Debordé After a Week in Kigali

Matt Gates in Kigali in front of his house with his pet Turkey.  Sorry no other photos this week.  Rebecca has the camera in Uganda.  More next week.

Some days are tougher than others, but this past Thursday was a real doozy.  It was not that there was anything particularly bad about it, in fact I spent half the day on a bus coming back from Kigali where I had just spent the past 4 days with partners and our service workers, helping them prepare project plans and reports for the next fiscal year.  I usually try to schedule travel in the first half of the week so that I can teach my dance classes on Friday and also be home for the weekend.  (Which we try to not use for work.)  

The problem was that my return was coming just hours before Rebecca's departure for a full week to Kampala, Uganda, where she is helping to lead worship for an annual conference hosted by Duke University called GLI (The Great Lakes Initiative.)  Both of these trips were to be challenge as one of us had to be away while the other did full time parenting for many days.  But having only Thursday afternoon and evening for transition between the 2 trips was just about the limit of what we could manage.

Rebecca's conference has required a tremendous amount of coordination as she is essentially leading a delegation of church VIPs from Burundi as well as some service workers and local partners.  She will also be leading worship there as part of a team.  This has meant a lot of last minute scurrying about to make sure plane and bus tickets are in the right hands, and everyone knows where they need to be to catch their rides.  There are about a 18 people going from  Rwanda and Burundi and Rebecca has been responsible for all their logistics.  

This did mean that much of our transition day was spent preparing for the next trip rather than reflecting on the last one, and precious little time for us to reconnect as a couple of family.  We did successfully get her off on the plane on Friday morning though after dropping the kids off to school and taking a swim.  Friday afternoon was a bit of a challenge as I teach my 3 ballet classes and Oren goes to soccer.  I brought the kids with me to class and through coordination with some mothers there, I was able to get the kids dropped off back home where Yolanda and Melody has come down in preparation for joining Rebecca in Kampala the next day.  

……………………………. 4 day interlude……………………………………….

Debordé is a french word I have come to appreciate.  It basically means overwhelmed, but it summons up this image of a boat either taking on too much cargo or water and beginning to sink below the surface.  It describes fairly well how I have been feeling the past few days since Rebecca's departure.  The weekend went well enough, we had yoga and then I took the kids to the lake for the afternoon on Saturday.  

We went to church on Sunday and I ended up helping in David's class as there were not many monitors and he has not been good about staying in the classroom.  We had a leisurely afternoon and then went to small group where the kids played very well with their friends while the adults met.  I felt I had the single parent routine down pretty well, even got Oren's homework done for Monday morning.

We got off to school in good time on Monday and I went to work.  When we got back for lunch though I discovered there was no one home.  Apparently our staff was sick.  Odifax came in a bit later and said he was getting better, but when I called our cook Marcelline she said she was in the clinic and was doing quite badly.  She did not anticipate being well before the end of the week.  

This would prove to be a challenge as not having a cook and needing to take care of the kids is a bigger challenge here than in the US where there are prepared food options available at grocery stores and fast food restaurants.  Not only that, but she cooks for our other staff as well so it means that there is no food ready for anyone.  I did make some lunch with leftovers for us on Monday and made a plan to buy stuff for sandwiches in the days ahead.  I would have some time to shop in the mornings while the kids were at school.  We did well together on Monday despite the fact that it is the night Oren has to do his dictation homework, but by evening I noticed David was very stuffed up.

David was not much better on Tuesday, but I did manage to get off to school again once more and continue our daily routine.  We went to karate after school and got the kids to better at a reasonable hour.  I was able to talk to Rebecca as well who said that things were going well at the conference.  David was definitely worse and the next morning (Wednesday) his eyes were glued shut with secretions and I dropped Oren at school and took David to a doctor to get drops for pink-eye.   Having no cook and a sick child, which meant no time for work proved to be about as much as I could handle.  

