All Quiet on the Quaker Front

So as I trudge back and forth through the snow, it’s easy to feel a long way from the summery paradise of East Africa.  But it hasn’t escaped my mind, by any means.  I’m developing plans to return this summer to Burundi to continue to help out as I can with HROC projects and observe the elections.

And of course, much has been going on in Burundi without me, including the beginning of registering of people for the elections, and the recent arrest of 13 members who were alleged to be plotting a coup against the current government.

On the brighter side, Alex has been doing great work with the Friends Women’s Association, and keeps a great blog about her work and life in Burundi.  And a few weeks ago I heard news that one of the grants I helped write for our work in North Kivu was funded, which will provide support to survivors of rape in the internally displaced persons camps in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.  Despite occasional mentions of the problem in the western press, I was amazed to find when I visted last year how little support is offered to these women, as well as the steep challenges of stigmatization they face in their communities.  Hopefully this program can start to create a space for healing and building community with them.

So though I have been short of time for posting, I hope to keep writing as the summer approaches.  In the meantime, I will be speaking at the Human Development Conference at the University of Notre Dame on February 26, including some reflections on my work in Burundi.

Just a quick note, since things here are a bit overwhelming as I try to fit in everything before I head back to the US to start an M.A. in Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute at Notre Dame this fall. I plan to be back here in Burundi next summer though, and I’ll keep the blog going through the year as time permits.

The week before last, I traveled to five communities in the interior of the country to oversee the distribution 150 goats, each goat to a pair of people that will jointly take care of the goat, giving them an excuse to interact more regularly and build relationships.

Now, it’s never too hard to give things away, but doing a good job of giving things away is more tricky. In general, I think the meetings we had beforehand where we discussed the program and opened it up to comment and criticism caught many of the little details we had missed in planning the program.

But you can’t foresee everything. For example, since the goats had to be bought ahead of time, in local markets, some people in the group took on the responsibility of caring for the goats until the time of the distribution. This created problems, however, when one of the women who cared for the goats wanted her choice of goats (and some were already showing signs of pregnancy), while we were trying to ensure a random distribution of goats to keep everyone happy. So for a while the discussion became a bit heated over this little dispute, but we all had a good laugh when we learned the name that had been chosen for the goat they were arguing over was “Amahoro” (“peace”). Then the exact same thing happened in a second community. At first this had me concerned a bit, but as everyone seemed to come to agreement, and with a little perspective looking back, it was really just a minor hitch, and yet at the same time demonstrated how much these little goats can mean to people.

The best part, however, was the glances I caught four or five times throughout the day of pairs people who were not really paying attention to what was going on with the rest of the group. The reason they were distracted though, was at the very heart of the program.  They had become so engulfed in getting to know their partner – formerly someone of whom they might be wary – that they were completely absorbed in being with each other. It was quite striking actually, often they would be holding hands, as Burundians do when having a close conversation, and they were really enjoying each others company. If gentle, nurturing relationships like these can grow from the project among many of the participants, it will have been truly worth its while.

As I mentioned before, I spent most of last week on the other side of Lake Tanganyika in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), specifically in the city of Uvira, and then briefly in a small town about 25 km south of there called Abeka.

The province of South Kivu had a difficult time during the wars that started in 1996 and 1998, seeing a significant amount of fighting and a number of massacres.  Now though, things are relatively quiet in South Kivu, unlike North Kivu where the conflict is  actively continuing.   There have been a few isolated events here however,  such as an attack on the prison near Uvira that freed the prisoners earlier this year, and violence continues further north in the province, such that the UN has 4,000 peacekeepers stationed here to protect civilians.

In Uvira, I stayed at a small peace center that was started by the Friends Church in 1999. It is up on a small hill, which makes for a great view overlooking the lake and a good part of Uvira, and surrounded by simple semi-urban area that is quite tranquil.

While there, I witnessed a Change Agents Training sponsored by Change Agents for Peace International, and had a chance to chat with some of the participants, who were enthusiastic to use their skills as leaders in their community. I also participated in some informal strategic planning sessions, though most of the outcomes consisted in me having a chance to learn about the different work they do.

In the rural community of Abeka, I had a chance to see the first Friends Church in DRC, started in 1983 or so, as well as beautiful site where plans are underway to build a trauma healing clinic, and finally an ill-equipped, but desperately needed hospital.

This hospital has been very much on my mind since visiting. The doctor is making due as best he can, performing basic surgeries, with seemingly little more than a scalpel, anesthesia, and disinfectant. (And growing peanuts and other food in his spare time to supplement his very modest income.) The only electricity currently available is one solar panel that operates one light bulb in the operating room. Actually they have a generator that was donated, but no funds to buy the wires to connect it. And if they did, they wouldn’t have much to connect, beyond a refrigerator.

