A PSA and a Serendipitous Day

Like Father like son, or maybe it is mother—daughter.  These were among the 8 hippos we watched basking at Cercle Nautique Saturday.

PSA--  For any ex-pats living in Burundi or planning to come to Burundi, I need to advise you all that laptop theft is completely out of control these days.  Besides the two we had stolen at least 8 other friends have had theirs stolen in the past 3 months.  It is an easy target to snatch.  Light, portable and in unbelievably high demand here.  Armed robbery is not the modus operandi here, but expect your car to be broken to, or any carrying case left momentarily unguarded or carried casually to be snatched.  Best strategy is to have a well-maintained back-up drive.  --And don’t come with one you can’t afford to lose here.

David and Isabel

There is change in the air.   Although we are getting a few last throes of thunderstorm, the rains are coming much fewer and further between.  The mountains of DRC are starting to fade into the haze that will keep them hidden for the next 4 months. 

Besides the weather, there is a certain agitation that begins as the academic year draws to an end.  This is the time when we get the final word on who will be staying and who will be leaving as the summer break is the main time of transition between long-term arrivals and departures.

Minotaur sandwich
and homemade battleaxe

We are moving into the end game with several of our close friends this year.  Our German missionary friends, the Hoffman’s will be returning home this year after 4 years here, as well as our very close Danish friends, the Spanners.  They are actually taking a job with World Relief in Baltimore, so it is very likely we will see them again in the future in the US.  Another family from the UN is leaving as well who we have enjoyed through yoga, children’s ballet, and early music singing.  Others are just departing for the summer, including us. 

In all of this there is a certain jostling of social events to try and have some final meaningful times together.  So we are going out a lot with friends in various groupings quite a bit these days.  It is actually enjoyable but there is also a certain giddiness as people  begin to look forward, with excitement or trepidation to imminent departures.

This is also the time for those staying to watch for great sales on things others are leaving, although after 5 years, Rebecca and I are definitely stocked to capacity.

Among the social events that populated the week were the following:

A Birthday party for Zack Johnson.  His family are American missionaries who have been her for generations.  Zack is about Oren’s age and had a Star Wars party.  I took Oren and David last Saturday as Rebecca was at an overnight meeting and returning from Gitega.  It was a nice event with many mutual friends there, including a few newcomers.  The kids had a great time playing together and Joy had planned several Star Wars themed games and food, including a cake with Yoda, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leah and CP30 all made out of marzipan!! 

An outing up to Ijenda with the Hoffman’s as well as the Van Aardes, our South African friends.  It was a chance to have another final get together with the Hoffmans and the kids all enjoyed playing together.  David and Isabel were the featured children with Oren and the older boys setting up a wedding for them under a little shelter which houses a peculiar wooden lion statue

A dinner with the Millers at Ubuntu.  They our American missionary friends who are here as physicians with the Free Methodist Church.  We had a pleasant evening with them over pizza while the kids ran around the garden like maniacs.  They will be going back to the US for the summer, but fortunately not leaving.

Michael, Melody, Yolanda with
Julie

This weekend we are also hosting several of our service workers who are down for the weekend from Gitega, as well as Michael who is visiting from Bukavu.  He had also recently had his computer stolen and needed a little break from Eastern Congo.  Yolanda and Melody were down as well with a friend of Yolanda’s who is visiting for a few weeks. 

David and Isabel looking
at the hippos in the lake.

A Serendipitous outing to Cercle Nautique.  After having successful outing with our kids one on one, we decided to repeat that on Saturday.  Rebecca went with Oren to Cercle Nautique but then immediately called David and I because there were 8 hippos lounging there as well as 2 different groups of our friends--the Van Aardes, and the Johnsons.  Jessie Johnson had brought fishing equipment so the kids fished while the adults visited and we all enjoyed watching the hippos bask in the sun.  After that we stopped by the Cercle Hippique to see the horses and found Naja Spanner and Courtney Ivaska and their kids there as well!  Rebecca remarked that we could not have planned it better if we had tried.

Besides hosting and socializing we have had a fair amount of work between the two of us.  Rebecca was asked to preach last Sunday and continuing in the theme of stewardship that we have been exploring, she was asked to talk about a Christian approach to environmental stewardship.  She worked hard to great a visual, prophetic image to go along with the sermon and succeeded in her attempt. 

