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= Leymah Gbowee =

Educational and Training Background
In her education career, Leymah Gbowee graduated high school with her sister Josephine and two cousins Fernon and Napah in Monrovia, Liberia. Her high school journey consisted of her being involved in multiple public speaking spaces and was also elected to be Senator in her high school's Student Government club. Speaking at other local high school was a bog part of her extra curriculum activities and managed to maintain honor roll throughout. Gbowee aspired to be a doctor in her early years or trying figuring out what she wanted to do when she was older. Throughout her life, she and her siblings had the opportunity to attend some of Monrovia's best schools. She was involved in after school programs that was viewed as only available to children of "elite" backgrounds. Such programs includes swimming classes, Girl Scouts, and vacation bible school.

After her high school education, furthering her education was often interrupted by wars that constantly broke out and caused by Charles Taylor's armed rebels. These interruptions was caused by the Liberian Civil War that began in 1989. In March 1990, she attended classes at the University of Liberia. Throughout he attendance, she faced challenges based on the chaos caused from the institution being government-ran. She and her family was later forced to flee their homes in Monrovia multiple times, escaping to refugee camps in Ghana.

She later returned to Liberia and went back to school where she was trained to become a trauma counselor. After training, she started working with former child soldiers, who fought in the Liberian Civil War, trying to teach them about dealing with trauma and being a part of society again.

Religious Practice and Peace
Leymah Gbowee, during the Liberian Civil War used religion and spirituality as part of their techniques that helped ended the war. She expressed her usage of religious songs, traditional songs, and other songs that was sung by her women counterparts, Muslim women. After her Nobel Prize winning in 2011, she did multiple interviews, specifying the importance of her inclusion and determination in using religion as the stepping stone for achieving peace in Liberia. On October 6th, 2016, Gbowee did an interview with Harvard Divinity Schools, speaking on her topic "Women as Catalysts for Local and Global Spiritually-Engaged Movements for Sustainable Peace."

Leymah Gbowee used religion and spirituality as strategies to rally women for ending Liberia’s two civil wars. Tactics that she used such as religious and traditional songs to help create a bonding community with her women. Throughout her memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War; a Memoir, One can perceive the influence of her religious beliefs on initiatives for restoring peace in Liberia. After the second civil war broke out in 1999, increasing the already existing problem of rape and systematic brutality in Liberia, Gbowee felt the need for an inter-religious call for action. In response to this second wave of deadly conflict, Gbowee formed an inter-religious peace building coalition of Christian and Muslim women, which lead to the uproar of the Liberia Mass Action for Peace Movement. With her involvement in these powerful settings, Gbowee gained a great amount of leadership skills in which she combined with her religious background. During the LMAPM, she along with other women activists, formed multiple pray-ins, using it as a form of nonviolent protest. These pray-ins called for reconciliation and demanded concrete actions to end the war during peace talks around West Africa. Gbowee, along with many other women, such as Thelma Ekiyor, combined religion and traditional practices to define their approach to conflict transformation, peace building, and security.

Gbowee’s faith  has had a tremendous impact on her personal and professional life. Prayer is a recurrent theme in her memoir and talks. Although her memoir depicts instances of loss, pain, grief, and disappointment that made her question her faith, she indicates that prayer has been an intrinsic part of her journey in  peace building. She writes, “God is ever faithful, ever loving; he listens to our prayers.” She used prayer as a source of protection,  hope, and guidance in her activist work. Gbowee perceive Christianity to be very self-serving and crucial to the social and cultural realities of the Liberian people. Gbowee believes that for adequate results to be seen in conflict situations, especially the ones in which she was involved in, prayer had to occupy center stage. This is a central characteristic of her identity as a global activist as it is an important part of her work. Being involved in groups such as the Christian Women’s Peace Initiative (CWI), helped her to embody this part of her faith into bringing peace and teaching peace to others over the past year.

