We preach peace because we don’t want to be widows– Women for Peace in Nigeria
By Olaiya Tolufashe
Saturday, January 5, 2008

•Amb. Mariam Abdulahi Photo: Sun News Publishing

Living index

Even with a modest funding, the Women for Peace in Nigeria, (WOPIN), a non governmental, not-for-profit, and an apolitical organization has, in nine years of its existence, leads the pack in touching lives of more women – and children – in rural and urban Nigeria.

Ambassador Mariam Abdullahi is the founder and president, WOPIN, was born and brought up in Kaduna , and she witnessed, the Shariah crisis in Kaduna , where many lives were lost in the religious conflict.

Moved with sheer passion, Amb. Mariam Abdullahi woke up to an idea of motivating inter-religious tolerance in the state. “We felt both Muslims and Christians should come together in Nigeria , for the sake of peace and for the sake of our children,” she said.

The idea became the capital, and drive she needed to start a foundation, an organization that would first of all visit widows of slain men, and then, look after their children. As fate would have it, visiting widows opened WOPIN’s ‘eyes’ to see the need of adding another responsibility of helping women living with HIV/AIDS. Consequently, that led to taking care of orphans of children of those who lost their lives to HIV– and to the Kaduna crises.

Then, WOPIN began a vertical, and later a horizontal expansion, having functional representatives in 36 states and Abuja . The bottom line is to make a long lasing peace where conflict is probable. And with women on the harsh side of consequences of political killings, religious wars, ethnic crisis, electoral violence, HIV/AIDS stigmatizations, Amb. Abdullahi – if you ask her – would like to ameliorate sufferings of women – those living with HIV/AIDS; and children – orphans and less privileged.
In this piece, Mariam Abdullahi, among other things, wants peace in our homes, peace in our communities and peace in our government

That’s what we are for
Women for peace in Nigeria started in Kaduna after major crisis the shariah crisis in Kaduna that killed a lot of people, in 1999.
We feel that both Muslims and Christians should come together in Nigeria for the sake of peace and for the sake or our children, and their collective future. And if we don’t do that the future of our children will be miserable. Conflict and war will rub off on them. And they will think the only way to achieve what they want to achieve is to fight.

So, we willed and we did
The first thing we did was visit widows of men who were killed, and we also visited the less privileged in Kaduna . From the little we had, we gave them food clothing and so on. The basic reason we visited them was we felt they can also talk to their children so that the upbringing of their children will be better; so that their children will not participate in violence; so that they wouldn’t be used as thugs.
In 2000, we embarked on house-to-house counseling, which was the basic thing we were doing – house-to-house counseling on peace and reconciliation and trying to see how the youth can embrace peace. And we thank God we achieved a lot with that.
We also began having seminars on peace and reconciliation, conflict management, conflict resolution, dialoguing, trainings, bringing the elders, the women and the men together. There were many challenges because people say what are you talking about after killing a lot of people, you are talking about peace, but we didn’t give up.

Then, we were moved to tackle AIDS
During our house-to-house counseling, we were able to meet a lady who was very, very sick. We have to take this woman to the hospital, and she tested HIV positive. So we decided to infuse HIV/AIDS into our peace activities. So what basically we do is preach peace and HIV/AIDS prevention.
And in Kaduna , I’m proud to say, we were the first to identify and bring out women living with HIV/AIDS to publicly speak that they are HIV positive. It was difficult, then because the stigma was high. And women were hiding their status. People don’t want to come out. But then, the spread was going on. Because if you ask them, they’ll tell you they didn’t give it to themselves…and these are innocent women – very, very innocent women.
We organized a programme on counseling. We also were trained to be counselors. And we used to have weekly meetings with people living with HIV/AIDS.

And we began an orphanage
Some of those people are dead now, and we cannot abandon their children. So we had to take care of their children. There are homes that the uncles will say, “No, my wife says, ‘I can’t stay with these children because these children will come and infect my children.’” Then, they will abandon the children. We had to start going to those homes talking to them. If it were your own children, what will you do? Things like that is part of our activities.
HIV can cause a lot of conflict in homes. The man might say he doesn’t have it, so where did the wife get it from? The fact the one of the partners have HIV doesn’t mean there should be conflict in that home. But there are men that don’t even like to go for test, and once their wives are pregnant and go to hospitals, if they are tested positive, such men throw them away. The HIV issue causes a lot of conflicts in homes that’s why we decided to make it work hand in hand with peace resolution. Of course, if you don’t have peace in your home you will not be able to do anything.

Preaching peace
And we have national programme on peace and conflict resolution, where we talk about why we need peace in our societies. The last one we had was the National Programme on Violence-Free Elections. If there’s conflict, there’s war. Elections won’t be free. We will not be here talking if there’s violence everywhere. If there’s peace the election will be free and everybody will participate. But, then, the tension was so high at that time. So we felt we are mothers and we don’t want to be widows. Our children are there. We want to take care of them. The only message we could preach is peace.

WOPIN is nationwide
WOPIN is not just in the urban areas. It goes down to the grassroots; to rural areas. We have organized programmes at states and national levels. We started in Kaduna , and gradually, it is spreading to other states. We now have representatives in 36 states including Abuja . And in all the states, our activities are centered on peace and HIV/AIDS.