She began by reading the creation story while wrapping a box in beautiful paper on a table in front of her.  When it was wrapped she finished the story saying that God found it all very good before he rested.

She then unwrapped and opened the box to reveal a very nice, very colorful dress.  She talked about certain theologies that go against a notion that we have, as Christians, a responsibility to protect the environment.  As she talked she began to cut chunks out of the dress that was hanging on a stand on the table.  When she finished she took many of the cuttings and set fire to them on a plate.  The dress was completely ruined as she finished her discussion of these errant doctrines.

In the rest of the sermon she used a passage in Leviticus to talk about Sabbath and how God even instructed those using land to give it a Sabbath rest as well every seventh year.  She talked about the Jubilee year as well and tied environmental stewardship and economic justice together as a unified idea in the levitical laws.  I also sensed that in all of this she brought home the reality that God expects us to steward our resources in a way that allows for renewal.  Not using up, but rather restoring, as a commandment coming from the idea of Sabbath, for man, the animals, and the land.

Her sermon was well received and we enjoyed a very nice Sabbath day after that on Sunday with the kids at the beach. 

Children participating in YPI conference.

The other work event that took some of my time was a conference in Gitega on using children as peacemakers.  The person presenting the program was adamant that children were one of the most effective means of disseminating a message of peace and reconciliation as they even had capacity to influence parents.

There were quite a number of people in attendance representing several major institutions in the country including the Catholic and Anglican churches, several Universities, and other donors like World Vision.

My favorite part of the conference was on the first day when we sat in a plenary session.  We were a group of adults, mainly men, sitting at a large semicircle of tables facing a projector.  I noticed about a dozen places empty and thought there had been quite a few no-shows.  Then suddenly a dozen 6^th grade Burundian children came and took the empty places like they were adults.

They had been invited to participate and give feedback.  It was really interesting to be sitting in the room of grown-ups with them as we sat and discussed obstacles to the plan, possible solutions, and worked in small break-out groups to do strategic planning.

We are always trying to find ways to have beneficiary involvement in the planning of a project but this was a stroke of genius.

I was away on Wednesday and Thursday, but did get back in the evening despite some heavy rain upcountry.  I needed to be home of Friday because we are getting to the last two weeks of ballet classes and the little girls classes are preparing a presentation for their parents.  They are pretty excited about this and have been working hard to get ready.

That brings us back to today through a quick synopsis of the past 10 days.

In other non-chronological news, we have had several challenges in the past week, the hardest being the news that our one year volunteers in Rwanda (the SALTers Alyssa and Janelle) were actually denied visas that they have been in the process of applying for for the past 10 months.  It is a bit ironic because they have been in limbo this whole time and are only here for an 11 month term.  They will be able to finish their last month in Burundi as visa requirements are much less strict here, but it does leave us puzzled as to why. 

The immigration office claims that it is because of lack of qualifications but that does not really make sense.  The fact that there is some tension between the Canadian and Rwandan government could be another reason. We are also aware that Rwanda is getting much more strict about visa requirement since the M-23 crisis in Eastern DRC.  Anyway, we don’t understand completely what happened, but it does mean we will need to think hard about what we can do about bringing volunteers there in the future.

I will be traveling to Rwanda next week to talk to some of the leaders of the church that is sponsoring them.  Hopefully they will be able to shed some light on the situation.

Stewarding Power at a Partners Retreat

 David during one of his frequent visits to the farm at the Seminary in Burasira where we had our Partners Retreat.

I see that it is time again for another update.  I fear the past several might give one the impression we spend, between us, all of our time out of town.  Some months that seems to be the case, and this past week was no exception.

The occasion was our Annual MCC Partner’s Retreat.  Being our fifth year here, this is our fifth such retreat, and I will preface my remarks by saying it was one of least complicated most crisis-free ones we have had.

I say that because if you were to look back at past years of this blog in the months of May and June, you would see that most were uncannily timed to fall on some of the most serious health crises we have had here in the past 5 years.  I would say that almost every one of them was almost cancelled at the last minute, and at one Rebecca was recovering from malaria, while another, I was required to deal with a health crisis of a service worker family that prevented me from going all together.  Other years it was Oren or David who were seriously ill.