Religion influenced her approach to peace building as a type of mothering. In fact, Gbowee engages the often marginalized voices of women and young men who bear the brunt of war. Gbowee has used religion to achieve many of her activist roles throughout her traveling career and teaching in healing spaces. An important role that she and other powerful women such as Ekiyor, used religion as a support tool to mother those who have been traumatized, searching for peace within their communities, their homes, and their country. Praying had always been a part of Gbowee’s life, especially in her romantic life. Using prayer for her was a healing tool that helped her overcome her abusive relationships and protect her children. One aspect of Gbowee using religion and faith as a form of mothering is by using it as a resource to help whoever she is helping feel connected. She used her faith and beliefs, especially the bible to help them understand their shared experiences and trauma. In September 2016, Gbowee did an interview at the Harvard Divinity School on “Religion and The Practice of Peace.” She points out that Religion and spirituality were common aspects in the lives of the women who participated in the Liberian Women’s Mass Action for Peace. These spiritual encounters are what she used in her community to mobilize and empower women to take action in all aspects of their lives, whether personal, spiritual, or political. In the Harvard interview, she states:

“In our group the first thing we did was to hold three days of consultative meetings. The first day we brought only Christian women, and we went back into the Bible to find those things in the Bible that women did. We wanted to really show them (Christian women) that God had a way of using women and that there’s a place for women in turning around the history of their nations. So, we took them to the Bible, and we used women of faith as examples—Esther, Deborah, Rahab the Prostitute—who had done great things to turn the tide. We used those women as the springboard for really mobilizing women.”

Religion and the bible enabled Gbowee to convey her vision to Liberian women with different creeds. In order to build stronger communities for peace-building and promoting activism included the containment of other religious groups, which is a big part of the Women’s movement’s success. However, for Gbowee, building a stronger community amongst women that will put them at the forefront of such a major movement for the end of wars and not limiting her beliefs to just Christianity, is a tactic she encouraged. In the Harvard interview again, she states that:

“The second thing we did was to bring the Muslim women together and go through the same process, but with the Qur’an...We would talk and read some of the descriptions that talk about how to treat women better and live a nonviolent life…”

Using faith as a common denominator amongst all women, helped them to create a closer leadership bond. Gbowee came from a mixed religious and spiritual community where her parents were Christians, but their close friends and neighbors were Muslims. Using religion to bring young people together, especially for young girls and women, became a motive and a goal for Gbowee to help breed leadership and women empowerment skills through her activism, creating new leaders for the future.

Gbowee had worked in multiple healing spaces, for example, the Trauma Healing Office, where she traveled around Liberia to different communities, trying to educate people on how to deal with their traumas. She felt as if this is her calling from God. Because of the severity of the war and her trying to provide for her family, keeping a strong faith is used to help provide comfort through her work, especially since her target is towards weakened women and young boys who have been a part of the destructive process against their wills. Through her activism work in her communities in Liberia, it is fueled by her experiences at home. She is not able to mother her children the way she wanted, and to her, apart from her children, not losing faith is most important for her. People whom she had helped in both Liberia and Ghana referred to her as being “Big Mama” or “Mother of Peace.”

Religion and spirituality for Gbowee are considered essential in the peace coalition and the healing of everyone and everywhere. She believes that to overcome injustices that take over people's livelihood and the way they live their day to day lives, it calls for true believers. Being a religious person in these settings, for Gbowee, revenge is not the way to go. She recounts reading the bible and searching for different accounts that encourage peace and not an “eye for an eye.” For Gbowee, religion and its relevance helps to teach compassion and practice forgiveness which had also contributed to the success of her activism work. Working with angered people who had dealt with social and political trauma, forgiveness became a part of the healing process and education for her intended audiences. To Gbowee, forgiveness does not have a specific religious practice attached to it, but multiple. She mentions at a peace conference that, “In my life’s journey, it hasn’t been just Christians who have reached out to me. It hasn’t been just Muslims. It has been people of different faiths.”

