All Quiet on the Quaker Front

One idea in vogue in some development circles is the idea that development projects should be run like financial investments. After all, if the invisible hand keeps factories producing things that people actually want to consume, couldn’t a similar model also keep development funds going to projects that actually produce benefits? For example, if a workshop benefits its participants, shouldn’t they be willing to pay to participate? If so, then this payment can be used to provide access to others for the same workshop. And to oppose this view, by contrast, would seem to entail throwing money at projects that don’t have tangible benefits.

But that’s the side I want to come down on. I think the comparison with the private sector can be fruitful, yet I think it is flawed as a model for all development work.

The reasoning behind this became a bit clearer to me last week at a meeting of the Quaker Peace Network for Central Africa, which brought together peacemakers from Rwanda, Burundi and Democratic Republic of the Congo (perhaps more about that later!). À propos of this post, I was presenting on monitoring and evaluating projects, and after the meeting was over, there was an additional workshop on development projects and income-generating activities.

The leader of this latter workshop helped me understand why such projects cannot be simply self-sustaining and supporting on a simple economic investment model. As he put it, work aimed at socio-economic improvement necessarily involves sensitization and awareness raising. The example he gave is that if you go to a village to start a school, but the community believes that the proper role for children is to help raise cows, not to be in a classroom, you cannot simply expect to ask them to pay for the construction of the school and pay school fees, even if it is in their economic (and social, and cultural) interest to do so. That suggests that outside funding must play a role.

Or at least, I might clarify, it suggests that outside funding must play a role until the point that one can use the testimonies from one community to convince their neighbors of the value of a program (though this in turn presumes that one works methodically within an area over an extended period of time building up relationships…not a bad idea anyway).

Even so, there could be a tricky role to play between the newcomers, who are expected to pay for a program that their neighbors got for free. And then of course there is all the programs whose benefit is not so tangible, so that the information problem persists even after others have successfully completed the program. And finally add to this that even good programs may have instances of failure, making the whole evaluative process even more murky.

So for all these reasons, participants/recipients will be unable to judge the value of the project, making them unable to pay for it, and the whole model can’t get off the ground.

Perhaps this all strikes you as obvious, but to me it’s an important caveat in response to the mantra that projects should be self-sustaining. It suggests why a program may be both useful and effective and yet require outside funding, even in cases where the benefits are calculable in monetary terms. That is not, of course, to say, that programs that are able to take advantage of a self-sustaining model are bad, in fact I think they’re quite neat, but we should also realize their limitations (just as the invisible hand theory is only applicable in so far as its premises are valid in a given real-world context).

This week I was upcountry in Rurengera for an advanced HROC workshop.  The three day advanced workshop is for those who have already attended the basic workshop, and goes into greater depth on the topics of trauma healing and reconciliation.

The workshop was somewhat dark – taking place in the crumbling remains of an old Friends Church, with only the door and one window for light.  And dark because many stories were shared of people’s struggle to cope with loss, anger, and mourning.  But there was also the light of hope and the transforming power of rememberance and reconnection with one’s community.

The sessions opened and closed with song, of which one session on the second day stood out in particular.  One of the facilitators started the singing and then began to draw people into dancing in the center of the circle.  One participant began beating a table, alternately with his fist and palms, improvising a makeshift drum.  And everyone folded into the center, kicking up dust that rose in a swirling cloud cut through the window’s rays of light, all vibrating in four part harmony.  The slow regular trickle of time swung out into an arc, then a swirl, and then caught itself in an eddy, swallowing individuals into a small community.  Then suddendly one finds oneself downstream, slowly drifting away, finding it hard to comprehend what took place a few moments ago but knowing too that one will not soon forget it.

So too was the workshop as a whole, as a space opened in which people shared their raw inner lives and emotions that are so often submerged in day-to-day living.  They spoke of their struggle to find meaning in the lonely night after the loss of a loved one to violence, to live together with those who have caused one suffering, to make sense of the mechanisms that shape one’s community and of the aim of remaking them into forces of good.

At the end of the second day, participants envisioned how to remake their communities.  People expressed not just a general desire to go back to their communities, listen to others, help them heal, and to love them, but also the newfound realization that this could truly be done jointly among Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa; that they could reclaim for themselves an undivided human community.