Felix, Matt, Pastor Jeredie, Melody, Yolanda

So when I say that this one was uncomplicated and crisis-free, I am saying it like I feel some kind of hex has finally been broken over this event. 

The retreat was held last Thursday through Saturday (we actually arrived Wednesday evening) at Burasira, the site of the Grand Seminaire near the Hope School for the Batwa.  It is really an ideal place with a very modest guest facility, conference rooms, and a cafeteria, all in a very picturesque setting in a fairly remote part of Burundi between Gitega and Ngozi. 

It is also ideal in that it is roughly half-way between Bujumbura and Kigali so that people traveling from different countries  come about the same distance.  We were also fortunate to have a week in May when the kids only had three days of school (Ascension Day is a Holiday weekend in this Catholic Country).   So we went as a family bringing Marcelline, our cook, along as a nanny for the kids. 

Antoine and Musafiri

Burasira is a very familiar place to them as they have been coming up since Oren was 3 years old.  It was where our service worker Jodi Mikalachki used to live and is the current home of our SALTer Teri-Lynn Jordan.  It is about a kilometer away from the Hope School itself and the seminary, although rustic, is a child’s paradise, with a labyrinth of gardens and courtyards as well as a farm complete with stables full of cows, goats, pigs and rabbits. 

Having planned this kind of event before, Rebecca and I were able to use our templates from the past to organize a schedule, plan music, and invite everyone.  Transportation was arranged by partners from each town (Buja, Kigali, Gitega) and no one was even late to arrive on Wednesday evening for the opening supper and introductions.

Jean Baptiste, Teri-Lynn, Felix

Activities for the 3 days include praise and worship, prayer, free time to walk around as well as do some sports (there is a basketball court, as well as soccer field).  We also have a theme every year and try to do some practical work related to MCC planning and reporting criteria.  This year the theme was “The Stewardship of Power”—an idea that came from me as we have been talking about stewardship in our church the past several weeks.

The basic premise of the theme is that power, defined as the ability to change one’s environment by causing and preventing actions, is something we all want an unlimited amount of.  (In our session I actually asked for a show of hands of who had too much in their lives.)  

I discussed different ways in which power is exercised and made this list:

Negative:

Force—Power exerted by threat to another’s life or well being to cause one to act in an INVOLUNTARY manner.

    (Ex.  Slavery, rape, Capital Punishment in certain cases)

Coercion— Power exerted through pressure of negative social consequences to cause one to act in an INVOLUNTARY manner

  (ex. Sexual harassement, but also mandatory vaccinations)

Manipulation---Power exerted through persuasion or misdirection to cause one to act in an INVOLUNTARY MANNER

   (ex.  Propaganda, certain kinds of advertising or fundraising based on guilt)

Neutral:

Influence:  The capacity to persuade others to act in your interest because of any number of personal traits or social relations.

(ex.--went to same college, good speaker, nice looks, same clan, money-as salary or bonus)

Expertise:  The possession of special knowledge by an individual or group that has intrinsic values to others.

(medical doctor, professional experience)

Positive:

Authority:  The right to exercise power delegated by an institution or another person (or group of persons) to an individual (or group).

   (ex.  President of the Country, or a Court of law, Legal Rep of Church, school teacher, etc.—note: can be given power to use force coercion, etc.)

Rights:  Protections given by an institution (or State) to individuals or groups that are enforced by that institution.  (Right to fair trial, bear arms)  note—sometimes rights are symbolic (representing an ideal) if an institution is not actually empowered to enforce them.  Ex. Right to work

Paul, Francois, Melody

Using this framework to understand how we exercise power, I then talked about the one most relevant to us in our institutions: Authority and Rights and made the case that exercising power in this way is in fact (in its ideal) a stewardship of power.  That is, the power that one has is not one’s own, but power given by another person or group to be held in trust by the one entrusted to use it.

I did acknowledge that there can be ‘illegitimate authority’ (like having an army) but focused on the more common experience we have of institutions, organized to take actions using a legitimate distribution of power through the delegation of authority.

