Seeding Peace at the Grassroots

To Yewobnesh Dando (left, horsing around with colleague Essayas Tatak), feeding famished Ethiopians and creating a culture of peaceful change have the same end: saving lives. Photo: Dan Sadowsky/Mercy Corps

When you begin your humanitarian career by tackling one of the 20th century's biggest food crises, you risk feeling let down by the work that follows, no matter how lofty or well-intentioned.

Not so for Yewobnesh Dando of Mercy Corps. Two decades after responding to Ethiopia's crippling 1984-85 famine, she continues to perform what she considers to be life-saving work in her home country. In the southern part of Ethiopia, where tribe-based land boundaries and a scarcity of arable land threaten peaceful progress, Yewobnesh is helping train local communities how to solve their disputes before they escalate into violent clashes.

Mercy Corps is training a cross-section of residents and government leaders in 10 woredas, the Ethiopian equivalent of a township, on how to identify, analyze and resolve conflict. Each of the areas simmers with tension resulting from one thing or another, whether it's scarce water resources, disputed political borders or religious differences.

Ethiopia has a long history of settling disputes with weapons rather than words, and Yewobnesh sees that legacy in the places where she works: burned villages, traumatized and orphaned children, senseless killings.

But in equipping everyday citizens with conflict-resolution skills, Mercy Corps is trying to help Ethiopians chart a more peaceful course for their country. Along with her colleagues from Mercy Corps and Agri-Service Ethiopia, the agency's local partner, Yewobnesh identifies key community stakeholders, touches base with government bureaus, organizes workshops and teaches part of the weeklong conflict-resolution sessions. The program is supported by funding from USAID.

Yewobnesh was fresh out of college when she enlisted in Ethiopia's historic famine-relief effort in 1984. As a nutritionist in a 10,000-person relief camp rampant with typhoid and typhus, she distributed porridge and high-energy biscuits and witnessed firsthand the horror of mass starvation. One morning, she helped dig a mass grave for 40 people who had died overnight. "Everyone was serving the farmers with tears," she says. "I hated to work there, but it was a must."

After the famine, Yewobnesh helped families return to homes they had liquidated and fled during the drought. It wasn't easy. Even after reequipping them with oxen, tools and seeds, the farmers needed a push to resume their livelihood, Yewobnesh says. "Farming is not an easy job, so once they got relief, they didn't want to go back to it."

As farming yields returned, Yewobnesh continued to aid Ethiopia's poor. One program she ran, sponsored by the World Bank, helped women find self-employment through activities such as selling goat milk and making shiro, a popular bean-based sauce eaten with Ethiopia's staple food, injera.

She joined Mercy Corps shortly after its conflict prevention and resolution project kicked off in February.

Yewobnesh isn't alone in her hope that teaching people how to resolve local conflicts will spread, giving Ethiopians the skills and the confidence to tackle the nation's bigger problems. With Ethiopia and Eritrea still arguing over the location of their common border, and internal tempers running hot over disputed national elections in May, disseminating the tools of peaceful change "is vital at this stage in the country's history," Yewobnesh says. "So this is an ideal program. Peace means everything."