The Answers Are There: Building Peace from the Inside Out by Libby HoffmanThis is a remarkable, super-optimistic book that I wouldn’t even have looked it based on the title, but a colleague I have great respect for not only recommended it but sent me a pre-release copy (publishing date was October 25). It’s all about forming real community in strife-torn lands, in ways that respect and honor and take direction from the indigenous perspective while helping establish resilience in very different ways than the typical First World development agencies try to work. It’s a deeply personal account that’s also elegantly written and remarkable easy to read. I often found myself gliding through 20 or 30 pages at a sitting—not typical of the books I review—even while pausing to take lots of notes.

Hoffman has been working with local peace leaders in Sierra Leone, and especially John Caulker, founder of an organization called Fambul Tok (Family Talk) that has done amazing work in helping that country move through the deep bitterness and resentment following a civil war with tens of thousands of atrocities. Starting in a single village, Hoffman, Caulker, and their colleagues have spiraled out to develop a framework that was eventually accepted by the national government—one resilient enough to help turn the country around during the Ebola epidemic, which hit Sierra Leone particularly hard.

Unlike typical western aid projects, Fambul Tok was at least as much about the process as the result—and because of that, the results have been spectacular.

Some of the key principles and insights:

• Peace must be in a local context, based holistically in local ecosystems and traditions: not just physical ecosystems, but cultural and spiritual ones
• No matter how barbarous a crime or series of crimes, reconciliation can happen if space is made for sincere repentance and apology and rebuilding, for listening to the perpetrators AND the survivors, and communally figuring out how to move forward—and sometimes, the most brutal actors can be among the strongest supporters, taking leadership to undo the damage they caused
• Successful aid/development is not a one-way street from funders and programs to passive recipients; every person has things to contribute, things to learn—and perhaps more importantly, things to unlearn
• The typical current pattern of development agencies is broken, because it doesn’t recognize that truth, attempting instead to impose a project from the outside, plan out all the details, pilot it and rapidly scale it up, rather than let one emerge organically from the needs—and strengths and capabilities—of the local community, and according to that community’s traditions and initiatives, on a timeframe that makes sense in the local culture
• Proactively building locally-rooted resilience is immediately empowering to indigenous people who have long felt unheard, unseen, and uncared about—and that resilience is a powerful way to get beyond the next crisis; rebuilding Sierra Leone after the civil war meant it was much more ready to face Ebola
• Unheard voices may belong to women or others who have not been welcomed into the circles of power—and their leadership can bring deeper changes than anyone would have anticipated before those conversations started
• Even the most dedicated leaders need to recharge and be nourished, and amazing learning and growth can come out of the spaces and rituals that enable those recharging moments

Hoffman uses a lot of powerful metaphors. Example: As early as page 10, she introduces the concept of repairing the cup (the community) before pouring water (aid) into it, and by page 218, that morphs into a series of nested bowls, spiraling up and out from the local villages through chiefdoms, districts, nations, the world, and whatever might be beyond—which she calls “the idea of wholeness.”

I could easily write another couple of thousand words, pulling out specific quotes and wisdom. But I want to honor the organic nature of Hoffman and Caulker’s work, and not to be just like those western planning and development agencies that impose their own structure on a recalcitrant village instead of coming in expecting to learn as much as they teach—and I don’t want to subject their message and methods to that subtle violence. So I will end simply by saying that anyone who really cares about peace and about ending poverty will find this book well worth the time you put into it.