The challenge is that we can be good or bad stewards.  We can abuse our power, or use it inappropriately, but also the ones delegating power may not put clear limitations on the power one is given.

Authority clearly defines and limits power.  I mentioned the crisis I see in many of Burundi’s churches is a crisis of abuse of authority where the institution has not put clear limits on power and those given stewardship over it find ways to exceed their authority in their natural desire to have unlimited power.

Oren venerating the Blessed Mother

I won’t say more here, if you are interested I can send my lecture notes.  The partners found it very interesting, particularly two questions I posed:

1)   Can one use negative ways to exercise power to achieve positive ends?

2)   Can one use positive ways to exercise power to achieve negative ends?

The answer is yes to both and we find abuse of power in both circumstances.

We ended our discussions with a workshop where we worked in small groups addressing some very practical situations  in small groups.  The idea was to address the problem first, and then second, propose some institutional policy that would prevent this problem from happening in the future.  (setting limits on power.)

Here are two examples of the questions I gave:

1) You are in a managing position in your partnership and a female field officer confides to you that a married male manager (your colleague) is trying to find opportunities to work alone with her and making many inappropriate compliments about her “good looks”.  He has asked her to accompany him on an upcoming field visit.

2)   You are running a school through your partnership.  A teacher reports that during the school day, a father of a student came and started to beat his daughter on school grounds while other teachers and administrators looked on.

Yves, Pacifique

How would you manage this situation? What policies might one put in place to prevent this problem in the future? 

In the US it might seem pretty obvious how these situations would be handled because the State guarantees certain rights, especially in the latter case.  But in a place like here, where the State does not have very consistent capacity to enforce any rights, it is important for our partners to consider what policies they will enforce in their projects and how they will do so.

The discussions were very interesting and I think the lesson about seeing authority as a stewarding of power was very helpful for them in thinking about other situations, even outside of their partnership where this would be applicable.

While that is a synopsis of the work we did on Friday, we did many other things as well.  The afternoons were off and many of the partners enjoyed playing basketball and were quite good.

Teri-Lynn with some of her kindergartners.

We also did a field visit up to the Hope School one morning and were able to see many of the classes and hear some of its history.  They greeted us with their drum corps which is always a treat before visiting the classes.  Since we were on Teri-Lynn’s home turf she took us to several classes where the kids could show-off their English through songs they knew.

The Hope School kids seemed to enjoy the attention, but especially liked to see David and Oren who came along for the visit.  David was particularly amusing and at one point walked alone into one class and sat down at a little desk and chair as if he were a member of the class.  The other children found it quite amusing and did a chorus of “Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes” for him.

Jean-Baptiste, Normand with Marceline
trying out the drums.

The Hope School is definitely one of our successful projects that is very nice to show to others as its impact on the community is palpable even during a short visit. 

Generally the retreat is a good time for partners to meet each other, network, share experiences.  We have not really changed our partners the whole time we have been here, so most know each other quite well.  I find that this way of working has been very effective and to see our partners looking for opportunities to collaborate rather than compete for scarce resources is very impressive. 

The only real setback in the whole retreat was the fact that our two Rwanda SALTers, Janelle and Alyssa, were not able to leave Rwanda to come to Burundi because they are having a lot of trouble getting their resident visa and could not get their passports back in time to travel.

The visa situation has been particularly difficult in Rwanda this year, especially for Canadians.  We are hoping for better luck next year in terms of getting visas in a timely manner.

We all returned to our respective homes on Saturday midday, and our family was back at the house by late afternoon.  We had a quiet evening together watching a movie.  The kids had been very good with Marceline during the trip and enjoyed visiting the farm animals quite a bit.

Sunday was quite normal and we went to the beach between church and our cell group meeting.

Monday was a very special day where Rebecca and I took a true Sabbath.  We took the morning off together, and after dropping the kids at school, went over to the Lake and enjoyed a morning swimming, talking, praying together.  It had been too long of working hard side by side or apart without a chance to relate to each other as a couple. At lunch, when we picked up the kids, I took Oren out for lunch and Rebecca took David out.  They both loved having special time with just one of us.  We have to do that more.   All in all, it was the perfect closure to a very busy long weekend.