discarded munitions, kajo keji south sudan

Last week while on a quick trip to London my wife and we visited the British Museum. At the recomendation of a friend we went downstairs to see the Mozambique Tree of Life.

It is a sculpture constructed entirely of decommissioned and cut up small arms from Mozambique's civil war. The tree was made by 4 talented Mozambican artists working on a commission from the British Museum (also check out the throne of weapons). What a great use of museum money to turn such a destructive force into a symbol of life. The project is the end result of a program call Transforming Arms into Tools (TAE) where people would trade their small arms for tin sheets, farming tools and seeds. The idea was to help dry up the flood of small arms that fueled the civil war.

Seeing the tree of life was very moving. Maybe because I had returned from Northern Uganda just the day before I had to sit down and stare for a long time.

Stephen Alvarez

Comments

[Marie]

That's a really fabulous project...talk about converting swords into plowshares...

Have you ever taken a train from the Gare de L'Est in Paris? It's a relatively small, unassuming train station, especially when compared with the sprawl of Montparnasse, but most of the trains to Germany leave France from that station. On one of the walls is a memorial to the employees of the SNCF who perished rather than aid the deportation of France's Jewish population to camps in Germany. It was very, very sobering to realize that I was making a similar trip from the same train station, but I was coming back.