In terms of her contributions to the conceptions of violence, she also used her faith to push emphasis on why non-violence approaches are important. This is especially prominent in the Women’s movement and her involvement while working with the Women in Peace-building Network (WIPNET). The way she used helped break apart the comfortability of violence amongst people who are vulnerable is by using vulnerable people. She used women who are also strong in faith and who have struggles with close contact with acts of violence although all were in a larger sense. Many of the women that were active with Gbowee, faced violence such as sexual, physical, emotional, mental, and physical forces. Traditional religious songs and dances were used in the non-violent, healing, and peace. These dances and songs are used as a form of storytelling.

Charity
Leymah Gbowee, in 2012, established a charity called "Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa" (GPFA). This charity continues the legacy of Gbowee encouraging peace and reconciliation among young people both in Liberia and in the United States. Her charity was created to educate young people in Liberia and help to enlighten them about the importance of peace and the empowerment of peace. The charity also allows the younger Liberian generations to have access to education and opportunities to become leaders in their country and in the world. The target is also to bring in more women along with the youths.

Her charity stands for women and youths having maximum access to educational opportunities. Through her experiences growing up in Liberia, she encourages the importance of education because having such access, lowers the chances of youths and women experiencing "perpetual poverty." GPFA provide opportunities for women and children to be able to get scholarships and school necessities that they may need. GPFA's goal os to support young people educationally who lack exposure to academics, caused by their impoverished backgrounds and financial difficulties that hinder them from education. Throughout this process, GPFA keeps members connected with each other through "annual retreats and leadership development opportunities." Since the establishment of her charity, Gbowee and her team has been in the process of funding and building technical high schools for young girls who lives in Monrovia, in which she grew up and was apart of the educational system.

This charity also made it a goal to provide leadership training opportunities that are said to be very thorough and inclusive. It creates spaces for youths and women to have and get hands on experiences, helping them to better develop their skills and their knowledge that will help them in the empowerment process and saving lives. According to the founders, GPFA makes it a mission to teach young people how to become "peace advocates, peer educators on health and human rights, and leaders in their communities and schools."

GPFA's final goal for the charity is to create a community empowerment environment for their scholars. Creating this kind of space for especially women, it allows them to participate and gain leadership characteristics that Gbowee think are necessities of successful activists. To Gbowee, these characteristics are also necessary for these women to be apart of Liberia's economic and peace encounters. Her organization stated that "To empower local communities and improve women's participation in private and public decision-making, GPFA provides spaces for women to connect with one another and develop and use the skills and knowledge needed for the journey of leadership."

GPFA allow women to widen their horizons in terms of peace building and navigating the importance of acknowledging human rights where it is usually ignored. It also allow children to have space and access to opportunities, distracting them from violent actions and traumatic exposures.

Possible Sources:


 * "Might Be Our Name"- This book speaks about her life and experiences with the war and some of her involvement in the reconciliation of Ghana and Liberia. It addresses many of the groups she created and also many that she was apart of throughout her journey. It also can be use to look into how she sees women in particular deal with drama and their processes of healing and reoccurring memory.
 * https://search.library.brandeis.edu/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=TN_bcrc362567254&context=PC&vid=BRAND&lang=en_US&search_scope=EVERYTHING&adaptor=primo_central_multiple_fe&tab=everything&query=any,contains,WIPNET&offset=0- This newspaper article gives an insight of the Women's Day Movement and some of the positives and negatives of the movement.
 * https://search.proquest.com/docview/2297100332?accountid=9703&rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo- This articles gives an insight on how Leymah and other women tried to resolve violent conflicts within their peace-building movements. She speaks about how being apart of women's groups and driving powerful grassroots movements also influenced the world to make certain changes since other countries were facing some of these violences that she and her group was trying to fight in Liberia.
 * https://rpp.hds.harvard.edu/news/women-catalysts-peace- This sources focused on the spiritual side of Leymah's involvement in the women's peace movement. She speaks about how religion and faith is one of the main factors that results ing the achievement of the movement. Conjoining Christian and Muslim women of different identities, background, faith, practices creates strength within the women.
 * https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2011/gbowee/facts/ - Information bout her life, work, nobel prizes that she had recieved, etc.
 * https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2011/gbowee/lecture/ - Information about her nobel prize speech.
 * I think that there could be some more added to the education portion of the article