And this hospital serves a wide area south of Uvira, comprising 55,000 people, who can generally only get there by sitting on the back of a bicycle over miles and miles of rugged dirt roads.

I asked if the government provided any support. “The government?” one member of the staff remarked, “I have been living in Abeka for more than 20 years and I’ve yet to see the government so much as set foot here.” (Keep in mind that the Kinshasa, the capital city, is located about 1,100 miles away by air, which is the only practical possibility).

So they do the best they can with what they have.  “It’s war-time medicine,” he remarked, “and it is only thanks to God that so far no one has suffered from an infection.”

Part of me says to myself, you have to look at the larger picture, you have to think about the need for the Congolese state to build effective institutions to end the conflict, impunity, and provide healthcare for its citizens. And after all, many in the US are without proper access to health care.  Still, in the meantime, a woman rests with her child delivered by c-section, on old mattress, sharing the room with a man whose appendix was removed, and a community and a whole region struggle to survive where a even few thousand dollars would make a signficant difference.  Perhaps they cannot wait until the state gets it together, and if it were your mother or your brother, would you be willing to wait?

This past week I traveled first up to central Burundi on Monday and Tuesday to work on the goat project, including to Ruyigi province in the northeast, which I have never been to before. Then for five days I traveled the other side of Lake Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to visit Quaker activities in Uvira and the small town of Abeka. More about the latter trip to come, but starting with the goat project, to summarize, committees to oversee the project have been created, and we were traveling to discuss the project with groups of 60 participants. These last two communities we are working in are geographically more distant, but we managed to make it everywhere we needed, so that the communities are all ready to begin distributing goats in the next few weeks.

This meant a fair amount of traveling from place to place, but this is no mere downtime; I have an important task on these occasions – waiving to each group of people that we pass every hundred meters or so. I find, as no doubt the Queen must, that it’s best to do a bit of calisthenics before such a session to warm up the muscles of the wrist and upper forearm. But though somewhat rigorous, these efforts do not go unrewarded. As we pass people tending their fields, or thrashing rice, or cooking over charcoal fires, I receive smile after smile, friendly waves, and, among young kids, pure excitement that often includes jumping up and down, yelling, and running after the car.

This response is quite remarkable when you think about it, considering that, though our HROC car is just an old Toyota station wagon and not a fancy Landcruiser like most NGOs drive, it still represents more monetary value than all the belongings of the average peasant farming family. Many people upcountry have never traveled in a private car and don’t know, for example, how to open the door from the inside. So if you try to imagine it from their perspective, perhaps midway through hoeing your field all day, such a car represents a foreign element, appearing out of nowhere and disappearing as quickly, containing unknown elements that you are not sure whether they represent forces for good or bad, though analogous elements have passed in one form or another the land of your parents and your fore-parents. And indeed a few people return mere blank, curious looks, or even the odd cold stare, but this is by far a small minority.

This always strikes me, coming from the city, where as far as I know in just about any culture, one adopts a distant, reserved posture with respect to one’s fellow citizens. What is it about cities that we feel forced to withdrawal into our individual selves? Are we afraid that if we shared a friendly smile with everyone we pass each day that we’d have too many friends? Do we believe our greeting resources are so meager that they must be reserved for a more limited number of encounters? Or are we unconsciously downcast from years of unrequited smiles? And if so, how many have learned not to share friendly greetings from our own, withheld demeanor?

And so I was asking myself, as I traveled the rolling hills of Burundi, as we might ask ourselves anywhere, when the stranger comes into your life, with unknown origins and unknown ends, perhaps a disappearing spectre of another world or perhaps your future neighbor, do you mount a stolid pose or venture a broad, hopeful, open-handed smile?

I’ve been upcountry – in central Burundi – for the last couple days meeting with three groups of 60 people who will be taking part in a goat project for a grant I wrote a while back.  Like any good change of scenery, this has been a chance to reflect, in this case on the year that I have been here in Burundi.

The first thing that struck me is how gratifying it was to see some of my work becoming real, as actual flesh-and-blood people were sitting around preparing a project that, as was clear from their enthusiasm, actually meant something to them.  And I was struck again by my co-workers, including the facilitators that we work with all across Burundi, but especially by Adrien and the staff of HROC and FWA, who are some of the most wonderful, dedicated, caring, and capable people I know.  I wish I could do more to help them, I wish for example, that I could figure out how to raise the funds to cover their salaries, in addition to the money for specific projects.