At that point I did reach out to some friends and contacted Naja and Thomas (our Danish friends) and asked if we might possibly come over for dinner.  They were able to have us which was very nice.  Today (Thursday) David is better and I sent him to school and have been able to follow our normal routine.  But I will say that without Rebecca or any other support at the house I have felt far to occupied (or pre-occupied) to sit down for a period of time substantial enough to write a blog entry.  I remember reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in which, at one point she imagines what Women's Literature might look like as a discipline.  She observed that women would probably have to write in shorter increments, perhaps smaller works because of the multiple claims on their time and even space to work.  --I think I had a real sense of what that experience was like.  Feeling, between the requirements of parenthood, work and other responsibilities the impossibility of having time alone with energy enough to sit, reflect and write.

Before recounting this past week, I was wanting to reflect on my visit to Kigali.  I had left the previous Monday and was there for 4 days.  The visit had multiple purposes.  It is the time of year when partners are writing their next set of strategic plans and need some advising.  I also wanted to check in our service workers:  2 SALTers, Janelle and Alyssa, and Matt our 3 year food security coordinator.

I was very encouraged by the work I saw there.  What particularly pleased me was to find that with Matt's help, all of our partners have decided to collaborate together as a consortium to execute an impressive livelihood project.  It involves them taking all of their existing groups throughout the country and sub-grouping them into regional zones.  Each zone will be overseen by one of the partners.  They are training all the groups in a savings strategy called VSLA  (basically they use their own assets by saving together and loaning the savings to each other to help them develop themselves.)  The groups will also each collaborate in an improvement in agricultural technique project, renting fields together and testing some conservation agriculture methodologies taught by Matt.  These combined projects should lead to improvement in livelihood for those involved and their communities.

What I particularly liked about the new spirit of cooperation in the project was that often partners compete, seeing assistance as a 'zero-sum' resource--If you have $1000 and you split it you each get less then if you kept it yourself.  What I am seeing though is that as they collaborate, they attract other donors to the projects they do as they demonstrate increased capacity.

What I am also inspired by is my own learning as I look back over 5 years.  I think I probably came in to this job with a normal 'western' naiveté about poverty.  To some extent I would say that, like most of us I believed that if someone had no shoes and you gave him a pair, you have actually improved his condition.  It took a while to appreciate that this could actually create a bigger problem of dependency or may hurt a local cobbler industry.

But even the wiser perspective we hear "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he will have food for life'. Also has a certain naiveté to it.  Indeed it can be patronizing to come to 'teach men to fish' and not notice that in fact they do know how to fish, and reason they have so few are far more complex and may involve complex structures of injustice that cannot be easily changed or removed by some 'well meaning' missionaries or development workers.

After 5 years I see how we are learning none-the-less how to bring change.  First, it takes time, it requires humility, especially about what we think we have to offer.  It is important to develop an eye to help others see their own assets rather than affirm their poverty.  Finally, change has to happen from within those who need it.  It cannot be done to them.  At best we can accompany others in their journey of self discovery and resist trying to rush them to arrive at objectives that reflect our priorities not theirs.  

I feel as a Christian mission organization we can, at our best, be powerful agents of transformation, but at our worst, can easily be arrogant, judgmental and ultimately do more harm than good.  (Jesus admonished the Pharisees of his day of being 'The blind leading the blind.")

The last thing that struck me about the visit to Rwanda was how close the end of our own term is coming and how hard it will be to leave.  We do have a year and a half left and that may seem like a while, but now we have at least 4 staff whose terms are longer than ours, who will be here after we leave.  The plans we completed in Rwanda are all 3 years long and will end after we have left.  It is a bit strange to think of these projects and people, in many ways feeling like offspring, that will go on to mature after we are gone.  (Planting

 seeds we will not harvest.)

It is interesting to realize how attached we have become to our work.  How the idea of leaving things we have begun here is actually painful, even at this point.  I am sure I will have more to say about this in the year ahead, but I think this is the first foreshadowing I have really experienced about the inevitability of leaving and how hard that will be to do.  It is a good thing to experience amidst the many frustrations of daily life in certain weeks.