Advocacy Tour and Existential Ruminations

Advocacy team with Rwandan partners at Friends Peace House in Kigali.

Sometimes getting this writing started seems to be an existential problem.  Who is it that is writing this blog?  I feel like I used to know.  But I am changing, a lot.  Maybe this is becoming more conscious to me because I am able to see the end of the road from here.  We are less than two months away from completing our term, but I don’t know in what way I will be going ‘back’ to anything, because I don’t seem to be me anymore.

This came to mind last week on a field visit to the Kigeme refugee camp in Southern Rwanda.  I have been there several times before as we support a project there in conjunction with the Friends Church.   We provide financing that has trained refugee volunteers in the camp in conflict mediation and trauma healing.  They act as peer counselors and mediators in the camp and have given testimonies about the amazing positive affect these interventions are having.

Vivine

I was there bringing some members of MCCs advocacy offices (from the UN and Washington DC) to see the work we are doing in the region.  They are trying to better understand what policy recommendations we should be making to the UN and US government with regard to the region. 

The meeting with the refugees was very enlightening and we stayed with them for several hours asking them questions ranging from how they ended up coming to the camp, to when they thought it might be safe to return to the DRC (in North Kivu.)

The overwhelming challenge for them is having sufficient food every day.  They get a set amount of rations from the UN, corn and beans.  But to grind the corn they have to pay a miller about 20% of their ration for the month to have it milled into flour to be used for making the corn dough they like to eat (fufu).

Through all of this, what struck me was how completely normal this felt to me.  Sitting and discussing very practically and thoughtfully how one might be able to eek out a living for another day.  I felt neither horror, nor guilt, nor pity.  I was there to help and to better understand them.  And they did not seem 'other' to me in any way.  We were all humans with very different problems, but all of us want the same things, food to eat, some clothes, a safe place to sleep, a place for our children to go to school, and a way to earn some money.  These came up over and over again.

Ester

I appreciated the time with them and the advocacy team was thrilled with the chance to hear from refugees in Rwanda.  But as I left I was struck by this question, of who I have become.  When did I become a person who feels at home with refugees?  Who finds discussions of where one’s next meal comes from, a topic of interest? 

When I emerge from that world, and return to our guesthouse to look at Facebook, the New York Times, or anything else, I find myself at a loss.  These worlds seem utterly incompatible.   I find the partisan wars in politics tedious, the injustice against the poor infuriating, and the obsession with self-care and the endless pursuit of personal happiness, completely baffling.  Most surprisingly, I cannot imagine myself ever being immersed in an interesting escapist TV series like Game of Thrones or The Wire.

I don’t know who I am anymore or who is going to be going home to try to reintegrate into my own culture.

The past week I was in Kigali to meet the aforementioned advocacy team.  I went up with Melody Musser who agreed to help me take them around to visit some partners and other sights when I had other work to do during the three days they were there.

Patrick Maxwell our Bukavu service worker, who had been down in Bujumbura with his dad the week before, came up and joined us as well.  He plays an advocacy role with the DRC program so he was a welcome addition to our team.

We arrived on Tuesday, a day ahead of the team who came Wednesday.  The guesthouse that we usually stay in was full last week and we needed to find lodging elsewhere.  We ended up at the Good News guesthouse in the Gikondo neighborhood.  I can highly recommend it if you need a place to stay in Kigali with hot water and excellent internet. 

When the team arrived we began our tour with a visit to the genocide memorial museum in Kigali.  I honestly have avoided visiting such memorials after my first year here because it is not something I find I need to remind myself of.  Nonetheless, it was worthwhile looking again at the way that they are trying to preserve the memory of those killed---many photos and stories.  There is a good explanation about the events that led up to the genocide.  While the genocide is not the only thing that we want one to think of when one comes to Rwanda, it does not help to deny it.  This is a deep trauma that touches the life of everyone here, yet no one talks about in a personal way, certainly not to a foreigner. 

We spent the late afternoon there before going out to dinner.  We were joined at dinner by our SALTers and Mark, Angela, and Ben Sprunger, the MCC area Reps and their son.  They had arrived in Kigali the same day.  The area Representative office for Central West Africa will be re-locating to Kigali this summer and they are the avant-garde.

