Wilfred Gray-Johnson Archives - �� News

Winifred Gray-Johnson and her father Wilfred share the �� and Summer Peacebuilding Institute experience

David Brennan — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 18:09:59 +0000

Like most children, Winifred Gray-Johnson didn’t pay much attention to what her father did for a living. She knew he often traveled from their home in Monrovia, Liberia, to the United States. She knew he occasionally visited a place in Virginia called ��.

But she never imagined her father’s participation in the 2009 (SPI) would so directly impact her own future. Winifred, a junior economics major, spent the summer as a community assistant at SPI – the very program that first brought her father to ��.

SPI director knows both father and daughter. “Wilfred fills up the room,” said Goldberg. “He is very outgoing … and tall. Winifred is quieter, but there is definitely a presence that they both share.”

Winifred Gray-Johnson with her father Wilfred, who works in the Liberia Peacebuilding Office of the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund Secretariat. (Courtesy photo)

As a community assistant, Winifred has offered support and information to the many international citizens who stayed on campus this summer. SPI employees accompanied participants to the grocery store, and on trips and tours over the weekend. The assistants were also available around the clock should someone need help or advice.

“They are incredibly dedicated to the participants,” said Goldberg. “They are always willing to answer questions and provide help whether they are working or supposed to be off.”

Her experience at SPI this summer has further solidified her commitment to follow in her father’s path of peacebuilding work, Winifred says. “It’s blown my mind how great everyone has been. Watching the dynamics between people from all over the world, the way they connect with each other – it makes me want to do good things.”

SPI plays ‘a critical role’

Wilfred Gray-Johnson, executive director of the (LPBO), attended SPI in 2009 and 2014.

“SPI has enormously enhanced my theoretical knowledge and application in peacebuilding, which has contributed to the level of success of the LPBO,” he said. “We are responsible for coordinating the Government of Liberia peace and reconciliation programs, and lead the development of various peace and reconciliation strategic policy frameworks. SPI, having built our skills in the areas of conflict and context analysis, as well as restorative and other forms of justice, continues to play a critical role in our work.”

Gray-Johnson has also sent members of his office to SPI every year since 2009. Participants from the LPBO include Sunny A. George, training and conflict sensitivity officer; Togar S. Tarpeh, national early warning and early response program officer; John R. Dennis, national monitor and evaluation officer; Matthew B. Kollie, who now works with the Governance Commission; and Victor Smith, who currently heads a USAID project in Liberia.

Tough transition

It wasn’t always apparent that Gray-Johnson was bound for Virginia. Soon after she graduated from high school, her mother passed away. Wanting to remain close to her father, two younger siblings and 10 extended family members, she attended a local college in Liberia for two years, after which she sat down with her father and had a long conversation.

“It seemed like the best thing, for my education,” she said. “At that point I needed to get away, to focus.”

Her father agreed. “��’s campus environment is conducive to focus and learning, par excellence,” he said. “I applaud the school for its multicultural environment that encourages respect for diversity, while remaining distinct in championing moral and ethical values.”

Winifred says her father’s familiarity with – and affection for – the campus made a hard decision a little easier. “My father loves ��. He has so many friends here,” she said. “He wasn’t afraid to leave me here on my own.”

Wilfred Gray-Johnson attended Summer Peacebuilding Institute twice; this summer his daughter Winifred, an �� student, worked as a community assistant for the program. (Courtesy photo)

While her father’s connections to the campus drew her to ��, they didn’t smooth her transition from Liberia to Virginia. The cultural transition, food and the winter weather proved the highest hurdle.

“I had a keen sense of being alone,” she emphasized. Furthering this feeling was a discomfort with certain social norms. “The hardest thing to adjust to was addressing my professors and supervisors on a first-name basis. I probably went for two months without saying their names. It just wasn’t comfortable for me.”

But frequent Skype conversations with her father helped ease her. ‘“We weren’t always close,” Gray-Johnson said. “Now we are close. We have become good friends.”

They are, however, good friends who haven’t seen each other for the past year. Though Wilfred Gray-Johnson was able to visit his daughter in Maryland last summer, where she was staying with her aunt, the two haven’t been on campus together since he dropped her off at the start of her first year. “I’d love it if he was on campus with me. Then he could introduce me to everyone he knows,” she said.

For his part, her father plans to attend an SPI session next summer. “Hopefully my daughter will be an SPI community assistant once again, and we can spend time together then,” he said.

Help for home

International Student Organization members (from left): Brenda Soka, Gee Paegar, Sun Ju Lee, Marcus Ekman, Kaltuma Noorow, Wael Gamtessa (back row), Norah Alobikan, Zoe Parakuo and Winifred Gray-Johnson. (Photo by Michael Sheeler)

Nor has Gray-Johnson been able to return to Liberia, due to the Ebola outbreak in the summer of 2014. Watching from afar while the disease threatened her family and her father worked on the front lines of the crisis in Liberia, Gray-Johnson to supply aid and raise awareness of the devastation in her home country.

