cLyttelton 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.