Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Leymah Gbowee Speaks at Westerville North High School

11/2/2012

Senior Melyssa Weaver presented Leymah Gbowee with a commemorative scrapbook made by Westerville North students. It proclaimed Gbowee to be an Honorary Westerville North High School Warrior.

Before her speaking engagement at Otterbein University on October 23, Leymah Gbowee, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, dropped in at Westerville North High School to talk to English students with whom she had been corresponding. Her visit was made possible thanks to the efforts of Zuulu Cooper, a LAN/WAN technician in the IT Department of Westerville City Schools, and Amy Birtcher, an English teacher at Westerville North.

Contemporary Literature students had read and studied Gbowee’s 2011 memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation at War. The book told of her traumatic upbringing in war-torn Liberia and how she found the courage to turn bitterness into action. In 2003, she helped organize and then led the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of Christian and Muslim women who sat in public protest, confronting Liberia’s ruthless president and rebel warlords, and even held a sex strike. With an army of women, Gbowee helped lead her nation to peace—in the process emerging as an international leader who changed history. For her efforts, she earned a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Yemen’s Tawakkol Karman.

Gbowee discussed her journey from hopelessness to empowerment, and took questions from the students, who were encouraged to dream of a better world. On a personal level, she talked about the power of forgiveness and asked her audience to consider how that might free them to move forward with their lives. She said she could not have achieved her success without spirituality and a network of trusted people with whom she could process her emotions. She challenged the pupils to think outside the box and broaden their world perspective by reading as much as possible, saying knowledge is power. She said she strives to be remembered as a humble person with integrity. When asked what motivated her most, she replied, “Young people. If you give up now, who is going to keep up this journey?”

Gbowee’s visit kicked off Cooper’s $1.2 million Libraries for Liberia Foundation fund drive. Libraries for Liberia is dedicated to engaging individuals and groups in the United States to collect educational materials and technologies for schools and communities in Liberia so that each child there has the opportunity to escape the bonds of poverty and hopelessness and develop intellectually and socially. For further information, please visit www.librariesforliberiafoundation.com.