The group reached out to Nobel Laureate , MA ’07 (conflict transformation), a fellow native of Liberia, and who knows and has worked with Wilfred Gray-Johnson. Winifred first met Gbowee when she was the 2014 commencement speaker (her son Joshua Mensah graduated with the class of 2014), and was eager to bring her back to campus.

To the group’s surprise, Gbowee accepted their invitation, donating her time and services to the cause, waiving even travel fees. Bolstered by Gbowee’s attendance, ISO raised over $4,000 to assist in fighting the Ebola epidemic. In addition, student participation in ISO events rose significantly over the remainder of the semester. “We had so much involvement,” Gray-Johnson said. “It was really wonderful.”

And when Liberia was declared Ebola-free earlier this summer, Gray-Johnson offered a prayer of thanks. “When I heard that, I gave a long exhale,” she said. “I was so relieved.”

Daily meetings with other staff, including Aaron Erb (foreground) and Rachel Smucker, brought some levity to the daily intensity of SPI sessions. (Photo by Michael Sheeler)

Future peacebuilder

Her summer experience has contributed to a long-term plan that she hopes one day leads back to Liberia. In the meantime, she’ll spend the next year as president of a newly invigorated International Students Organization.

Following graduation from �� in 2017, she’d like to spend a year interning or volunteering in a French-speaking country, to learn the language. And after that?

Gray-Johnson contemplates graduate school, maybe even at ��’s. That thought gives her pause, though. “My father is so well known there, I am worried the level of expectation will be too high,” she said, a momentary frown crossing her face. Then she shrugged and smiled. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Pausing, she reflected for a moment on her father’s love for SPI and ��, and his eagerness to share both with her. She nodded. “Now I see what caught his attention.”

For fight against Ebola, international students plan fundraising event with Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee

Lauren Jefferson — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 15:58:16 +0000

After spending the summer thousands of miles from her native Liberia and watching nervously from afar as Ebola swept through her country, sophomore Winifred Gray-Johnson wanted to take action when she returned to the �� campus.

She never imagined that desire, born from hours of long-distance conversation with her family members and prayer over the sufferings of fellow West Africans, would draw the attention and support of her university community – and a .

“Doing something was a way to help myself with the panic of thinking about my family and what was going on in my country,” said the economics major. “I didn’t want to be silent and just sit on my hands, so I started thinking, ‘What could I do?’”

That question quickly became “What can we do?” when shared with fellow members of ��’s International Students Organization (ISO).

To Gray-Johnson’s surprise and delight, Liberian peace activist and ( ’07) learned of the fledging movement and enthusiastically agreed to headline a fundraising dinner.

at ��’s Martin Chapel, with a seating capacity of 140, are $100, with $80 of that a tax-deductible donation to the Africa. Dinner guests will receive preferred seating at a public lecture later in the evening in Lehman Auditorium.

A freewill offering will be taken at the lecture, with an for those who cannot attend.

To those who need most help

“She is helping us raise awareness, but at the same time, we know that this money will go through her organization to those who most need it, [to] the children who have lost family members or been displaced,” Gray-Johnson said.

Gbowee, who received the 2011 prize for her work in ending Liberia’s civil war, says that her country’s decade-long peace is threatened by Ebola.

“We must face another enemy from within,” she wrote in an in Britain. “…Ebola is resurrecting old traumas from those who survived the war.”

Since the Ebola outbreak began, Gbowee’s Monrovia-based non-profit has contributed to community-based, . Donations from the �� fundraiser will be shared by the foundation with two Liberian organizations founded by alumnae of : GSA Rock Hill Community Women in Monrovia, founded by Vaiba Flomo (CJP Grad. Cert. ’13), and Messengers of Peace, a youth outreach group founded by Gwendolyn Myers (CJP Grad. Cert. ’14).

Gbowee’s visit kicks off a series of events planned by the in March, including a color run, chapel talk, and movie showing.

Kaltuma Noorow, ISO co-president, said students have rallied to the cause, inspired first by Gray-Johnson’s willingness to share how she and her family were personally affected by the outbreak.

Wilfred Gray-Johnson, Winifred’s father, is executive director of the . During the outbreak, he and his team travelled frequently to rural areas “to work on an early warning and response mechanism to ensure that Ebola did not lead to a national conflict,” Gray-Johnson said. “While in the field, he could see firsthand what was happening.”

At later ISO planning meetings, student organizers discussed “the stigma of disease and who was getting aid and who wasn’t, which led to conversations about who needed help who wasn’t getting it. We’ve all seen that in our own countries,” said Noorow, a junior peacebuilding and development major from Kenya.

