Rotary Peace Scholar has lived through two civil wars

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Lyttelton Braima lived through two civil wars. Now the Duke graduate student advocates peace and respect for human rights around the globe through the Duke-UNC Rotary Peace Center, one of six such centers worldwide designed to educate future leaders in the field of peace and conflict resolution.

Braima is one of 20 scholars currently pursuing master’s degrees on the Duke and UNC campuses through the peace fellows program. Hailing from 16 countries, these scholars are funded by the Rotary Foundation. Together they represent what Susan Carroll, assistant director of the center, calls “a mini United Nations—a little microcosm” of people who share an interest in national and international cooperation.

For Braima, that interest stemmed from personal hardships that led him, against all odds, to the Master of International Development Policy program at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “My father was on the opposition side [of the Sierra Leone Civil War],” he said, recalling his childhood in the country. “He was hunted, and because they were hunting my father, they were also hunting us, the little kids.”

After fleeing to Liberia, a country experiencing its own civil war, Braima took refuge in books and in knowledge. Unable to attend school until age 11 because of the rheumatoid arthritis that attacked his joints and ligaments, Braima taught himself to read by listening to his brothers and sisters spell three-letter words aloud and by memorizing the sounds. In Liberia, Braima would eventually pursue an undergraduate degree in economics.

The opportunity to apply his personal experiences of war to a mission of peace led Braima to the humanitarian agency CARE International, where he focused on justice, mediation and negotiation, and then to the World Bank’s Justice for the Poor unit in Sierra Leone. There he met Georgia Harley, the former Duke peace fellow who inspired his next goal.

“She sent me the link to Duke University, and I thought, ‘I can go for this,’” he said. “I’m grateful, because through hard work and determination, I’ve been able to come this far—as far as becoming a Rotary peace fellow, which is the best thing that has ever happened in my life.”

He is now working to complete a master’s project focused on natural resources in the places where resource exploitation leaves communities in dire poverty. Noting that Sierra Leone’s war was motivated by greed for resources, Braima said he finds himself “in the center of this depravation,” hoping to create a better Sierra Leone for his own children.

Braima also believes his peers at the peace center will be part of the solution to global conflict. Fellows at both campuses take one class together each semester and participate in seminars that feature guest speakers and introduce new frameworks for conflict resolution.

“At our center,” Carroll said, “we want to continue admitting really high quality students who represent a diverse set of opinions and experiences, and give them the space to learn from each other and from us—and we learn from them.”

Both Carroll and Braima feel positive that the Duke and UNC programs are creating global citizens who will have a lasting impact on the world.

“As [Rotary] continues to graduate Peace Fellows into the wider universe, and the networking continues to be strong among them,” Braima said, “there will come a time when there will be more peacemakers and peace-builders than those who destroy peace.”

Click here to hear Lyttelton tell his story in his own words.