Women create the narrative for where a country has been and where it will go after a war, adds Vanessa Farr, an expert in women’s coalition-building in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Again, women’s traditional role as communicators and memory-keepers isn’t just useful, it is essential and underused. "Women are the transmitters of stories, but often women’s own stories get lost," Farr says. "When reparations come around, women are recast, no matter what they did. Even if they were combatants or arms smugglers, they become the wives and daughters and sisters of the men whose stories are being told."

This pattern occurred even during the highly publicized and just-completed Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa. "Women mostly told the stories of men," says Farr. "So much of the brutality was sexualized; it was not easy for the women to talk about it. There was no space for women to talk, so their stories fell off the page."

"Until a woman has told her story, she isn’t in a place to think analytically about frameworks and how it relates to policy," says Hunt. "By giving the women space over three and one-half days to talk about the death, destruction, and terror they’ve experienced, they start feeling like they are not alone and out there on their own." In other words, the colloquium aims to meld ’70s-style consciousness-raising with practical skills such as negotiating tactics, conflict resolution, strategizing, and critical thinking.

The immediate impact of the sessions will be felt November 16, when hundreds of mostly male policymakers from the United Nations, the US State Department, and the US Agency for International Development, and ambassadors from India, Russia, the Congo, and other countries come to the colloquium to listen to some of these stories themselves.

Why is this important? Well, says Hunt, "Last year I had a former assistant secretary of defense tell me, ‘I’ve never heard from people who were affected by our policies before.’ I find that appalling."

IN THE end, though, what matters is what’s accomplished. While there’s an academic, theoretical tone to the proceedings, past WWP colloquiums have delivered results. At minimum, the conferences have given women greater access to diplomatic channels. Last year, for example, three Rwandan women were appointed to the negotiating team for the Congo/Ugandan peace talks in 2000, a move that came after Hunt met with Rwandan president Paul Kagame.

WWP member Aloisea Inyumba, the executive secretary of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda, visited Harvard with Kagame in February. She is now preparing villages in Rwanda for the reintegration of 80,000 prisoners who allegedly participated in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. More than three million Hutus who fled to the Congo will return to Rwanda and its Tutsi-run government; it will be Inyumba’s job to make sure these Hutus are not massacred when they return to the very villages where they committed atrocities.

After the first WWP colloquium and policy day in 1999, members worked with Bill Wood, a deputy assistant secretary at the US State Department, to develop language on the role of women in preventing conflict. They also traveled to Japan for the G8 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in July 2000. This year, Wood advocated inclusion of the statement on women in the peace process in the G8 agenda. The United Nations and European Union, along with the foreign ministers of the G8 countries, have recently adopted measures supporting the involvement of women in formal peace-negotiation processes.

Heady stuff. And it all evolved from simple acts of sharing — and listening. Boston’s Jaleh Joubine-Khadem, for instance, told of her work in Ecuador. Born in Iran and schooled in art history, Joubine-Khadem volunteered to go to Ecuador five years ago to help with tuberculosis education. She returns to the country each year to work with indigenous villagers and to facilitate alliances between women of means and the rural poor. The eye-opening experience, with its sense of mission, is one she wants to share with others.

"Once we help them, they take the ball and run with it," says Joubine-Khadem. "Men are simply absent from many of these villages. They go to the larger cities, claiming they will earn money and send it home, but they don’t." She notes that it is the women who are left, and the women who want to learn how to protect the community’s health, how to purify the water, how to make sure there is enough to eat.

As representatives from WWP prepare to sit down with policymakers in an effort to affect change on the world stage, it’s clear that the personal is indeed the political. And if the WWP organizers have their way, the personal will shape policy — however slowly and tenaciously. Women will have a seat at the peacemaking table. And when they talk, they will be heard.

We’ll all be better off for it.

Loren King can be reached at Lking@86958@aol.com