Ah, but a year is hard to sum up.   So instead, here are some assorted highlights:

- Taking part in a two-week training in Kigali with 7 Burundians, 8 Rwandans, and 7 Congolese, on trauma healing, reconciliation, and Nigerian soap opera-appreciation.

- Transcending culinary frontiers: learning how to make ugali (a doughy paste of cassava or other flour mixed with water), and then exploring its possibilities.  For example: ugali and peanut butter -  I consider this African American fusion to be breaking new culinary ground; others might esteem it as having busted clear through and coming out the wrong end.  Or, perhaps more respectably (after learning that the less-than-inspiring cheese available here comes from Congo, primarily areas controlled by Laurent Nkunda, and therefore possibly supports a militia involved in terrorizing citizens), I decided to try my hand at making my own cheese.  This has spawned (or rather, curdled into) mostly mozzarella, being easy to make.  On one ambitious occasion though, I made my own Burundian version of Monterey Jack, aged 2 months.  Alright, I can’t say that it tasted like any Monterey Jack I’ve ever had, but it was definitely the most delicious cheese I’ve had in the past year.

- Traipsing about the rural southeastern part of Uganda helping to distribute scholarships to orphans and teaching at Bududa Vocational Institute with Lisandro.

- Meeting and spending time with many delightful friends, from the workcampers, to Gabe (three months my roommate and to be much longer a friend), to Anna, Ian and Sarah of AFSC, to a recent visit from my brother and HROC-Rwanda volunteer Angela.  That leaves off, of course, countless Burundians, whose stories and lives are more than inspiring, and both nearly-unbelievable and not-to-be-forgotten.  I have shared with these fellow travelers but a tiny part of our lives, and yet in this short span there has been great loss, with two friends that are no longer with us, and also great joy, as we travel together the journey that is, unswervingly, unfalteringly, the narrow path of our brief, sunlight lives.

Now that I’ve been here a while, perhaps some readers are beginning to wonder what I have to show for my time here.  Well, for starters, I wrote a successful proposal for $9,000 to do a goat sharing project to encourage cross-ethnic reconciliation (based on our previous work with such projects, such as I described in Rurengera).  And we recently discovered that a grant that my co-workers and I wrote to the US Institute of Peace has been approved.  This program will build on our Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities (HROC) workshops to create grassroots community networks to monitor and prevent violence in the 2010 elections in Burundi.  The follwing describes the thinking behind the project.

The upcoming Burundian elections in 2010 will be a crucial test of the state of social and political relations in Burundi and will determine whether the fledging peace process will be consolidated or whether all progress achieved to date simply dissolves.

Burundi is at a crossroads.  We have worked so long to get where we are.  My hope is that the upcoming elections will be peaceful and will not return us to the cycle of violence and chaos that engulfed the country.  – Adrien Niyongabo

Among the issues affecting the process are the demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration of ex-combatants and the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tanzania.  But the challenges are also rooted in the post-independence history of elections in which manipulation of “ethnic” differences between Hutu and Tutsi for political purposes has created deep tensions and led to violence.

While some efforts have focused on working with political elites and party leaders to work for a fair and peaceful election, but such high-level gambles are also risky strategies for achieving peace.  This was demonstrated in 1961 and 1993, where a candidate with broad and inter-group support was assassinated, which eventually led to mass violence.  An alternative strategy is to address violence on the level at which it is carried out, building trust and relationships at the grassroots level that would weather possible calls for violence coming from political elites.  Such relationships have prevented violence in communities in the past, as is evident from the regional variation in levels of violence as well as from the stories of the prevention of violence by local leaders and citizens who refuse to take part and encourage others to do similarly.

Such interventions are only possible, however, where people have been able to reconcile “ethnic” differences and healed the trauma in their hearts that is the basis of Hutu-Tutsi animosities.  Otherwise, the “ethnic” division stirred up for political gain in an election falls on receptive ears and ready hands, motivated by frustration and anger or fear.

Some in Burundi also associate their trauma with elections themselves, with the idea of casting a ballot associated with the traumatic violence that followed the 1993 election.  For this reason some refuse to vote and many have symptoms of trauma provoked by hearing political discussions on the radio or in their community, casting a ballot, or other things associated with elections. These traumatic symptoms need to be addressed to so that elections can positively impact communities and all can take part, and also so that people can heal from trauma in the midst of divisive times when politicians are playing on peoples’ fear and ethnic identities.

