A poem for her

 Fortunate is she who knows how to collect the sun and the wind in the clothes of her beloved.

Who wakes and peers at the dawn and wonders what the day holds… whether a rainstorm

hides out somewhere in the midday and whether the morning sun will be enough.

Whose hands move under cool morning water as she scrubs a sock, stretching

its fibers long against the rough brush as yesterday’s bunker flows brownly

down the drain. Who drinks her coffee and packs lunches and braids hair

and rinses plates with jam and egg yolk, while the cycle hums in the

background. Who then takes her basket, full, to a spot of sun, of

quiet, (because clothes must dry in the quiet) and,

setting down her basket, she bends down to

lift out one piece

by one

piece.

What the breeze carries

African gospel music

Smell of honey

Dragon flies

Dust

Stories

A firefinch's song

Wound

The word that most Rwandans use to describe to me the horrors that were left after the genocide is “wound.” The translation comes from the Kinyarwandan ibikomere which means a deep pain. But I have to say that I appreciate the use of wound in contextualizing such an atrocity. To me, a wound sounds like something corporal, something of the flesh that can be fixed with some of mama’s spit and stitches. Even the sound of the word seems destined to wholeness – with your mouth formed in a round soft circle.

But what deep wounds they are.

This morning I was told two stories of female survivors of the genocide. Such stories are not told, or heard, lightly. But nevertheless, they are relatively common to hear and then to share. Sometimes I feel like they are heavy bowling balls which, upon hearing their contents, one has to carry around until they find someone else to give it to temporarily. You literally heave with the effort of telling it and then passing it to the next person. The stories flesh out the specific horrors of the genocide. That it was not only “a genocide” but also 800,000 singular murders. The stories also demonstrate how the most common tools of the genocide were the machete and the rape. Many women and girls were murdered after being raped, but some went on to live and to give new life.

The first story I heard today was told on the radio by a young woman of 22. She had been 6 in 1994 when the Interhamwe raped her and her mother then murdered her mother as she stood next to her, holding her hand. When the little girl cried out in despair, only able to utter to her mother’s murderers that she was thirsty, the murderers slit her mother’s wrist and forced the young girl to drink her own mother’s dying blood. The second was a story of a young couple in love. They became engaged with plans to marry. But when the genocide began, the man told his fiancé to put on trousers to appear as a man so that they could escape through the night. But they were soon found and the young man was murdered while his fiancé was raped repeatedly. And then they raped her with the gun they had just used to murder her fiancé. Months later she realized she was pregnant.

Well, this woman raised the son she was forced to have. And she loved him. And she still does love him, 15 years later. That is the good news of the story.

But what about the bad news? The news that still bleeds and cries and scabs over and scars and aches with each memory? What mama's spit can possibly heal this wound?

"I am not divisible"

“I am not divisible” were the words that Shalom Director Jean de Dieu used to describe his mixed Hutu-Tutsi parentage. “I just am who I am, I’m Rwandan, I’m not divisible.”

How do you tell that to a genocide? I am not divisible.

It reminds me of a quote I read in John Paul Lederach’s “Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies.” Lederach describes the characteristics of contemporary armed conflict - they are increasingly more internal than international in cause and response, they are based on narrowing concepts of identity, they are fueled by Cold War small weapon production, and, finally, they are “by nature lodged in long-standing relationships.”

Long-standing relationships. Conflicts lodged in long-standing relationships.

Like the Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats. Like the members of the FARC and the Colombian army. Like the long-term inhabitants of Israel and Palestine. Like the Tutsis and Hutus. These are all groups that have been and are in long-standing relationships. Just saying the name of one group is often enough to evoke the name of the other.

But doesn’t it sound so much more difficult to justify violence when you speak of the two conflicting parties as being in a relationship? People who are in relationship seek to understand each other. People who are in relationship try to compromise. People who are in relationship learn to accept one another's faults. And naturally, sometimes people in relationship divorce, move away, lose contact, disagree, neglect, and ignore one another. They grow divided by interests or attitudes, priorities or locations. But does the relationship end there? Or does it stall? Does it die or does it go into hibernation? Do we bring in a third party to fix things? Do we go to a counselor?

Something that has fascinated me about Rwanda post-genocide has been the government’s insistence that all Rwandan refugees return to Rwanda. There are various reasons for this insistence. For one, many refugees were continuing to organize Hutu Power (anti-Tutsi) campaigns in the refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other neighboring countries, essentially continuing to be a danger to Rwandan society. Some will also say that the goal of getting genocidaires back into the country is to punish them either through vengeance killings or through prison time. Whatever the intention of the reuniting of the country, it is an interesting phenomenon to me to declare “we are all going to go through this process together.” And they have. Gone through it together. Like the gacaca local judicial tribunals. The community work day, umaganda, where all are requested to chop down overgrowth on roads or dig ditches. The 2,000+ economic cooperatives that have surged post-genocide to incorporate survivors and perpetrators of the genocide into responsible business models. And the thousands of Rwandan homes cohabitated by widowed and orphaned, Tutsi and Hutu. (Philip Gourevitch's book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow we Will be Killed with our Families, has many interesting cases of this last phenomenon.)

President Kagame has asked the people of Rwanda to 1) start wearing shoes and 2) forgive one another. And we are all waiting to see what happens when a people comes together to do just that.

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.

Africa arriving, Rwanda rising…

It was 6 am in the rainy Brussels airport. In the past two months, I had traveled from Buenos Aires to Durham, Durham to Costa Rica, Costa Rica to Washington DC, DC to Durham, Durham to Richmond, Richmond to DC and DC to Brussels - and I suppose I should have been exhausted, but I wasn’t. I was wide eyed and focused. After all, I had a mission: to switch seats with someone on the plane who had a window seat. I was going to be flying over Africa for the first time, and I needed a window.

As we boarded the plane and I took my aisle seat, I looked anxiously at the arriving passengers for the person who would switch seats with me. Would it be one of the Guatemalan nuns? The young nurse from Boston? The National Geographic-looking guy? Or perhaps one of the many Canadian-passport clutching Rwandans that I saw? No, it would be Beatrice from Burundi. Agreeing to switch seats was one of the first of many non-verbal communications we would have over that 8 hour flight. She spoke French and I spoke English, but we were both fluent in smiling, nodding, and pointing.

At first my intention to see Africa from above was frustrated by clouds, but then, the bright white below began to fade away into rolling expanses of tawny brown and smears of black cutting across the landscape. The Sahara desert: all feminine and fierce. I began to search for blue, for water, for signs of life, but 30,000 feet above didn’t reveal any of those things. It continued like this until just before dusk, when I became aware that we were flying over the Nile River. Below us the sky had turned to a soft charcoal blue with the late afternoon as if all of the Nile’s H2O components were mixing with the atmosphere. And then, with the brief burst of an electric sunset, the sky and everything below went black. But completely black. I saw no hazy orange skylines, no slow moving highways, no neighborhoods ribbed in street lights. It was night, completely.

This visual silence could have been disconcerting, but it left me feeling peaceful. (The same feeling I now get walking through the dark hills of the neighborhood I live in. Walking beside a sure-footed companion, my vision is more limited that I am accustomed to, but I trust my feet to carry me.)

As we neared our destination in Kigali, lights began to dot the space below. Hills began to rise up above the wings of the plane, and suddenly we felt the ground below the wheels. As I descended the plane, greeted by tall, serious-faced Rwandan airport employees in reflective gear, I took a deep breath, giving thanks for Africa arriving.

sur america

ciao ciao, un beso fuerte, saludos a la gente alli, te quiero, ciao ciao, que dios te bendiga, un abrazo, ciao, adios