Learning from action-taking

Winifred Gray-Johnson (left) and Kaltuma Noorow. (Photo by Jon Styer)

In a year of new leadership and transition for the organization, Noorow credits ISO members for pulling together and taking on “huge responsibilities” to work on this fundraiser and the upcoming events in March, she said, adding that she’s reluctant for any one member of the group to be singled out for attention. “We’ve all learned a great deal from the process. It’s important that every member be recognized for their thoughts and all the time spent deliberating and processing.”

Her own involvement with the project has been empowering, Noorow added. “In class, we learn a lot of theory and just reading about it is great, but I’m interested in change. I’m a doer. This event shows that we students can actually do something given the platform. We never imagined it to reach this magnitude. It’s been a lot of work and a lot of time, but we’re all really excited.”

From following appropriate fundraising protocols to parsing out the correct wording for public relations releases and invitations, Gray-Johnson says the hands-on experience has taught her about the complex realities of fundraising for international causes.

“I’ve learned a lot about professionalism and credibility, about raising money for a cause,” she said. “It is important to me that the money raised here go through the right channels… [It helps that] Leymah’s giving us her credibility and that of her foundation.”

Noorow and Gray-Johnson both met Gbowee briefly when she came to campus in spring 2014 to deliver the commencement speech and celebrate the graduation of her son, Joshua Mensah, a major. They are looking forward to learning more about Gbowee’s peacebuilding experiences from the woman herself.

Gray-Johnson hopes to share the experience with her 14-year-old sister, Addy, who moved from Liberia this summer to Maryland, where she’s living with an aunt.

Liberian Seeks Peace Skills at �� After War Rips Up His Family

Andrew Jenner — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 20:48:15 +0000

Togar Tarpeh had hardly started school when, in 1989, the civil war in Liberia reached the capital, Monrovia. His family fled the city before he’d finished second grade, and they didn’t know when they’d return.

Because Liberia’s educational system fell apart during the war, Tarpeh spent the rest of what should have been his elementary years working in cassava fields and rice patties in Bong County, his father’s original home. In 1994, the family was finally able to return to Monrovia, and the following year, Tarpeh re-enrolled in school as a 15-year-old third-grader.

Between fourth grade and the end of high school, Tarpeh attended a new school that opened at his family’s church. He was the oldest student in his class, and there were still plenty of obstacles ahead of him. In 1996, his father died, and in 1998, his mother and niece left Liberia for good, eventually settling in the United States with an older sister who’d moved there previously.

After his mother left, Tarpeh lived by himself. He was 18, he was in sixth grade, and, had it not been for a family in Texas that began sponsoring him, he would have had to quit school then and there. And while many of his peers took their lives in less constructive directions, Tarpeh concentrated on his studies with unusual self-discipline for a teenager living on his own.

“My parents brought me up in a way that I was already conscious about what was right and wrong at that time,” said Tarpeh, adding that his church and Christian school also strong influenced the decisions he made. “I knew that I could only succeed if I focused on my education.… Once you’re educated, things can change for you.”

Two years after Liberia’s war ended in 2003, Tarpeh finished high school and was eager to continue his education. The family in Texas agreed to continue their support, and that fall, he returned to Bong County to begin classes at Cuttington University. He graduated magna cum laude in 2009 with a major in sociology, a minor in public administration, and an advanced certificate in peace and conflict resolution.

After college, Tarpeh received additional training and practical experience in work during a one-year term with the Liberia Volunteers for Peace Program. In that role, he taught conflict resolution skills to young people, organized and led various youth volunteer efforts, and worked with local government in Bomi County on an analysis of conflict issues in that area.

Tarpeh now works on a conflict early warning and response project with the . He began working there in 2010, after earning a competitive spot in the President’s Young Professionals Program, a national effort to train upcoming Liberian leaders from the ranks of young people whose lives were severely disrupted by more than a decade of war. At the encouragement of his colleagues Nathaniel Walker, a 2010 master’s degree graduate of , and Wilfred Gray-Johnson, a former participant, Tarpeh arrived in Harrisonburg this summer to attend SPI.

“There are new skills I’ve learned here that I’ll be able to use back home,” said Tarpeh, who is now looking for funding to pursue a at ��.

His first trip to the United States also gave Tarpeh an opportunity to see his mother for the first time since she left Liberia 14 years earlier. Over Memorial Day weekend, he flew to Minneapolis, where the two reunited for several days before he returned for the remainder of his SPI session.

“We pray and hope we’ll meet again,” he said.

Togar Tarpeh invites inquiries about his situation at

Wilfred Gray-Johnson Archives - ���������� News

Winifred Gray-Johnson and her father Wilfred share the ���������� and Summer Peacebuilding Institute experience