Wrestling with Ham on a Saturday Morning

I love Saturday mornings like this. On weeks which are fairly ‘normal’—that is, a routine where we are not out of town (which is 3 weekends a month at best)—we have the day off Saturday. Oren usually gets me up early and we watch a ‘train movie’ together. I downloaded about 6 documentaries from the series Extreme Trains on the History Channel to my iTunes and Oren loves to watch them.

It is community work time on Saturday morning, which means that no one is allowed to go out and drive until after 10:30am. Many Burundians are doing community service work during this time, though truthfully it is not very well coordinated here. When Rebecca and David get up (about 7:30) we have a breakfast together of fresh fruit and cinnamon rolls. I buy the rolls fresh the day before from Nathan, the cook at the Rainbow Center who has a small baking business on the side. His cakes and rolls are fabulous!

Today everyone was in a particularly good mood and it was nice to have a family breakfast together. On school mornings, Oren and I usually have breakfast while Rebecca is feeding David and showering, then we all rush about madly to get ready to go to work and school by 7:30am. So the Saturday morning slow routine is really nice. It is amazing that this kind of morning off was something that our lives in the US never allowed. We always had something scheduled every day of the week and Saturday mornings were often especially full. The pace of life here is (sometimes) more human friendly.

The morning rest is also particularly satisfying for me because I usually go to ‘capoeira’ on Friday evening, so I am often sore on Saturday morning. (capoeira is the Afro-Brazilian martial art I have mentioned in previous blogs.) I have included a couple pictures of the group practicing playing the ‘birimbao’ a single string musical instrument, in a local park, and a picture of me in the living room trying to show Rebecca and Oren an inverted kick. Even at 49 and not dancing regularly for 9 months, I like to think I still have some flexibility left!

Actually it is disappointing how hard it is to have lost the opportunity for regular exercise here. The job is painfully sedentary and worsened by the fact that it includes several very long drives every month. It is not that there is no opportunity to exercise here, there is running, sports, swimming, and even at least one health club, but the problem is sharing a job with my wife and having two very young children. There is just no time to get away.

The past week was mercifully uneventful. We did have an opportunity to go have dinner with Onesphore, one of our partners who founded an organization called Moisson Pour Christ. I have written about him before; he has quite an interesting story (link to past blog). We met his wife Innocente who is an OBGYN and on the faculty at the medical school. They have a modest house as he gave up a career as a lawyer to do Evangelism through his organization Moisson Pour Christ, full time. We appreciated being invited over as we do not often have invitations from Burundians to dine at their homes.

Zachee and Tim had dinner with us on Tuesday and Wednseday night, as Bridget was out of town. Timmy and Oren really like to be together these days and Tuesday day I took care of them together in the afternoon while Zachee and Rebecca worked.

Oren has been back at school this week, and seemed really pleased to be back. He definitely has friends there and talks about them quite a bit. His current favorite is a girl named Fatima who we met recently at an after school event on Thursday. The after school event is a once a week ‘obstacle course’ for all the kids in primary school (about 20 attended). Different pieces of gymnastics equipment and mats are set up for the kids to follow a trail through. Oren’s teacher Madame Cecile runs it and this past week was the first time we have brought Oren to participate. He loved it, especially considering that it was a safe alternative to the kind of stuff he does at our house all the time, to wit, jump off of the furniture onto other pieces of furniture etc. Even with a broken arm he does not seem to be disuaded from continuing to be a daredevil.

Madame Cecile, of course, teaches them some skills, especially discipline, waiting one’s turn, etc. But Oren is very well-behaved with her.

He struggles more with us at home and is in a phase of ‘acting out’ in negative ways. I think he is competing a bit for our attention with his brother David. When we ask him why he is doing bad things he says: “Because I don’t have any friends.” It is true, he is far better when he is with a friend. He talks often about his friends in New York—Asa, Miriam, Gabriel, Alex—and still seems to lament leaving New York and Baltimore behind. But I would not say that he hates it here. He is making new friends and seems to be enjoying the things he can do here.

This coming week we are expecting two new service workers who will be seconded to our partner Friends Peace House in Rwanda. We will pick them up Friday and orient them over the weekend, then I will drive them up to Rwanda next Monday. We will need to make 3 trips to Rwanda in less than a month and I am not looking forward to all the driving and border crossing, but that is part of our job.

I can’t believe we have moved so far from being the newcomers to now orienting new people. (Rebecca and I both spent several hours at work creating an orientation packet with info. about Rwanda, language, culture, history, maps, emergency info. etc.)