As an outsider I’m often curious how people will respond to the audacity of putting together victims and perpetrators together for three days to talk about some of their most personal challenges, as if they were old friends.  Yet the participants seemed to reach to a point at which they recognized “yes, of course we should come together to mend the rent fabric of our community, and it is only natural that we would do so step-by-step, working together across the very barriers that we have created.”

Perhaps one of the moving moments came on the last day.  In the workshop, participants discuss how to escape the cycle of violence in which victims seeking revenge become perpetrators.  The alternative discussed was for victims to allow themselves a period of mourning, to accept the wrong that has been done, to learn how to deal with their emotions and to remember and share what they have lost with others in their family and community. 

Participants were asked to write on pieces of paper the obstacles to their own ability to escape the cycle of violence – their anger, their doubts, their loss.  Then each person was to consider these challenges, and as they felt empowered to do so, to throw them on the ground and liberate themselves from them.  So that the 20 participants were sitting in a circle around perhaps 80 or 100 crumpled scraps of paper, the collected pain, cynicism, uncertainty, and powerlessness of a community.  And finally these scraps were gathered and burned in a small pile, releasing them in a rising chimney of smoke.

This simple symbolism of this was powerful.  I watched in particular one participant who turned a scrap of paper over and over in his hand, past the point that facilitators suggested that we might be done, the pull of its weight on his soul turning over and over in his mind, until he was finally able to cast it off.

That we all may be so unburdened!  Which reminds me of the the Fall 2008 edition of AGLI’s PeaceWays newsletter, which I had a hand in putting together and focuses on Burundi, and is now available online here.

Like a number of people from the US, Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holidy, since it is focused around being together with family and giving thanks, with little material focus, except for on food of course.

And at least according to the mythology of Thanksgiving, it was from the start a multicultural event, so while I could not be with my family, I was able to give thanks to some Burundians who have helped me find my feet here.  Though actually we had 9 Burundians, 1 Kenyan, 1 American living in Kenya, 1 Brit, and myself.

We had a hard time finding a turkey, so we went with chicken, which is a little easier since we don’t have an oven and most of the meal was cooked over charcoal, though I made use of an electric hot plate.  So fried chicken it was, with garlic mashed potatoes, green beans with thyme, honey glazed carrots with ginger, soda to drink, and for dessert a fruit salad with pineapple, mango, passion fruit, banana, and itunda (“tree tomato”).

I gave a small speech in which I explained Thanksgiving and thanked them from coming, and then in traditional Burundian fashion, one of the guests thanked me for the food and drinks and politely pointed out that if there were more drinks, they would be able to stay longer and further enjoy each others’ company.  I love this practice – it always makes Burundians, and then me, laugh – the tradition is that guests cannot ask for more food but they must ask for more beverages. 

So while I missed being back home with my family, I enjoyed the opportunity to share this time with others, and my secret hope is that it will inspire Burundians to revive their own tradition of harvest festivals from pre-colonial times.

Some of my passions that tend to fall by the wayside in my work are for environmentmental stewardship, addressing global warming, and organic food.  But over the past few months Adrien, Désiré and I have been putting together a program to incorporate these along with our peace work all in one project.

The idea is rooted in a scholarship program for youth who could not pay their school fees that began last year within the Friends church in Kamenge.  Kamenge is one of the poorest parts of the city that saw a lot of violence during the war and is currently struggling to reintegrate many ex-combattatants and others who are returning after having fled the violence.

As in many communities in Burundi, when Hutu started attacking Tutsi after the 1993 death of Melchoir Ndadaye, Burundi’s first democratically elected, and Hutu, President, many Tutsi in Kamenge fled to areas that were protected by the military.  The military, which has long been dominated by Tutsi, then often made reprisal attacks on Hutu.  Still today many Tutsi live in the internally displaced persons (IDP) camps to which they fled 15 years ago, with the result that neighborhoods are segregated by ethnicity and children have few interactions with those of the other group, allowing stereotypes and mistrust to flourish.

To address this, we expanded on the scholarship program to include youth from both communities (Hutu and Tutsi) and who form part of an ongoing program that meets weekly for group activities, including cultivating a community garden.  Other programming will include trauma healing and reconcilation modeled on our HROC workshops as well as life skills, community building, and environmental awareness training.

