Nailed to the Doorframe: How Past Experiences Inspired Change
The gates slammed behind us and we were all locked in San Pedro Prison in La Paz, Bolivia. We were surrounded by what seemed to be a tightly packed neighborhood complete with small grocery stores, seamstress shops, and Coca Cola signs. I looked down at my forearm revealing illegible permanent sharpie writing in Spanish that I had been haphazardly informed would be my way out when it was ready to leave. I thought wryly to myself, “let's not rub this off in the next few hours.” I also noted that there were what seemed to be as many children in the prison as there were adults. I was later informed that children were incarcerated with their parents as they have nowhere else to live. “The children are paying the price of the parent’s crimes.”
I simply could not get that statement out of my head. It stuck with me for a week after we returned to the United States and I wound up typing the statement into Google to reveal more about this notion. What the search returned would change the course of my life forever. Article after article described children in war zones who by no choice of their own were suffering due to the decisions that adults in their countries were making. After researching more about the most war-torn places on Earth, I nailed a piece of notebook paper to my doorframe so that I would see it every day as I worked to finish my undergraduate studies at the University of Arkansas.
When the time came, I asked my spiritual mentor, “how should I begin?” His response was unreserved and without alternative, “You can do nothing if you are ignorant about the situations abroad. You need first-hand knowledge about people if you are going to respond to their needs in any productive way…so leave, get out of here and go there.” This began an 8-year journey of mine, living in and researching the world’s war zones. My search for this knowledge has taken me to Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Colombia, Lebanon, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Around year three, I started to notice a pattern. Living in Colombia, I learned that there existed at the time something like 60 organizations working to alleviate the needs of street children in Bogota alone. I wondered: If so much effort was being exerted, why there was any need at all remaining? What I learned was that there was, for many of the organizations, a complete lack of sustainability or reproducibility mechanisms within the organizations. The more I traveled the world, the more I was able to understand just how deep a problem this was for many of the NGOs working in war-torn countries worldwide.
Armed with these experiences, the mission of ForgottenSong, the NGO I subsequently founded, focuses on sustainable, reproducible, native-led business initiatives which aim to make a long term-impact on the vulnerable populations of war-torn countries. We have since started projects in Iraq, Uganda, and Burundi and are about to launch in the D.R.C. Our initial project in Kampala, Uganda, a poultry project comprising 1000 chickens, has since been replicated 75 times. In Burundi, we have seen an almost 7-fold growth on our initial financial investment after only 14 months and sustainability throughout the current civil unrest.
After several years of work, I began to understand just how important higher education was going to be in furthering my options and in sharpening my skills, and I knew that I needed to balance my life experience with academic knowledge to be as effective as I can be. After one year as an Anthropology Master’s student, I knew that S-CAR was going to be the place that would foster continued growth and allow me to continue to pursue my passions. After learning more about the ways that S-CAR prepares academics and practitioners for future work, I saw my horizons quickly expanding.
I am not yet sure where I want to go in the field of conflict analysis and resolution, but my goal is always to remember the sheet of notebook paper nailed to my doorframe and to grow ForgottenSong until we have a presence in every war-torn country in the world…We’ll see what happens.