Building Stronger Communities Through Social Peace

Many efforts have been made towards building an enduring peace in this war-ravaged country. These efforts to build peace have not provided political stability and security and the leaders of the country have fallen short of dealing with the economic, social, and psycho-social issues and even the community had a symbolic role in the peace process during the last two decades and all efforts failed peace and could not ceasefires the war.

WISE Organization through the TDH funding have a strong recognized role of community to play in the social peace, this role involves promoting the implementation of workshops to enhance the capacity of the community both females and males to get passionate for awareness-raising and move forward to solve social conflict and gain the knowledge to over-come challenging stigmatizing portrayals of people struggling with internal conflict and ensuring that social peace is must be in high on the community agenda.  

Ms. Mozhgan Sorkhabi is the head of a female public school in Badghis province and she was one of the third-round workshops of peace and conflict re-solution participants.

She says that before participating in this program, I did not have any knowledge or understanding about resolving conflicts, and I did not know, as a leader and school what to do to prevent conflict to not happen in schools between teachers. Even sometimes unwanted I cause some of the conflicts and I had no knowledge to control and prevent the conflicts and even sometimes the level of conflict in our school was so high that I become disappointed to be the leader of the school.

Teacher with the teacher, a student with the student, a teacher with student and vice versa, and even with the school attendant, they were arguing over the smallest details and sometimes causing students to break their arms and legs, I was frustrated. What should I do? I even wanted to resign several times because I thought that I cannot be a good leader to over-come such challenges.

I did not know about the causes and effects of the conflict, nor did I know about the skills and methods of resolving the conflict, and sometimes I refer to the Department of Education to find a solution. Also, should ask the local elders to resolve the dispute.

Until I was informed through one of our teachers the WISE Organization has “Peacebuilding & Conflict Resolution programs. Despite this, I hesitant to participate or not and I was thinking that the contents of the program may not be useful to enable me to solve the school problems.

I was a little skeptical, but when I asked the previous participants of the program, everyone was satisfied and they praised this program. Therefore, when I participated, I learned all the skills of resolving conflicts, and now I understand why conflicts occur in the school, and its level was so high.

What are the causes of conflict? What traces are left? How can I resolve disputes to make peace? Most importantly, before participating in this program, our school did not respect human rights and violence against children, and I mostly to suppress and calm down. I used to beat children and I did not prevent teachers from beating students, but now, after participating in this program, I have realized how harmful child beating is both from the holy religion of Islam and from a psychological point of view. And they forbade us from doing this ugly thing and they said what harms and adverse effects it has on children.

Now, no child is beaten in our school and there is no conflict. I have resolved to make peace, and I have passed on all the methods and skills and what I have learned from this program to my teachers, students, locals, and family, and I have advised everyone to go to the Wise office. And take advantage of this great and useful program. Now I understand that time has not been wasted. This program was really worth the time and sharing. Thankfully, our lives have changed a lot since joining this program, and we can get on with our lives calmly and easily, and we no longer have to go to the government, and spend our time arguing and going to the government and waiting for hours behind the gate. Let’s make a waste, now we all understand that living in peace is really beautiful.

I want to thank the WISE Organization and the funder of this project that launched this program, hoping for the success of all those involved in this program.

Date: October 11, 2020