Speaking of history and culture, I am reading a fascinating history of the Great Lakes region called When Victims Become Killers by Mahmood Mamdani, about the Rwandan genocide. It is quite shocking to read about the way that colonialism played such a role in reifying ethnic differences and hostility between Tutsi and Hutu. While the Tutsi minority had been an upper social class in pre-colonial times, it was the colonialists who proposed this was due to their ‘Hamitic” origins. (This was a racist doctrine that purported that certain African peoples, who seemed more advanced were descendants of Noah’s son Ham—although Ham was cursed in the Bible, the claim was that his line was ‘genetically superior’ to the native (Bantu) people.) Colonialists allied themselves with the Tutsi ruling class and educated them separately in superior schools as they were perceived as ‘born to be rulers. Incidentally, the word BANTU, which means “people,” does not describe a tribe but was a colonial catch-all term for the inferior, non-Hamitic Africans. If it is part of your lexicon (as it was mine), I suggest you drop it, it is like saying 'Indian' for native Americans but with an even more derisive racist overtone because it is contrasted with ‘Hamites’.

The culminating point in the 1930s was a census done by the Belgian colonists (with the aid of the Catholic church) in which everyone was given a ‘racial’ identity and issued a card. One was either Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa. Classifying these groups as ‘racial’ identities rather than ethnic, meant among other things, that once one was identified as Tutsi or Hutu, one could never change. (It should be noted that before colonialism, Hutus could become Tutsi and vice versa depending on whether one acquired wealth (cows) and status. Tutsis would become Hutu if they lost their wealth and status.) Tutsis were, as I said, schooled separately and thoroughly indoctrinated as well into the theory of their ‘Hamitic’ superiority.

I feel that urge to rend my garments, put ashes on my head and lament the way that the church in colonial times was the originator of this treatise and helped perpetuate the division in Hamitic and Bantu people. (Tutsi and Hutu.)

The book talks about a point after World War II and the defeat of the Nazis, when Christianity as an ideology began to critique the institution of the church. The theories of ‘master races’ fell into disfavor, to be replaced by a new morality of populism and a commitment to build up and support the underclasses (“Blessed are the poor…”). The church and colonial power began to support and empower the suppressed Hutu majority to take power after independence. The Hutu dominant political party that emerged was not interested in sharing power; it had become convinced that the Tutsi were a ‘foreign race’ essentially identical to the colonial rulers. The dominant Tutsi party, by contrast, held onto its claim that they were a master race. As rulers of the land, they were entitled to the power that was their genetic/historic destiny.

The hostility between these groups, which lived in tension but not open conflict for several centuries prior to colonization, grew increasingly radicalized and hostile. The radical Tutsi elements fled the country and launched regular guerilla raids into the country from Uganda to kill local Hutu officials who had won elections, and in response Hutus would kill any Tutsis in the villages that were around in revenge.

This cycle continued up to the genocide of 1994, to a great extent because of the toxic ideological legacy imposed on the ‘Bantu’ and ‘Hamitic’ people by the church.

What I find instructive about reading history, especially the history of church culpability in supporting ideologies that seem clearly, in retrospect, to be counter to the TRUTH of the Gospel, is to see the ways we might be doing this in other contexts today. I have no doubt that our grandchildren will click their tongues at our own hypocrisy.

Sunday Morning:

That last bit of blogging was written after 1 am. But we did get up this morning to get ready for church and found that mysteriously our car wwould not start and we are stranded at home. We sat on the porch as a family, sang songs--Rebecca accompanied on guitar, prayed, then drew Oren a picture to color while we read from Mark 7. The passage finds Jesus rebuking the Pharisees for using God’s word and the “Law of Moses” to do exactly what contradicts God’s intentions for his people:

He quotes Isaiah 29:13 saying:

“The people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship is a farce,
for they teach manmade ideas as commands from God.”

It seems that the legacy of using a Biblical truth to support a convenient manmade lie is nothing new in the history of our planet. My advice is for us to examine our hearts. Are we using God’s word to support any belief that some people are more important than others, or some are less deserving of rights than others? Be warned, this belief may not stand up to the light of God’s truth, in his time.

Tune in next week to find out if we ever get the car working again. I do know that I have never seen a tow truck in Burundi!

Here is a final image to enjoy. Oren is getting good at drawing! This is a self portrait, not bad for a three-year-old in