As we began the program three weeks ago, the first thing I noticed was that the kids definitely needed the scholarship help.  Some of them had already been kicked out of classes as a result of not paying their fees (around $30 per term), and so they were very happy they could now return to school.

And so far, it seems that the group is coming together well, with everyone working hard and at the same time having a good time singing songs and joking with each other.  On the second day we met, as we were preparing the land, it began raining and we just kept on working in the rain, which I thought was great fun, and created a great sense of solidarity.

So I’m looking forward to working with this group and getting to know each other.   And if you are interested in supporting this work, we are still trying to gather the funds to provide the school fees in the next term.  Please consider clicking on the “Donate Now” button on the right hand column of this blog and write “Kamenge Scholarship Group” in the donation note.  Thanks!

John McKendy, a regular reader of this blog and friend of mine, was killed on October 31, allegedly by his daughter’s estranged ex-husband.  John had come to Burundi the last two summers as a workcamper with the African Great Lakes Initiative (AGLI), and in particular helped to build the clinic for the Friends Women’s Association.  In the process, he was one of the most thoughtful, caring people I have come across.  While he was here, we would stay up late at night having discussions, and he was always a great thinker and listener.  We continued to converse after he returned to Canada, and I came to depend on his support for me and the work that I’m doing here. 

John was sociology professor, an Alternatives to Violence Project facilitator in prisions in Canada, and was deeply committed to non-violence, and was planning to return to Africa next spring to teach the principles of nonviolence.  He also lived these principles, right up to the end, caring even for those who put him in danger.  In a message shortly before his death he asked that friends hold both his daughter and her ex-husband in the Light, as well as their families.

A small memorial service was held for him yesterday at clinic of the Friends Women’s Association.

Dear John,

I know, I know, you would not have wanted us to make such a fuss, would humbly have suggested that we just go about our own business.  But you should have seen it, John.  I don’t think you had a chance to be at a memorial celebration while you were here – this one was eight hours of sharing food, laughing, crying, singing, praying, and making cards to send your family.  Hours drifted by distantly to soft slow voices singing in harmony to the swaying boughs of the mango tree.

It might well take a degree in sociology to understand what such an event signifies.  You had well experienced the awkwardness of being an umuzungu, a foreigner, here.  Sometimes it feels that even when your intentions are good, you can’t quite escape the reverberations of colonialism, as your priviledge and status, freedom to leave, and inability to negotiate local norms and culture means that you are always trampling a bit heavily, always a little bit separate from the local people.  Yet here were 20 Burundians who have experienced the deaths of family and loved ones from war and poverty mourning the death of a white professor from Canada, with absolute sincerety and feeling.  There is something greater than what divides us, and you were part of that.  The people here mourned you because they saw the love and caring with which you lived, for all people, but especially for the least among us.

And you should have seen M_, with the many challenges that she has faced in her life, who once thought that rich people could never be good because they had always treated her so unfairly. M from whom words of prayer normally rain down in sheets, she could barely put words together, and she was largely unable to eat she was so distraught at the loss of you.

You were the first person I met who waved to everyone with both hands – always a smile, two-handed wave, and a greeting.  As I told you before you left, if I don’t remember anything else of you, I will remember you enthusiastically waving to the people of Burundi with both hands. 

So it has been a while since my last post, first of all because of a month of traveling during which time I didn’t have internet, and then due to the flu which kept me rather occupied (sleeping) for the past week.

The first week of my travels was to the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) International Gathering in Kakamega, Kenya, which brought together more than 120 participants from 23 countries.  The gathering was an opportunity to find ways to strengthen our work, share resources and techniques, and generally learn from others’ experiences. Outside of the actual content of the conference however, I was most impressed just by the chance to meet so many inspiring people who are working to avoid violent conflict in their communities by gathering together groups of people at the grassroots.  To see how people had creatively adapted the framework of AVP to different conflicts and challenges was quite inspiring, and such a positive perspective from which to be learning about other parts of the world.

