Peace Warriors

In the weekend the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to three remarkable women. This awarding of the prize to three people whose names we don't recognize may be unusual but when we hear their stories it makes a lot more sense that giving it to President Obama for reasons which escaped me at the time and even more so since he has played up his "kill the bad guys" image.

One of the three is a Liberian woman, Leymah Gbowee. Her story is remarkable. Raised in a Christian family she was traumatized by the civil war in her country, seeing loved ones murdered. During a decade as a refugee her faith evaporated.

She eventually went back to the church but had little respect for the male leaders who degraded women. She was inspired by peace activists including Martin Luther King and Gandhi, whose works she read. In 2002 she had a dream in which she was commanded "gather the women to pray for peace." She did, bringing together twenty women to pray once a week. This was the beginning of what came to be called Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. Now there are thousands of women, Muslims and Christians, rural and urban, educated and uneducated.

The civil war continued to grip the country but Gbowee and her followers pressed for peace with great courage. At one point security officers moved in to arrest Gbowee and others and they responed by stripping off their clothes, which confounded the men who grew up in a culture where it is a curse to see a naked married woman. The story is told in what is apparently a moving documentary called Pray the Devil Back to Hell.

This was the beginning of a fragile peace and the eventual election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as president of Liberia -- the first woman president of an African country. Sirleaf, Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen were awarded the Peace Prize "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work".

Were you aware of the story of these women? Did you notice that this peace award has not received the attention of those in previous years? Inspiring?