Angola - De-Mining Minds

“Each time, they ask me where I am from… as if the answer will bring some order into the chaos of their experiences.”

They are some of the more than three million Angolans displaced by years of civil war, living in camps with minimal access to the basics: food, water, shelter, sanitation and health care.

“I’m Angolan. That’s what I tell them.”

Paulo works with Angola’s internally displaced people from both sides – or no side – to rebuild their lives using non-violent strategies. He is a conflict resolution trainer with the Centre for Common Ground in Luanda. For Paulo, conflict resolution is a practical response to his own experiences of war.

Paulo’s parents divorced when he was seven. When he was 12, his mother died. When Paulo’s half-brothers were ten and 12 years old, they disappeared. They had become child soldiers. “They had to walk for days in the rain, carrying weapons and supplies through the bush. They worked without eating and slept under the open sky, in the rain and cold. They saw everything. Their innocence was lost.”

Three years later, Paulo’s aunt found his brothers. “At that time, my brothers were 13 and 15 years old. The one that was 15 was very small for his age – like a six year old. They were ill and weak. It was frightening. A few months after my aunt brought them back to Luanda, the oldest one got really crazy. He walked the streets – aimless, directionless, confused, upset, often yelling and speaking nonsense. We took him to the hospital for treatment. The diagnoses covered everything from sleeping sickness to severe trauma. The other brother was also not well and together they sunk deeper and deeper. We did everything we could, but nothing saved them. They both died in the beginning of 1998.”

At the end of the year, UNITA and the government plunged back into war. Paulo, then 24, was in bad shape. Any lingering sense of hope had been knocked out of him.

“I had been running since I was a child. It was a choice: either I went to school, got drafted, served in the military and most likely came back as an amputee, or I quit trying to have a normal life. When the war started again after my brothers died, I thought my only chance was to run.”

The urge to escape his downward-spiraling life in Angola and build something new led Paulo to Canada, where he found a job and learned English. “Maybe it gave me the break I needed. But it didn’t help me face my pain. I realized that was the one thing from which I couldn’t run. My pain was still there and there was nothing Canada could do about it. That country didn’t need me, but maybe my own did.”

Paulo returned to Angola in 2000, in the crux of war.

As part of the Centre for Common Ground team, Paulo finally stopped running. “At first it was just a job. But as I became more and more exposed to conflict resolution through training and practical work in the camps, I began to realize that I could turn my pain into something productive. I needed to. And I could tell from the interaction we had with people in the camps that they needed it, too.”

Forgiveness is a complicated idea. Even as a conflict resolution professional, Paulo admits that he cannot quite grasp it. “I know that forgiveness isn’t forgetting. No one who has lived in Angola can forget what has happened here. We have at least five hundred years of pain to get on top of.

“There are still so many explosions waiting to happen. We have to de-mine people’s minds as well as our land. To do that, we have to know how and where the mines have been laid and have the skill to deactivate the triggers.”

by Gillian Huebner