Then I spent a week in Nairobi, generously hosted by a generous friend I met at the conference, and finally I spent two weeks in Bududa, a small town set in beautiful hills of eastern Uganda.  I had come to visit a friend of mine from DC who was in the Peace Corps there, and he played a great host.  I went on hikes, milked a cow, sorted coffee beans, and learned a little bit of Lugisu, the language most prevalent in that area (my favorite expression – as a way of greeting people: “Wakinyala!” i.e. “well done!”)  But Bududa is also host to a vocational school supported by the African Great Lakes Initiative, so I was able to participate in some of their classes, see the program they run for orphans, and was even put to work in helping to distribute money donated by Canadians to pay for school fees for orphans.

As a result, along with another volunteer from Canada, I spent six days traveling around southeastern Uganda visiting schools, meeting children, and distributing funds.  This was a great way to see the country a bit, but I’m not suggesting that this is a good way to go about social change.  Actually, in some ways it is rather problematic, given that there is no real sustainability to the program (the funds might not even be around next year), and no lasting relationships are really being built.  And there was some corruption among the people we were working with, a few of whom included their own children in the lists to receive money, even as the money was clearly meant to be for orphans.  And I heard many stories of corruption in the region, which I’m not in a position to evaluate, but suffice to say it made me quite appreciative of the relationships that my coworkers have created over the years in Burundi, which seem to be quite trustworthy.

Also while I was in Uganda – I was part of a rather significant accomplishment.  Now people in East Africa often talk about how many people get packed into matatus (minibuses) in various countries.  I submit our achievement: in a matatu designed with 15 seats, we fit 27 adults, or 29 people if you count the two infants.  In the middle two rows alone, we fit 15 people (okay, so 2 of them were only partially in the matatu).  I’m sure it’s been beaten before, but it’s a personal best for me.

Well it’s been almost a month since I last wrote, which is perhaps a sort of unplanned summer vacation from blogville.  But I haven’t been just sitting around watching the Jacaranda trees bloom.  I’ve been working on grants of course, and also did some writing and interviews for AGLI’s newsletter Peaceways, which this quarter focuses on Burundi and includes more stories like a few that I’ve shared here.

At the health clinic run by the Freinds Woman’s Association that I also work for I participated in the distribution of donations contributed by friends and families of AGLI workcampers and myself (thanks again!).  It was a fun event, as we all cooked food together, and though I do a fair amount of cooking back in the US, I played the expected role of clueless foreigner, as I’ve never peeled tomatoes with a knife, stripped cassava leaves, or picked stones out of rice.

And the recipients, who are people living with HIV/AIDS, were quite greatful for the childrens clothing and other materials that they received.   In fact it felt a little bit like Christmas as they opened their bags delighted to see what they had received.

Coming up next: A trip to Kenya for the Alternatives to Violence Project Internation Gathering.  I leave Saturday on a 15-hour bus ride through Rwanda to Kampala, Uganda, and then take another bus on Sunday to get to Kakamega, Kenya.  So with any luck I’ll have some good pictures to share and a story or two when I get to the internet again.

Over the past month I have listened to the stories of more than 50 people in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and here in Burundi. They were people who had lived through conflict and had participated in trauma healing and reconcilaition workshops as part of our “Healing and Rebuilding our Communities (HROC) Program. I have learned many things from them and been inspired time again again by people’s resiliance and desire to achieve peace within their communities.

I will share just one more story with you, of Jerome who I met last week in Mutaho, Burundi. He asked us to publish and share his story, and though I have rearranged the order of his narrative and shortened it, it is otherwise as close as to his own words as I could come given the translation from Kirundi.

Jérome Birorewuname:

“There’s a gift I received in the HROC workshop. Two times I was taken, and people tried to kill me. I still have scars on my head, neck, and leg, shaped by a machete.

First, there was an old man there who had tried to kill me. He was like my father, he was my neighbor, and he had been feeding me with his kids, you know we were just like family. But surprisingly he was the one who brought the machete and cut my neck. They thought that I had died but I had not. I was with other people. They were even stronger than me, but they died immediately.

When I was in the HROC workshop, there is a session where you share about your sufferings,and that man shared about his sufferings. He claimed that during the massacres in our community he was not present, that he was in Cibitoke. I got angry because I knew he’s the one who took me to the killers. They had tied my arms in the back, and he was the one who was pulling me there. On our way to that place, he was telling me terrible things that I still remember. So because of anger, I walked out. I called one of the facilitators and I asked for a private time, so I may meet with that person.

