Partners Retreat

 Oren David and Rebecca at Cercle Hippique.




I am happy to report, this Monday evening that we are all alive and well, the kids are in bed and Rebecca is having a 'ladies night out' with some friends.  The reason I feel it is important to begin by telling you this is that we have just completed our Partners Retreat, an annual event that we do with our partners to help build their capacity, network, and generally get to know MCC better.


In the past three years, however, this event has almost seemed cursed with a steadily worsening series of health related crises.  The first year Oren was so sick and lost so much weight the week we were supposed to go that we almost cancelled.  The second year Rebecca got malaria days before it started, and last year one of our service workers had to be medi-vacced out of the country and I was left to watch their her kids while Rebecca ran the retreat alone.

Needless to say, we were more than a bit anxious in the days leading up to the event.  But I can happily say that everything went off without a hitch health-wise, and we felt very good about its success.  I don't know why this particular event has seemed surrounded by so much misfortune.  It is a lot of work but it is no more stressful than other conferences we participate in and generally we like to go and spend time with partners in this forum.

This year we held it in Rwanda close to the town of Butare in a Catholic monastary called Gihindamuyaga.  We have been here before and have found it to be a lovely place for a large group retreat.  The simple rooms do have bathrooms and even hot water and the Rwandese food there is prepared to perfection.  There are also an abundance of fruit trees that produce passion fruit, navel oranges, japanese plum, avocadoes, papaya, and guava.  We enjoyed eating them as well.


Preparation went well up until Wednesday morning, the day before we were leaving, when I realized that our exit permits were not up to date.  This is a process that usually takes 2 days and we had a moment of panic, but sent Felix off to the immigration office to see what he could do.  He did successfully come back with all of them later that afternoon.  (That was probably the most stressful preparation emergency that we had in getting ready.)


We left town on Thursday afternoon, which seemed less stressful than leaving in the morning.  We took our Fortuner (which is running fantastically well by the way) and another vehicle as 13 of us were coming from Bujumbura.  We also had a car coming from Gitega and a third from Kigali in Rwanda.  We all arrived about the same time at Gihindamuyaga just before 6pm.  We had tea and then supper and I did a welcoming presentation explaining the theme for the weekend and giving an 'ice-breaker' question to start us off.  The question was what people remember of their parents.  It was an interesting question to hear the answers to because it reminded me of just how different our life experiences have been.  Among the mzungus, most of us are blessed to still have our parents still living.  I would say that among our partners, with the exception of 1 or 2, all of them had passed away.  More disturbing, though is that in most of the cases the cause of death was murder during one of the many outbreaks of civil war here in the past 30 years.


The theme for the retreat was one inspired from the program evaluation we had at the end of last year.  One of the challenges our evaluators gave us was to remember who were serving.  They reminded us that the beneficiaries of our programs are the poor, marginalized, traumatized individuals and communities in Rwanda and Burundi, not our partners.    Yes we do serve them through our partners, but the real measure of success if their effectiveness in reaching these people, not how well our partners relate to us.  It seemed like a good challenge and much of our work during the retreat was focusing on how we can better focus our programming on serving the truly poor and needy, and even more, how we can involve them in the planning, execution and follow-up of our programming aimed at them.


Over the three days together we divided the time into roughly 2 parts.  The first day we heard reports from each partner, the second day, we did some workshopping on how to better invove our beneficiaries in planning.  Yolanda Weima and Jean Pierre Niyonzima of UCPD led a very good discussion on this based an experience they had designing a recent project.

She also drew a nice illustration of the role of the partner in the fine balancing act of connecting the vision of the donor with the felt need of the participants (beneficiaries) on the ground.  We were all challenged to not just pay lip service to our committment to empower the marginalized, but to really go on the ground and get feedback on programming that we are doing.


Along with all of this I should add that we did take time for praise and worship at each plenary session that was led by Rebecca and her guitar.  We also had some time for prayer and reflection in the evenings.

In order to accomplish all of this we did bring along a childcare person to watch Oren and David.  This was the only way that Rebecca and I could be available for all the work we had to do.  This time David and Oren were the only kids.  In the past with Ruth and Krystan and the Horst family there were at least 3 more.

We did have some free time scheduled in the retreat and played some Frisbee, kicked around a soccer ball, and went to the Rwanda National Museum as well which had some very interesting artifacts from the country’s history, particularly the time of the traditional Kings.

Sunday was our final day and we had worship together.  I did a sermon based on John 9, the story of the healing of a man born blind from birth.  What was most striking to me about the story is it is unique in that has a very thorough follow-up of a beneficiary of a healing of Jesus.   What was interesting to me and instructive was to realize that this great transformation was not actually appreciated by anyone but the blind man himself.   The disciples had their errant theology challenged, the neighbors were skeptical, the Pharisees were menaced, the parents were afraid, and the man ends up being excommunicated and cut off from his community. 

I talked about the reality that often transformation of an individual has consequences and may not be welcome.  In this context, educating Batwa, raising them out of ignorance, empowering women, or poor farmers, will disturb the current structures of injustice that keep them down, especially those who are benefiting from the current system of injustice.

Poverty and marginalization are structuralized, not accidents, and real change for individuals at the bottom are not welcome by those at the top.

And yet,  it is clear from the passage that the healing of this man is a great act and something that changes his life irreversibly forever for the better.  My caution to our partners though, is that bringing  a true gospel of transformation is dangerous work, and as we truly involve ourselves with and empower the marginalized, we should expect to ruffle the feathers of those who are in power.

After the service we all packed up our things and got back in our cars and went our separate ways.  We were back in Bujumbura by mid afternoon, in time for our small group.  Unfortunately it had been cancelled, but we did have a nice chat with one of the couples that participates, Phillip and Ester, who are Kenyans serving here with Food for the Hungry.

We went to bed pretty early on Sunday evening as we were quite exhausted and took the kids to school on Monday morning.

For Rebecca and I we took a comp-time day off on Monday as we were really worn out.  We swam in the morning then went to a café and had some fresh fruit juice and reflected back on our time.  One of the interesting things I observed is how much more at ease we are in our role here and working with our partners.  Truly being with that group had more the feeling of being among friends than professional associates.  It is also quite an accomplishment to realize that we conducted the entire retreat in french ourselves without really even thinking about it or writing everything down first.  It did not seem like a really big deal to do that.  Truthfully it is only at the last minute that I am remembering to mention that fact in the blog.

We were grateful that things went as well as they did and we had no catastrophes.  After school we took the kids to Cercle Hippique where Oren was very excited to ride a horse again.  I don’t know if riding lessons are in the future, but he really wants to ride by himself without being led around by the grooms that care for the horses.

We have a fairly routine week this week but I am preaching this Sunday at our church so I will be busy getting a sermon ready.  Prayers that that would go well are always appreciated.