We all enjoyed going out to eat at Sola Luna with the entire group.  The next morning the advocacy team met with some of our partners for  a local perspective on Rwandan politics.  (Can’t say more about this as it is classified.)  In the afternoon Matt Gates took them on a tour of one of our Conservation Agriculture projects.  There was a mishap enroute when the hood of the Fortuner, not securely fastened after a fill-up, flew up and cracked the front windshield.   Despite this, the visit went fairly well.

Friday, their last day, was our most ambitious, we spend the morning with someone from UNHCR who filled us in on work with refugees in Rwanda.  From there we took a 3 hour trip to the Kigeme camp I wrote about above.  Although we only spent a few hours there before making the 3 hour trip back to Kigali, the trip was well worth it.  On the long drive home we listened to a Mahalia Jackson CD and for the first time I really felt like I understood Gospel music.  Every song reminds you that things are bad now but its gonna be be better in Heaven.  (Where we are all going to get shoes!)  I don’t think it makes any sense to listen to this in a culture of excess, but here, after hearing the testimony, despair and hope of the refugees, it really spoke to me.  They are primarily Christian and thanked God even for our visit, and a reminder that they are not forgotten.  They were obviously uplifted by our visit and seemed even happy, in the way that the gospel music seemed to uplift me on the drive back.

The advocacy team left Saturday for the DRC with Patrick.  I headed back to Bujumbura with the Sprungers, the whole family.  Several MCCers stayed in Rwanda for a half marathon (Matt Gates, Matt Allen, Julia Downer, and Melody Musser)  The amount of MCC movement in the region is a bit crazy these days.

English reading club Moms

I arrived home with the Sprungers in the afternoon.  Angela Sprunger was here on business and was going to do an evaluation of an AIDS clinic we support. 

It was good to be back to see Rebecca and the kids.  They had been busy with lots of social activities, tennis, english club.  The highlight of which was a Lord of the Rings Birthday party complete with maps, bows and arrows, wooden daggers, swords and capes.  (Thanks Zack Johnson).

It was good to be back into a normal routine again the following week. We did have new guests arrive on Monday though.  Matt Alan’s (our SALTer) parents were visiting from Canada so we had a full house much of this week.

We did do some touristy stuff with the Sprungers, like visit Avril the chimp at Pinnacle 19.

Rebecca was particularly occupied this week continuing to watch over Marceline and her baby.  She had just finished explaining the importance of breast feeding the week before when Marceline called Monday to say the baby was not eating, had diarrhea and a terrible throat infection.

Mark and Ben Sprunger with Matt and his parents.

Rebecca went out and got her and the baby and took them to a good clinic.  He was unresponsive for several days.  Last night she was quite sure he would die.  But we went back to the clinic this morning to find him in better health, the antibiotics apparently worked.

We talked to the doctor privately to find out about lab results.  He very matter of factly explained that throat infections are common when an infant of 5 days is given a uvulectomy! (cutting out the uvula in the back of the throat.)  We were stunned.  Why would they do that?  Her husband insisted that it was a doctor at another clinic that said it was necessary, but the doctor at the clinic she was at told us it was a common practice here coming from some traditional medical superstition. 

It is bizarre to me that they are very conservative evangelical Christians who preach and sing in the choir, and would still go to some traditional ‘witch doctor’ with their new-born to do this highly dangerous and unnecessary procedure. 

Sometimes we feel like we need a break.  This episode encapsulates in a way our experience here.  We work hard for change, we do all we can, but so often we are clueless about the complex motivations and practices of those around us and we are foiled, in our efforts to make things better. Even after six years we are shocked by new information we never knew. This is not the first time where we feel like our work to assist completely contradicts the practices of those we are trying to help.  And they seem to be their own worst enemies.

We are getting tired, perhaps the timing of the end of our term is not altogether bad.  But I still don’t know who is coming home this August.

Bonus video, David and Oren playing with Avril the chimp on the trampoline.