Now before the training, each time we would see each other at the bar, he would run away immediately. This happened more than three times, so in the HROC training I had a chance to ask him, “Please, why do you run each time you see me when you are at the bar?” He said, “You know Jerome, every time I have been with you I was shameful, I didn’t have anything to say because I could not deny all the bad things I did to you, so I just tried to hide it. You know, I am the one who took your rabbits, I am the one who took your chickens, I am the one who took your hoes, and everything you had in your house, I took them. So I will ask you to write down all the things that you lost, and I will pay them one after another.”

I responded, “I have been living with soldiers, I could have asked them to come and kill you, or I could have told them to come and kick you out of the community. You know that there are many who are living in Tanzania in the refugee camp because of what they did. But I never wished you to be there because I know that they also are suffering.”

“I’m not going to kill you or ask you to pay. So please, don’t run anymore when you see me. You know, while you’re running you might fall into a hole and hurt yourself and maybe even die. Please believe that I really have forgiven you, and that I don’t have any bad wishes for you.”

So he was very, very happy. He could not understand it, because he knew what he did to me, and he was surprised to hear that I would not take him to jail or whatever but I have forgiven him.

But you know, I survived two times. I have not yet met with the ones who tried to kill me for the second time, but I am planning to ask the HROC facilitator to invite them and meet with them in a workshop so we can deal with our problem.

Where does that forgiveness come from? – Frankly, it didn’t take effort to forgive them so much as it took time. I have never been in prison, I am now 42 years old, but I would say that prison is not a good place to be. There are those who have been taken to prison, and now they are back home. I wonder if the relationship has been improved, I mean between the victim and the perpetrator. But I would say it would have worsened. And it would not prevent the perpetrator from planning other harmful things. But as I just let things go, I think it made a big impact on the person. Not as person myself, but believe that through my behavior there is another power that works through me to come and transform the person.

In a way I do not not understand why and how I did it, but I do know that I didn’t pay anything, and yet I believe that that will be a lasting relationship with my killer.

Very recently, I was just coming back from church, and by chance I recognized one of the people who had fled to Tanzania. He was surprised to see me, and he said, “are you still alive?” because he had been involved in the killings. “Are you surprised to see me alive?” I asked. “I really could never expect you to be alive” he responded.

At the time, he had a lot of luggage, and he was trying to find a bicycle taxi so he could go home and find someone to help him carry the load. The bicycle taximen were trying to charge him 3,000 Burundian Francs (about $2.50), when it should be only 500. And he was just arriving so he had no money. I told him, “Don’t worry, I have a bicycle. Take it, and you can bring it back to me when you’re done with it.. He looked me in the eyes and asked “Are you really giving me your bicycle?” “Yes,” I said, “And if anything bad happens to you, I would rather prefer it happening to my bicycle and you staying safe.”

Later, a friend from the internally displaced persons camp came to me and asked why I had given my bicycle to a Hutu who had just arrived from Tanzania. And I said, you know, there is this meat – indindura (Made from cow intestine, it is “the meat that changes things.” Normally it is given to women who are birth to girls so that she will give birth to boys.) If we agree that indindura is a delicious meat and we want change, then we need to eat it, give it to others to eat. You see these people that come from Tanzania, we are the ones to show them that we have changed. They have been away from the community for 15 years, so they don’t know where to go, everything has changed here. So unless we give them a warm welcome show them the way, they will never believe that Burundi has changed. So we need to show them we have eaten indindura, and everyone will understand.

When the man from Tanzania returned to his community he told them who gave him the bicycle, and he told them how he had been welcomed in the internally displaced persons camp. And that will improve the way the village people treat us, so that when go there, they will treat us as human beings, as friends.

That’s how we can make the change, that’s how we can make forgiveness take place, so that’s why I say forgiveness is important.

Once time when I was coming from the workshop, going home, some people asked me, “Where are you coming from?”

“I’m coming from the workshop.”

“Oh yeah? You must have received a big stipend for three days?”

“Big stipend?” I asked.

