Recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee speaks about her role in Liberian liberation

Leymah Gbowee remembers her son asking if he could have a scrap of doughnut and having to tell him she didn't have any.
In fact, they didn't have food at all. She remembers standing outside in the blazing sun with 250,000 other women protesting for peace. She remembers speaking to Charles Taylor, the oppressive warlord in Liberia, forcing him to engage in peace talks to end violence in the country. Now, she'll be able to remember winning the Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous actions that ended many human rights violations in Liberia. Originally from Liberia, Gbowee came to Harrisonburg this weekend to accept a different kind of award from Eastern Mennonite University, where she received her master's in conflict transformation in 2007.
For EMU's homecoming, Gbowee spoke about her work and received EMU's Alumnus of the Year award in front of an audience of more than 1,000. At the ceremony, Gbowee showed the 2008 documentary "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," which features her efforts. The film won a myriad of awards, including the Tribeca Film Festival Best Documentary Feature.
Gbowee received the Nobel Peace Prize for her work leading the women's movement to bring peace to Liberia after years of violence, oppression and starvation in the 1990s and 2000s.

Taylor was president of Liberia from 1997 to 2003. His regime raped and killed Liberians across the country.
In addition to the violence, the country was short on food and extremely impoverished, thanks to Taylor's habit of personally gaining money from the country's natural resources and corporations investing in Liberia. Profits from these actions would normally be put back into the country, but since Taylor was keeping money for himself, Liberians were left with nothing.
Taylor was "a man who could be smiling at you one minute, and the next, order to have you killed," said one Liberian woman in the documentary. Another Liberian woman remembers watching Taylor's followers murder her husband by slowly slicing his neck to her left and witnessing the rape of her 12-year-old daughter to her right. "You would go to bed and pray you have something different the next day," Gbowee said. Because of the uncontrolled violence and oppression in the country, Gbowee decided to do something about it. "If we allow evil, what do we tell our children in the future?" Gbowee said.
She started organizing mass movements against the violence by empowering Liberian women to stand up against Taylor. She eventually convinced 250,000 women to make a point they weren't stepping down until there was peace in the country.
For the first time in Liberia's history, Muslim and Christian women came together and worked for peace in the midst of the violence, risking their lives every day. Gbowee also decided to initiated a sex strike. Women refused to have sex with their husbands until the violence stopped.

"One way or the other, you have the power as a woman, and that power is deny the man your sex," a Liberian woman in the documentary said.The movement finally forced Taylor to listen to the concerns of women. In 2003, Gbowee directly addressed the president in front of thousands of Liberian women. She spoke of the hardships Liberians faced and the importance of putting an end to the violence, encouraging Taylor to attend peace talks. "Going to meet Taylor was the moment I lived for," Gbowee said.
Because of the massive number of women protesting for peace, Gbowee and her followers became known as General Leymah and her troops. Taylor agreed to enter peace talks. After weeks of negotiations, Taylor was eventually exiled from Liberia and the violence stopped when the United Nations peace force came in. "It's a wonderful honor to be associated with someone with a gift for mobilizing people," said Loren Swartzendruber, president of EMU. In addition to visiting EMU, Gbowee just finished a book tour in the United States for her book "Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War."
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, another 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, is currently the president of Liberia and, along with Gbowee, is working to restore justice to the country.