Shalom: Educating for Peace

Shalom’s Director, Jean de Dieu, was eager for us to get immediately to work when I arrived. So at 8:30 am, I was halfway through a breakfast of bread and jam and Rwandan tea (1 part black tea, 99 parts warm fresh cow milk) when I saw him through the lacy curtains arriving to the large porch of the house where I am staying, unpacking his computer and other work papers. I could see he was cheerful to begin our labors together. I was jetlagged.

I joined him on the porch where we were shaded from the midmorning sun and able to enjoy the breeze and birdsong. Since we have already been collaborating for the past few months on writing grants and preparing trainings, the conversation was easy. The plan for the morning was to orient me to the work, vision and mission of Shalom – or in other words, the work, vision and mission of Jean de Dieu. Here I have tried to put together some of the story he told me:

Jean de Dieu was a young, married man with a child on the way, when he felt a call - (a word he accented from here on out in the conversation by rubbing his chest with his right hand and grimacing his face as though the “call” were a physical pain) – this call was to study the paths of peace and nonviolence. And while issues of peace and nonviolence were not completely new for this young Christian (as an undergrad in psychology, Jean had been required to do short military training, but instead wrote a letter to the authorities expressing his dissent with the obligation. As he justified it to me: “When they train people in the army here, they teach people that the gun is their mother, their father, their everything. I didn’t understand the idea behind learning to use guns because we don’t have animals to kill. And so teaching me how to use a gun was teaching me how to kill someone.”), it was certainly not what he or his sweet, pregnant wife had expected for their lives. He chuckled a little to recall that this new call to study peace was paradoxically a “conflict” – “It was my first time to have a conflict such as that, I cannot resolve it. My mind said no to studying conflict resolution, but my heart said quickly.”

As Jean began to investigate possibilities to study this call, he found a distance-learning university in South Africa that would offer 2 years of coursework. He contacted one of the professors of the program who told Jean to send in his materials as soon as possible to begin the following semester. Jean did this, but told me, his application lacked so many things to be complete, among those - visa paperwork and the $50 registration fee. A week later, Jean was advised that he had been accepted and that the professor who had encouraged him to apply was going to cover his registration costs as well as his 2^nd term of study. But Jean had to cover the first term – which, in addition to the plane fare to get to South Africa, was the money that he and his wife had saved to build their home. Plus, the initial meetings for the Masters in Peace and Conflict Resolution were set to begin on January 25^th – meetings that Jean really needed to be present for.

But Jean’s first son, Shema, was scheduled to be born January 27. It was a hard time for Jean and his wife as they discerned what was important to them at this juncture. Jean told me that he asked his wife: “My dear Grace, I ask you just one thing. Just listen to me and understand me. I do not have justification. You have questions. I do not have answers.”

Apparently dear Grace did listen and understand Jean and on January 23^rd the “first miracle” (in Jean’s words) took place – his son was born. He was named Shema which means pride. And on the 25^th, Papa Shema (parents become known by the name of their first born) kissed Mama Shema and baby Shema goodbye and boarded a plane to South Africa.

Two years later Jean de Dieu had a Masters degree in Peace and Conflict Resolution. He had studied from home, taking care of Shema and his younger brother Jabo (“Conviction”) while dear Grace worked a few hours from home. And now he was ready for Shalom. Together with a fellow student from the MA program, Jean began taking the slow, but eager steps towards developing a peace education model in Rwanda. The first year of Shalom was dedicated to strategic planning. The second year to program development and design. In Rwanda there is a lot of respect and appreciation for a well-designed program and many entrepreneurs and professionals here have told me that before embarking on their projects, they spent much time making sure it was right and good. Now, in his third year with Shalom, Jean tells me he is ready. However, there are many complications still. First, he is a man with a family and he feels a lot of pressure from others to use his Masters degree to work with one of the big national or international organizations here in Kigali. Also, there is the issue of money. At this point donations to Shalom solely cover operating costs and Jean de Dieu goes without a salary. (I would find out over the course of the week what this lack of funding really means for an organization as ambitious as Shalom: each day we walk 10 minutes and take two crowded chicken buses (yes, I can call them that because there really are chickens), to get to the center of town, whereas the other day, a pickup truck owned by the international NGO World Vision took us into town in less than 15 minutes.) But despite the inconveniences of not having deep pockets at this point in his career, Jean tells me, “Mary, money will come. First the ideas must be there and then money will come.”

As the morning turned into midday, Jean began to conclude his story. Now you understand, he said to me, a little about the vision, the mission and the struggle behind Shalom. He closed his eyes and rubbed his chest and then looking out over the valley below, said to me, “My dream was to find myself in community, educating people for peace.”

And that is where I have found him.