“Yes, of course if you are there for 3 days.”

“Yes, I received a lot.” I responded, and I gave him this example – “You know ugali (a doughy bread made from cornmeal)?”

“Yes, of course, I am Burundian, I know ugali.”

“Imagine that you have a big ugali in front of you, but your heart is bleeding, will the ugali take away the heart and bitterness from the wound in your heart?

“No,” he responded.

“That’s why I say it’s a lot of money, because I come home with peace. You know, even if they had given us those big big stipends, there would be no meaning in it for me because my heart was still bleeding. But now my heart is whole. So peace is more meaningful than money.”

“My wish is for HROC to keep offering such healing opportunities to people. You know I have been at one worshop, I consider myself a member of HROC, I would be happy to hear HROC coming back to us saying, we need our members to come together again so that we can learn new things together. So please, do not abandon us. Come back and offer us new skills, help us to meet new people so that we can keep coming together again.”

Hearing this story, I was overwhelmed by Jerome’s simple yet piercing wisdom and his hopeful faith in a better future, grounded in depths of forgiveness that are hard to even fathom.

On a final note, it is my birthday to day, and so if you feel led to support this work, you can do so by clicking the “donate now” button on the right-hand column. I can’t think of a more meaningful present than to share in my passion to help bring people together who sincerely want to be able to move forward with their lives.

In my recent travels, I had the chance to learn more about the work of AGLI as well as other organizations involved in peace and development work. It also gave me a chance to reflect on the 11 weeks that I have spent so far in Africa. That is just a short time of course, but it is long enough to feel relatively at home here and even to start to become wrapped up the in the tangled complexities of being a “umuzungu” (which means both “white person” and also “rich person”), including the feeling of responsibility incurred by having access to opportunities to marshal great resources in a world of great material need.

It occurred to me that such a position has its dangers, and so one should carefully probe the depths of ones motivations. For the power to transform a person’s life – their ability to feed their family, heal from trauma, etc. – all for what people spend on a dinner at a restaurant in the U.S., could become intoxicating in a perverse way. In the extreme, it’s possible to imagine a megalomanic development worker who delights at the arbitrary exercise of his power to say yes or no to his supplicants.

Even in less extreme forms though, being a umuzungu is a position of power. And power pursued carelessly, for its own sake or from vanity, only reinforces the divide between haves and have-nots, white and black, American and Burundian. Doesn’t one, in “helping the needy,” simply entrench the privilege of helping others, a privilege that increases positively with wealth?

I once read a news article documenting the competition for status derived from philanthropy among multi-millionaires in Silicon Valley. Few of us will ever have the opportunity to join such a competition (and even fewer Burundians). But of course one also senses that there is something awry in this type of thinking. Wasn’t helping each other about more than quantities of things, and don’t we have more to give than our money?

Relatedly, coming from the perspective of outcomes, how do we know the addition of resources will make a difference in the long-term, when much of the trouble to date is rooted in mistrust, disunity, violence, feelings of shame and abandonment, and social exclusion?

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angles, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging symbol. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor, and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. (I Corinthians 13:1-3)

How true this strikes me as being, even if just thinking about it narrowly in relation to a relatively mundane, practical evaluation of the work of nonprofits. In particular with large nonprofits, while I believe they are filled with people with the best of intentions, one cannot also wonder how their work can be deep, transformative, and responsive to individuals when they are so thoroughly institutional and beauracratic. I suppose that right now my doppleganger that works for one of these big NGOs is right now writing a blog wondering how small NGOs can ever be effective. But for myself, I wonder how (or if) they try to ground themselves in a set of shared values, something that goes deeper than job descriptions and evaluation criteria.

Setting aside nonprofits and thinking just of individuals, I think people can tell when someone is really motivated by love, and my guess is that Burundians are quite adept at doing so. When one first arrives, it is possible to be rather overtaken by the displays of regard for being simply a white person. As I mentioned earlier, for example, merely having a white person at a wedding is considered special, and so one is (embarrassingly) ushered up to the front, to the most important seats. But one should mistake such fascination with a deep-seated respect or admiration, for those are to be earned through real dedication and love.

