Innocente, Jodie, and the Batwa

Amahoro. Urakomeye? Sinzi ikirundi neza. Ariko, ndagerageza!

En Français, ce la veut dire: Paix. Comment ça va? Je ne connais pas bien le Kirundi, mais j'essais!

In English: Peace. How are you? I don?t know Kirundi well, but I am trying!

The rainy season has brought out some new features of the Burundian landscape. On the macro-level, we can see that there is a huge mountain range right across Lake Tanganyika, in Congo, which until now, we have not been able to see due to haze. This really means that Bujumbura is surrounded by mountains on all sides, a bit like Seattle Washington. On the micro-level, our house has been a millipede sanctuary. They are all over the floor and hard to avoid when walking about in the dark. They particularly fancy an afternoon siesta under any dirty clothes left carelessly on the floor.

This has been a busy week for us and the jobs have involved a steep, but interesting learning curve. On Sunday we picked up one of our new 'service workers' Jodie, from the airport (returning from a visit to Kenya). She is Canadian, but has come from Massachusetts where she taught at Wellesley. She will be stationed in Bugasera, a remote town in central Burundi where she will teach at a Batwa (pygmy) school. She will be living next to a Catholic seminary that is up there. The Batwa are a very marginalized people in Burundi and generally looked down upon by other ethnic groups in the country. Setting up a home for a missionary is challenging. Finding a suitable, secure homestead, getting furniture, appliances, cooking utensils, access to water, curtains, etc. all needs to be considered. We were fortunate that the Abbey at the seminary was able to help us quite a bit. Oren, Rebecca, Jodie and I drove upcountry on Tuesday and stayed the night at the seminary. It was a very rough ride (several hours on dirt roads), but the dorms at the seminary were comfortable. Oren was delighted to find that the priests kept a pet monkey there. We ordered furniture and made other arrangements for her 3 year stay, then returned to Bujumbura with her on Wednesday. We will go up again next week to finish the preparations and leave her there.

It is probably worth saying something about our local partner who runs the Batwa school up there. The group is called UCEDD, but the founders are a couple, named Innocente and Beatrice. Innocente and Beatrice are batwa themselves, and Innocente related to us his harrowing tale of fleeing from Mbutu's Congo (Zaire) when he (Mbutu) was sending the soldiers to round up and capture the 'forest people' to be conscripted into the army. Innocente was separated from his family and fled to Burundi. He had the opportunity to get an education, and then, years later did an extensive search for his parents. He eventually found them in Congo after not seeing them for years. While in Burundi, however, he saw how terribly and shamefully his own people were treated, and in fact, did not even tell his hosts that he was Batwa because of his own shame about their wretched existence. From what I understand though, he eventually did feel convicted, as one who had the opportunity for education during his exile, to champion the cause of his people.

He and his wife founded UCEDD and have done amazing work in helping the Batwa in development and education projects. The school is one of the centerpieces of their work. It is supported by MCC but the Batwa themselves pay a small tuition fee to send their children, which gives them a real sense of ownership and investment in education. It is great to support them in this. Placing Jodie, an MCCer there, affords great opportunity to help build their capacity. She can teach English and French, as well as help develop curriculum and teaching methodologies with the local staff. We are also hoping she will be able to help build the capacity of UCEDD as well through assisting with grant writing, strategic planning, etc.

We are aware of the great challenges this will put on Jodie. She is moving from an academic career in an Ivy League School, to live as the only 'mzungu' (white person) in a remote village in the heart of central Africa. The sacrifice and cultural challenges are daunting, but she feels called by her faith to this work. Rebecca and I, as team leaders will have responsibility for making sure that she feels supported in this role, and I imagine we will be making trips, at least monthly, to Bugasera to visit. (The consolation, is that Oren seems to like the seminary and monkey.)
Right now, however, the rough roads up there are hard on Rebecca as she enters her seventh month of pregnancy. She has been doing quite well, in general, although today she is sick with a stomach flu that our cook had this past week. Please pray for her speedy recovery, as we need to make another trip up country next week.

Oren is doing extremely well. It is interesting to me to see him adapting to a new diet. He really does like food and does not seem to mind shifting from ice cream, cookies, cheerios, chicken, apples, and other American food, to a diet of rice and beans. He does like rice and beans, and we have it for lunch every day, so that is good. Yesterday we had fish for dinner and he ate almost half a kilo by himself. Although there is much I miss, I am also refreshed by the more utilitarian place food has taken in our lives. I have often felt that we have too many choices at home. It is a good proscriptive to see alternative lifestyles where less is more.

I am trying to send an interesting picture with each entry, so here is a photo of Rebecca (looking very pregnant) and Oren, in our 3rd world office. The windows are permanently open as there is no AC anywhere, and the technology is minimal, although we do have our computers and a printer. Photocopying is done at a nearby store, one page at a time, at about 30 cents per copy. What is hard to see is all the dust which collects daily. The floor is concrete. The walls are yellow, the closest shade to white available, and the furniture is all cushionless. The bamboo couch and chairs on the left is our conference room.

You might be interested in hearing the type of work we do in the office. Sometimes the work is game like in the challenges we are presented with. Here is an example. I need to travel, with 3 of our partners to Ghana, in Oct. for a 3 day meeting. I am American, 2 partners are Burundian, and one is Rwandan. We all live quite far from each other (a day trip). Ghana requires Visas for travel. There are no Ghanaian consulates in Burundi. For visas, Ghana requires our passports, and quadruplicate copies of an application, our plane tickets, our health cards, and 4 photos of each of us. So Rebecca and I have to get everyone?s passport, health cards, and photos, buy plane tickets for everyone, fill out all the applications, send them to Kenya (the nearest consulate), get them back and redistribute them to everyone. Needless to say, it is a complicated process and can take a long time. Consider also the fact that virtually nothing can be done on the internet, and never with a credit card.

I have really enjoyed the many comments you all have been writing. Shout out to the Vassar crew who started the semester this week. I did feel a real pang of sadness as I thought of the beginning of a new semester that I will miss for the first time in 8 years.