Of course, elections need not be viewed as only a source of trouble, and they have the potential to help deliver good governance and peace to Burundi.  To do so, however, the roots of a participatory, informed, and liberal democracy must be more deeply embedded.  As many have argued, the act of voting itself is not enough to ensure that democracy promises anything more than a destabilizing census on ethnic affiliations.  For elections to help create a stable governance that is supported by popular will, citizens need to be involved in addressing ethnic-based political appeals, observing the entire election process, from vote-counting to media content to the use of police power, and acting as community leaders to demand effective response to community problems.  This grassroots civic engagement is central to the long-term viability of democracy and good governance, and if it is rooted in joint participation of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa, it will be a strong foundation on which to prevent future violence.

The challenges to the creation of such non-ethnic civic groups include overcoming significant mistrust between identity groups rooted in traumatic experiences of past violence, a tendency towards deference towards political and other leaders, as well as a lack of knowledge about democratic practices.

– Later on, I’ll describe more of our plans for this project.

There are words that qualify as interesting because, to translate them, it requires a phrase rather than just the equivalent word in the destination-language.  Then there are words, such as the Kirundi word “kujijuka”, which is, in the first-person plural of the verb — “tujijuka,” the name chosen by a group of women living with HIV/AIDS in Gitega, many of whom faced considerable stigmatization in openly admitting they were HIV positive.

“Kujijuke” means…hmm, it means when you are courageous in the sense of being willing to ignore the negative things people say about you by, for example, openly admitting that you are HIV+, or illiterate, etc.  It means to be awakened, to pass through difficulty into the light.

 

This week we have been morning the death of my dear friend Odette, who passed away last week following complications from a pregnancy.   A memorial service was held for her on Friday attended by hundreds of people, an outpouring of support that showed the depth of her connection to those around her.

Odette was highly engaged in her community, leading a weekly support group for women in Kamenge Friends church for the past eight years, raising four wonderful children, and being a very loving companion to her husband.  She had also recently completed a degree in Christian leadership and had begun facilitating workshops with the Friends Woman’s Association on trauma healing and HIV/AIDS, for which seemed to have a natural gift.

I remember many happy memories of the time we spent together – meals, conversations, traveling, her teaching Gabe and me how to make ugali.  I also really admired her deep commitment to integrity, which she put into practice even when, on perhaps the most important exam in her student career, many of the other students were cheating and encouraging her to, and when the outcome would have serious consequences for her education and job prospects.

When I was at the AVP International Gathering with Odette last fall, in one workshop we were asked to wander aimlessly around a room and then, suddenly, to find someone we identified with and admired, and as it happened Odette and I instantly found each other and stood with our arms around each other.  The facilitators asked us to explain why we choose each other, and I remember talking about how I had seen the joy with which she lived her life but most of all the deep love which she held for her family and her husband Adrien.  Like so many others here, I will greatly miss her, and will continue to be inspired by her example and spirit.

Tune by body and my brain

to the music from the land.

- Dave Mallett

It was back in November that our gardening youth group began clearing an overgrown plot of unused land, strewn with popsicle sticks and fading wrappers.

At the time, some were cynical, thinking that we should just plant ilengalenga, a quick growing leafy green that we could harvest in a month.  I admit I too had my moments of doubt.  Some of the soil is pretty lifeless, largely compacted clay that has been serving well to house termites but is not so kind to roots wanting air and nourishment.

But this week the eggplants were ready for harvesting, looking like heavy, dark purple balloons that no longer belong in their parent’s slender green arms.

Those that find it inefficient for me to spend my own muscle power growing food when I could eat food produced in a factory, or produced by the very inexpensive labor of others – perhaps they haven’t recently sat down to a dinner grown and cooked by themselves.  To know where your food comes from – not just which continent, but to have known it from birth, having seen it through its struggles, to maturity, and then having paired it with spices and heat to draw out its flavor, texture and nutrients – how else am I to spend the finite strength of my physical being?  In using my body I care for it and make it stronger, and tune my mind to the community and earth around me.

Sometimes, on hot sunny days when I have other things to do, I admit I don’t really feel like taking the bus over to Kamenge, sweating, and struggling to interact across barriers of language and culture, being outside of my comfort zone.

That’s when I need it the most.  That’s when I need to be drawn out of my little ethereal bubble.  I’m not, in fact, an unconnected consciousness or a node in the internet.  My mind is nourished, dependent on nourishment, through the working of my nerves, muscles, tendons; by the consumption of food which must be grown in the complex diversity of the soil and the rays of a distant sun.  Today’s rain was stirred up by currents — created by the earth’s rotation and a swirling complex of temperatures — that bring oceans to fall from the sky.

