamento de habilidades práticas, que levam a uma sensação de empoderamento bem além da sobrevivência de subsistência. Então a verdadeira cura pode começar. As mulheres devem perdoar-se a si mesmas e encontrar a calma interior antes que possam voltar para fora e começar a curar as fendas em sua sociedade, diz ela.

Buracos de bala no teto

Santa Mônica, como grande parte do norte de Uganda, ainda carrega as cicatrizes físicas dos anos de agitação. A partir de 1989, mais de 30.000 crianças, meninos e meninas, foram sequestrados no norte de Uganda e forçados a cometer atrocidades contra suas próprias aldeias na guerra de 25 anos liderada por Kony.

Kony, um profeta auto-descrito empenhado em derrubar o antigo presidente de Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, instruiu seus seguidores a sequestrar crianças tão jovens quanto 8, lavagem cerebral e forçá-los a queimar casas e estuprar e matar seus vizinhos. A violência deslocados mais de 2,5 milhões de pessoas no norte de Uganda e deixou 100.000 pessoas mortas.

As crianças chamavam de "transportadores noturnos" lotados nos corredores de St. Monica’s todas as noites, andando quilômetros todos os dias para ter um espaço seguro para dormir, escondendo-se dos sequestradores.

O Exército de Resistência do Senhor por fim se desmoronou quando as crianças sequestradas escaparam, e a guerra parou. O Tribunal Penal Internacional emitiu mandado for Kony in 2005, and the Ugandan government attempted to negotiate for peace starting in 2008. President Barack Obama sent special forces troops in 2012 to try to capture Kony in cooperation with the Ugandan army. The Department of Defense spent $780 million over six years in pursuit of Kony, though the operation ended last spring without Kony’s capture.

With his army weakened to only a few hundred fighters, Kony withdrew from northern Uganda years ago and is now believed to be in hiding in the Central African Republic, Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As the conflict ended and the kidnapped children emerged from the bush, they had to return to the same villages they had pillaged. Many communities shunned the returnees, because the children’s presence was a reminder of the things they did and people they killed, a reminder of impossible loss. The process of reconciliation, some of which uses religious leaders to conduct traditional tribal forgiveness ceremonies, is ongoing.

Girls faced an even greater challenge than boys in the process of rebuilding a life after the conflict. Many girls were forcibly “married” to rebel army commanders, and they returned to their village with young children. The girls had barely completed elementary school and were now single mothers with no education or social support because their families shunned them.

When the first waves of female returnees came back home, the Sacred Heart of Jesus sisters, who have run St. Monica’s since 1982, adapted their vocational program for young mothers. They started a nursery school and kindergarten so mothers could study, and they offered literacy programs for girls who had left school so early they could not read. They incorporated therapy into their traditional vocational training in agriculture, weaving, catering and tailoring.

More than 1,500 girls and women have graduated from the various courses, which range from three months to two years.

Nyirumbe said it was a change for the sisters to begin to accept unmarried mothers to study at the school. “But we said, ‘Where is our compassion? Where is our care? Our care is to embrace both the mother and the child,’ ” she said.

As the years passed, many St. Monica graduates have found success: They started their own stores, began to reconcile with their family and neighbors, got married, had more children. “You can see a girl 10 years ago, she was so miserable, deeply traumatized, and I see her now very beautiful and well dressed,” said Nyirumbe. “I see these people have walked through their own pain, they took ownership and they are totally transformed.”

Once Nyirumbe, who gives speeches and interviews about St. Monica’s around the world, ran into one of her graduates in Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa airport. The graduate was returning from a women’s conference in Egypt, where she was an invited speaker. “She wasn’t [formally] educated, but she’s getting that freedom to go out and talk in the name of others,” Nyirumbe said.

A group of St. Monica’s alumni started the Women’s Network, an independent group of women who offer small-scale bank loans and emotional support.

Josephine Amena, a graduate of St. Monica’s who now works at the school, is one of the members of the group and said the financial independence she gained after learning to sew has allowed her to “stand firm.”

“Sometimes I’ll be defeated, but [after my training] I won’t need to go begging to people,” she said.

Amena accompanied Nyirumbe to Washington, D.C., in 2016 for the National Prayer Breakfast and spoke to a breakout session. Instead of focusing on the difficulties, her kidnapping and survival in Kony’s army, or her family’s rejection when she returned home, Amena prefers to talk about prayer.

“I told them that God has relieved me from the bush to continue with life,” she said.

