December 8 and 9 – Nairobi, Kenya

This is a travel day. Another 5 a.m. departure, this time for Durban airport where we board a short flight to Johannesburg and another, longer one to Nairobi. Our South African airline flights have been great, despite the one flight attendant who said, "We are the best airline. We never crash." Gulp! En route, we view vast tracts of red and yellow desert from above and manage to spot the snow-topped peak of Kilimanjaro through the clouds.

Arrival in Nairobi on Saturday afternoon means no chance to confirm our meetings until Monday morning. No voice mail or cell phones here, it seems. We spend Sunday writing and transmitting, looking forward to meeting Kenyan and Sudanese women over the next few days.

December 10 – Nairobi, Kenya

A frustrating Monday, spent on the telephone trying to contact the women we plan to interview. Long waits for return calls that don't come, except from Shiphrah Gichaga at FAWE, the women's education group who are organizing a trip into Masai country where they run a boarding school for girls, including Masai girls who have fled arranged marriages. Finally, we also make contact with Anisia K. Achieng who heads the Sudanese Women's Voice for Peace (SWVP) and arrange an early morning meeting.

With all the warnings not to go out except without jewelry or purses, and dire stories about people being robbed even just outside the hotel, we decide to stay in until our interviews begin. We can't help feeling a bit trapped, although poolside around our hotel and Internet access in the business centre make things easier. Judging from the crowds in the hotel, a lot of business is being done in Kenya, and the cell phone is in great evidence here.

December 11 – Nairobi, Kenya

We set off this morning with a driver, a young fellow named Andrew who does safari tours when he's not ferrying people around the city. Andrew drives us through town to the Sudanese Women's Voice for Peace offices. Nairobi is a bustling, not particularly pretty city with massive unemployment and no assistance for the poor, so many live in dire poverty. The Wetlands area, where their offices are housed, is home to many United Nations offices.

We spend time with Anisia, a tall, slender woman who impresses us with her quiet resolve and deep understanding of the steps needed to build peace in the Sudan. They began in 1994 with a dozen women who had been forced to escape the terrible slaughter . Today, 500 women spread the peace-building message taught by SWVP. An orphan brought up and educated by missionaries, Anisia, 35, made a perilous escape from the Sudan in 1993 and was separated from her two small children for three years. Women, she tells us, are mothers to all. They are the ones who can ask the right questions, can convey the truth that everyone knows, which is that we are all sisters, and we all want peace.

She has travelled extensively throughout Africa, helped by UNIFEM and other NGOs, and has gone into the countryside the do workshops in peace and storytelling. Many photographs are tacked to the walls showing the work that has been done. But peace-building is a dangerous business. She points to one photograph of herself with about a dozen workers in the countryside on the border of Sudan and Uganda. They were a strong, educated group, she says. On their next trip, without her, eight of them were killed by Ugandan rebels, who threw a grenade into their car. "These are the people," she says, "who really deserve the peace prize."

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