Love as I mean it here is not just a feeling one gets in the head, or heart; love is a selfless concern for the welfare of others, grounded in humility, deep listening and thereby understanding. And love is made real through action, including, but not limited to, the giving of material resources. To refuse to help would surely be to deny love, “for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

The vision of the early Quakers (and in my reading of Christians, among others) is the transformation of the current world through love, from the redemption of the individual to the renewal of love between individuals to the restructuring of economic, political and social relations to be more equitable, just, peaceful and inclusive. The power of that kind of love is inestimable, and it is a power available to anyone willing to trust in it, regardless of income level.

“Development” should not be the use of wealth to spread merely aimless wealth to new corners of the earth, for, as John Woolman wrote:

Wealth is attended with power, by which bargains and proceedings, contrary to universal righteousness, are supported; and hence oppression, carried on with worldly policy and order, clothes itself with the name of justice and becomes like a seed of discord in the soul. And as this spirit which wanders from the pure habitation prevails, so the seeds of war swell and sprout, and grow, and become strong, until much fruit is ripened. (A Plea for the Poor (1793), Part X)

I feel honored to work with staff who not only have strong integrity and ensure our work is strategically sound, but who also do their work with sincere dedication and love. And as I see it, love is also a focus of our work, for trauma healing and nonviolence trainings are about showing people love and about reconecting people to love in their own lives.

I just wanted to share a few more themes that cropped up in my interviews with HROC participants in DRC that I found instructive.

In the Mugungu I IDP camp, I sat with a group of HROC participants in a room made of plastic tarp. As we talked, gravel made from lava crunched underfoot and children looked in through the holes cut in the sheeting for the wind and giggled. People told me their stories in a straightforward, deadpan voice, even when they described terrible events that happened less than a year ago.

In some ways the strongest emotional inflection came when people discussed their hope for retuning to the good old days before the violence and ethnic stereotyping became pervasive. Some people wanted HROC trainings to help people to return to the world in which ethnic division and its attendant violence was not an issue. A variation on this was a longed-for return to their home village in a newfound peace and understanding between people:

I came from a place called Mweso. Before we ran away, we used to hide in the bushes – if you see someone coming, even if it is your relative, you hide…Later on we heard that other people also fled Ngungu so we also had to run and follow them. In Ngungu the fighting went on and they killed my husband. From Ngungu we came up here to Mugungu. When we got here in the camp, people used to come and deliver food, clothing, water, but no one had come to assist us with teachings like those of HROC. If we had received these teachings earlier, we would maybe have had different thoughts and would have known how to handle things or situations… More people need to be trained, so that by the time we go back home, we will go home like comforted people, and so that the tree of trust is planted within us (one of the themes of the workshop). That way we can go home with that knowledge and at least try to put the war behind us and get along with each other.

Some people received HROC or AVP trainings before the violence occurred, and they reported that it in a sense protected from being re-traumatized and thus better cope with the situation:

Before the training, we saw trauma as just a very strange thing that we are not even supposed to undergo. After receiving the trauma training here, the war again broke out…[this time however] we were not affected inside, which is how trauma effects you; we were able to manage and to handle the situation better because of the teachings. And that was where we saw the usefulness…we need more trainings because people are still experiencing or having the effects of trauma.

Another participant I interviewed in the town of Sake reported that in the past people fleeing from violence would only flee with people of their same ethnicity, while after a training they were able to flee with others. So helping people heal from trauma is not me backward-looking, but can help people to deal with ongoing violence and life difficulties. I learned of a woman who before a training was being beaten by her husband, even as she was the breadwinner for the family. Through the confidence she gained in the training, she decided to speak out for the first time, with the result that her in-laws intervened on her behalf and removed her husband to another area, allowing her to live in peace with her children.

Others suggested that HROC trainings convinced them to abandon plans to join a militia to get revenge on those that had killed their family members. One person related how when he first arrived to the IDP camp he was so angry that he had plans to “start his own militia,” which got a good laugh out of the other people present.

Finally, one participant spoke from a belief that access to healing from trauma is a right:

People are no longer stable, they run away if someone just calls out “”hey!” So the [HROC] teachings can help us at the grassroots level, and at the same time reach the leaders. For we can be denied everything else, but we need peace, the peace that comes from putting our trauma behind us.