To Help “Broken” Communities Heal, We Must Listen and Act From the Perspective of Wholeness

For those of us working in international peacebuilding and development, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the brokenness of many of the communities where we work.? This was certainly the case for me when I first arrived at the tiny village of Daabu in a remote part of Sierra Leone’s Kailahun District. A rebel stronghold in Sierra Leone’s 11-year civil war, Daabu had been the site of intense violence and devastation and felt like a ghost town even 8 years after the war ended.

It was March of 2009. Sierra Leonean human rights advocate John Caulker and I were there to take part in the reconciliation bonfire our Fambul Tok program had organized to help the people of Daabu heal and reunite as a community after the war.??

The knowledge of what they had witnessed and experienced was overwhelming, as was the palpable reality of the division and disconnection that still paralyzed the community. In the center of Daabu, the charred ruins of a community center burned down in the war was a gaping wound, left alone and untended. Among other atrocities, neighbors had beaten and killed each other's children yet continued living side by side, ignoring and avoiding one another. That level of brokenness is nearly impossible to describe.?

Yet, throughout the evening the desire to reconcile, through talking about what happened with their community was striking, as was their will to acknowledge, apologize, and forgive . . . together.? In an especially poignant moment, one perpetrator begged the mother of a girl he had killed for forgiveness with a deep bow of repentance and submission.? She touched his bowed head, a symbol of her acceptance of his apology, and said, “Yes.”?

In the hundreds of communities I’ve visited in the years since then, I have heard over and over a vision of “justice” described not as punishment and exile of perpetrators—the line between victims and perpetrators in the war was thin and fluid—but rather as the work of making communities, and the people in them, whole again. That wholeness encompassed both victims and perpetrators, all of whom were seen as integral members of the community, the collective entity everyone wanted to see move forward and thrive. In Daabu, that meant community members began to work together again after their bonfire ceremony, meeting major development needs themselves—including rebuilding their war-destroyed community center.

Weaving this desire for wholeness into peacebuilding and development work means:

Acknowledging that, in a certain sense, the wholeness of the community exists in the present.? It is not simply a goal to attain at some future point. The concept and vision also exist in the present as a resource, even in the midst of visible brokenness and devastation.

Asking and imagining what an already whole and healthy community would do. ?For example, how it would respond to present challenges.? Then work can proceed in a way that embodies those qualities already, and we can create the structures that will sustain the community in the long term.

After the bonfire, Daabu didn’t have anything more on a literal, physical level, than before. But it regained a sense of its wholeness, of its collective identity beyond what the war had done to it, and it reclaimed its identity as a living entity serving and supporting the greater good by supporting all its residents.?

I have seen the power of this idea confirmed in village after village, year after year—including in moments when great crises, like Ebola, birthed great possibilities.? When communal hearts have been made whole, this wholeness has animated local agency and capacity, including the communal capacity to lead their own recovery.

It’s as radically simple as working from the assumption that the answers are there.