The sun rises, sets, rain falls, evaporates.  At dusk bats begin to stir in the trees and then make crooked paths for Congo, then return before I awake.  Migrating birds pass high overhead.  While I sleep, termites build their elaborate subterranean castles.  While I read the news, colonies of ants set forth, conquer, enslave, battle torrents of water, collapse.  I have not looked to see.

I’m connected to the earth, to an earth I’m drawn to all my life by gravity, by material needs, by a sense of belonging.

Community gardening is people coming together, organizing, planning, uniting their actions and dreams.

As Hannah Arendt suggested, the power that really moves mountains is not coercive force, which breaks down and constrains, but the constructive, collaborative power of people finding a common purpose and orienting themselves towards the realization of that goal.  Not a quick, destructive power, but a slow, cultivating one.

A plant will bend to force, but it does not thereby produce fruit.  You have to ask it.  Ask it with your action.

At times in my life I have gotten a little too drawn into the seeming vast expanse of the internet, a little too comforted by the straight lines of spreadsheets and graphs, a bit too enveloped by stories told on paper.  Back to the rough ground!  To clearing the overlooked, overgrown spaces of our lives and bringing them under deliberate care and nurturing.  Communities are not built with bricks; they are formed by the creating and pulling taut of a web of relationships that can support understanding, acceptance, and love.

For those in the northern hemisphere, despair not!  Spring is on its way.  Go ahead, get a little dirt under your fingernails.  If your neighbor gardens as well, she won’t hesitate to shake your strong, calloused hand.

Today I’m writing from Kigali, Rwanda, where for the past 9 days I have been at a training for Burundians, Rwandans, and Congolese to become facilitators of Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities (HROC) workshops.

At the same time, I’ve been reading Rethinking the Trauma of War, a book critical of programs that intervene in post-conflict situations for trauma healing.  The effect of the juxtaposition has been to strengthen my appreciation for the approach I was learning in the training, and to highlight the strenghts of the HROC program.

The critique is aimed primarily at the trauma healing programs that were deployed after violence, such as in the Balkans and here in Rwanda after the genocide, in which large humanitarian NGOs supplied Western-trained psychologists/psychotherapists for short 6-month or 1-year stints.  During this time, they conducted individual counselling sessions to help people deal with trauma, and then after a year or two the whole program was wrapped up.

To summarize briefly the critique, such a program:

1. imports Western (culturally relative) ideas and values, such as individualism and a focus on trauma as a mental/cognitive state.  In brief: yesterday they brought the church to Africa, today they bring the doctrine of PTSD.

2. disrupts and displaces local resources for psycho-social healing

3. is attractive to donors because it implies no long-term commitment to changing the situation on the ground as is the case with other development projects

4. aims at a need that doesn’t exist, or at least which is unimportant relative to other material needs (a point I have responded to in previous posts).

I think that all these critiques are correct, as far as they go, but what’s interesting is how the book completely misses the possibility of a trauma healing project like HROC.

Our workshops are faciliated by local people, not just from the same country but from the same region of that country and, often, from the same community.   The workshop structure has been adopted by each local culture and continues to be revised to match the needs perceived by those at the community level.  And as far as the content goes, it is not presented in lecture format by the leader but is rather elicited from the participants themselves, so the possibility of importing foreign values is minimalized.

Such a program cannot be said to displace local resources, since it is precisely built around creating such resources — rebuilding communities by connected family members to each other, neighbors to neighbors, and communities to their own members who have experience facilitating trauma healing — as well as the ongoing process of healing from trauma themselves.  And the program is also aware, and is constructed so as to capitalize on, the long-term approach that such a community-based approach requires.

Of course, you might object that a rural peasant farmer with a little training cannot provide the sort of care that a highly trained professional can, even if the latter suffers from disadvantages of language, culture, and context.  Perhaps this is true in some circumstances, still I’m not about to start promoting a change in our program.  I am reminded of an empirical study that compared different therapeutic approaches (Freudian, cognitive, behavioral, pharmacological) with respect to their effectiveness in treating various psychological troubles – schizophrenia, depression, etc.   Although there were some minor differences between approaches, the outcome for all methods was roughly similar, as was simply having a friend or pastor who was a good listener.  Oh, and did I mention that each workshop includes a session on good listening, and that we also refer to our facilitators as “healing companions”?

Of course, I don’t claim to be unbaised; I just spent the last 9 days with some of the most inspiring people I’ve had the chance to meet, who have no book learning in trauma, but whose own journeys of healing give them a unique personal strength and a compassion they hope to share with others.