Most of us missed an opportunity to hear a future Nobel Peace Prize winner speak in Spokane in July. Liberia’s Leymah Gbowee served as the keynote speaker for a national Lutheran women’s gathering at the Spokane Convention Center.

In October, it was announced that Gbowee had won the prize, together with Liberia’s first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Tawakul Karman of Yemen. Gbowee was honored for bringing together Christian and Muslim women for the first time in Liberia to protest the horrific war that persisted for 14 years under President Charles Taylor. In 2003, it was the protests of these women that helped to finally bring peace to Liberia.

Gbowee flew to Spokane this summer to inspire American women to unite in similar actions against the violence and pain in our own communities. “The reality of today is our world is upside down,” she told the Spokane audience, using the language of faith. “Evil is now good. Good is now evil.”

In Liberia, war began in 1989, when Gbowee was 17. It left her and her four children hungry and fleeing to a refugee camp in Ghana. Their neighbors were slaughtered. She watched her country descend into a horrifying darkness where young boys were taken from their mothers, drugged, given AK-47s and taught to rape and murder.

Her story was told in a documentary called “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.” In that film, posted at PBS.org, she describes a “crazy dream” in which she was told to get the women of her Lutheran church together to pray for peace. She wound up rallying thousands of women to join together in nonviolent demonstrations.

Wearing white T-shirts and white head wraps, they protested daily in an outdoor fish market in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. The women chanted, prayed and sang. They demanded to meet with Taylor, even though he was known for murdering his enemies.

Finally, Gbowee was allowed to share her message with Taylor. She told him the women of Liberia were tired of war. “We are tired of running,” she said. “We are tired of begging for bulgur wheat. We are tired of our children being raped.”

The warring factions were forced into meeting for peace talks in Ghana. When these talks appeared to be breaking down, Gbowee and 200 women looped arms to prevent the men from leaving.

In a moment of exasperation, Gbowee recalled a powerful West African curse. There it’s seen as terribly bad luck to watch a married or elderly woman remove her clothing in public.

And that’s just what she threatened. Gbowee took off her hair tie and said “I’m going to strip naked.”

The men, many of them from indigenous backgrounds ingrained with the fear of this curse, resumed the peace talks. Two weeks later, a peace treaty’s terms were announced, and Taylor went into exile in Nigeria.

Gbowee is known as a dramatic activist and a shrewd strategist. At one point, she helped the country’s women stage a sex strike. All the men of the country, she said, were perpetrators of the violence, whether by commission or omission.

Since the war ended in Liberia, Gbowee has worked on peace issues elsewhere in Africa. She and her six children live in Ghana, where she is the executive director of Women, Peace and Security Network Africa.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told PBS recently that in today’s wars, which lack front lines, women and children suffer the most. The State Department has embraced the goal of human security, the idea that everyone deserves to live free from violence in their own neighborhoods. It’s the same vision that propelled Leymah Gbowee.

Gbowee had a message for American women that July day in Spokane.

“Even in communities that are stable, like the U.S., violence against women has increased,” she told the Women of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. The video is posted on the ELCA website. “The objectification of our daughters in the media as a sex object is appalling. Drug lords and gang members have taken over some of our communities.”

Reclaiming a space for peace, for nonviolence and for safety is not just the role of African activists, Gbowee said. It should be the work of women everywhere.

In a city with its own heart of darkness, its own divisions and violence and rape, there’s a certain irony that it takes a woman from Liberia to call us to confront it.

“Rise up,” Gbowee said at the end of her speech. “Reclaim your space and let good overcome evil.”

Even here in the Lilac City.