Amena relied heavily on her prayer group, made up of both ex-soldiers and civilian victims of terror, to help her find inner peace. “I always tell my fellow ladies, ‘Stand firm, there are problems all over the world; there is nowhere where people aren’t suffering. Even if I’m sleeping hungry, wherever I go, when you have that peace of heart you’re not alone,’ ” said Amena. “Peace starts from the inside, and then you have more outside.”

How do you teach peace?

“You cannot teach peace,” said Nyirumbe. “You have to lead and see it done practically. The people who suffered so much are the very ones who can become teachers of peace.”

Nyirumbe is overseeing the creation of the Transformative Peace Education curriculum, part of a partnership with the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Peace and Development. There are already many blueprints for peace education curriculums across the world. But Nyirumbe is giving the survivors, not academics, the responsibility for designing the program.

“We’re involving people who went through that past and they can tell the story using their own example,” said Nyirumbe.

One lesson they plan to include in the curriculum is a photo project where the women create three photos that represent their past, present and future. “Pictures and storytelling are very good for these women,” said Nyirumbe. “It encourages them not exactly to forget the painful past but to remember it and be able to talk about it now, and keep it as a point of reference to teach their children. To say to them, ‘This is what we went through so I will take care of you and I won’t let you go through this,’ ” she said.

Nyirumbe said she remembers hearing traditional stories from her mother, including the stories about two brothers from the Luo tribe who kept fighting. To this day, she still hears her mother’s voice echoing in her ear with the moral of that story, warning her never to take revenge. “It is women who can tell these stories effectively to the children, who can say, ‘You must break the cycle of violence.’ Children spend so much time with their mothers,” she said.

Nirumbe says many women are cowed by their culture or lack of education.

“Education will liberate these women from their servitude, from their psychological slavery, from their psychological torture and mental torture because they cannot speak about the past. I know there are many things that hold them as captives, and one of them is lack of education. Once they are able to write and speak and communicate, they are no longer living in that prison.”

Pennies and peace

The curriculum will give women around the world practical tools for emerging from trauma and conflict toward personal healing and then doing peacemaking on a larger scale.

First, there’s the practical part of making peace, which is making money. More than anything, these women know you can’t pray on an empty stomach. In conflict areas beset by widespread poverty, the first thing is to ensure the women have a way to survive.

Amena and her friends, assisted by St. Monica’s, created small groups of “table banking,” or informal micro loan groups in their communities, to set up small businesses or shops using the skills they learned at St. Monica’s.

“You should always try to save a little money, because the world is like a ball,” said Amena, and you never know which way fate will roll. “If you think, ‘people will help me out,’ that is out. You have to stand firm and say, ‘What I’m doing is not only for my benefit but also for my children.'”

Then comes the emotional work.

Amena said in the early years, after her family rejected her and she was struggling to survive as a single mom, people often told her to forget the past and move forward. “But I’ve seen these things with my own eyes,” she said.

Instead, it took years of counseling and community prayer groups to address the trauma she went through and begin to heal. There is a pattern towards healing, one Amena and her friends will try to crystalize into part of the peace curriculum.

“Forgiving people is part of it, you must have a heart of forgiveness,” she said. One aspect of that forgiveness also focuses internally.

“You must have peace of mind, peace of heart, peace of body,” said Amena. “In families where there is no peace, life will be hard. People will be quarreling all the time. When you have peace of mind, it also helps the family to live in peace.”

It, too, is important to create a community of people dedicated towards the same goal of healing.

“When life becomes hard, you can say, ‘I have no one,’ it can be hard to share or ask for help,” said Amena. “I live and work with these people, and when I’m stuck with life they understand.”

Nyirumbe and the University of Oklahoma believe that people around the world will also learn and understand, gaining insight from the lessons these women have gleaned.

“We are working with them, but we are making them become the advocates,” said Nyirumbe. “They should find other women and say, ‘If we can do this, then you can reach it, too.’ “

Uganda now hosts more than a million South Sudanese refugees, who have been through their own traumas and need the same support and assistance.

“Someone can’t come and tell you to have peace in your heart and mind,” said Amena. “It depends on the way you live with people, what you do to people, and the life you’re going through.”

As Pope Francis reminds the world to pray for peace on Jan. 1, Nyirumbe hopes the message of the women of northern Uganda will also reach forgotten corners of the world where conflicts are just beginning to fade and wounds are still fresh.

“Peace is not just the absence of war, it’s also the peace of the heart,” said Nyirumbe. “And if we can get people to start living and feeling from their heart that they’re in peace, then development can start taking place. Without this, we will work in vain.”

[Melanie Lidman is Middle East and Africa correspondent for Global Sisters Report based in Israel.]

Fonte: Relatório Global de Irmãs...