A living saint, and Oren at School

“Are you saying that the blood of tribalism runs deeper than the waters of Baptism?”

--a question asked by a cardinal visiting Rwanda after the genocide when he saw the extent to which Christians participated in it. The answer that came back to him from the local church leaders was “Yes.”

Identity, Community, and the Gospel of Reconciliation: Christian Resources in the face of Tribalism, was the title of the conference sponsored by the Duke Center for Peace and Reconciliation. This was the milieu we spent the past 5 days in. Yes, just two days after arriving back in Bujumbura we found ourselves attending—NAY, HOSTING --this auspicious gathering.

We spent the week at the one big hotel: Club du Lac Tanganyika, in the company of several distinguished professors from Duke, notably Chris Rice and Father Emmanuel Katongole, who co-led it. Emmanuel is a Ugandan Catholic priest who led the Duke pilgrimage I wrote about in a blog last August. With us were about 90 other participants primarily from the Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda, and Congo. Most, I would describe as being on the front lines of peace and reconciliation work in the region, and the conference provided an opportunity to share stories, network, and pray and worship together. (There was a lot of talk about the need of trauma healing for the trauma healers.)

The event was quite inspiring and I want to share some highlights, but I will say a bit more about what it meant for Rebecca and I to host it. MCC was the primary sponsor of this gathering and so Rebecca and I were called upon to do a lot the banking, reimbursements, as well as numerous other errands. This proved to be quite a challenging assignment as travel reimbursements were done to individuals when they gave us receipts. Because of the different countries participating all of the refunds had to be in US$. We immediately cringed at the prospect of trying to track down a few thousand dollars in 20s, 10s, 5s and 1s. I can tell you no one uses dollars in denominations less than 100 here in Burundi. We divided the job, though, I went and got cash at the bank, then Zachee and I ran around town looking for forex cash exchangers who might be able to change our 100s into smaller bills. Rebecca, meanwhile, collected receipts and distributed money. Over the 4 days we did pretty well, but it was a challenge. The added complexity of needing to have new bills made the search even more difficult.

My duties also included leaving the conference midday to bring Oren home from school and after lunch together, leave him with Denise, his nanny --but I will come back to that later. Rebecca had the additional job of nursing David every 3 hours. He spent most of the three days listening quietly to the worship and talks from his mosquito-net-covered car seat. (He was quite a celebrity there.)

The days began with very inspiring worship led by an MCC worker from South Africa, two Kenyans, a Rwandan and a Congolese guitarist. We heard a message on the theme of the day. (There were 3: Day 1 was Lament, Day 2 was Learn, Day 3 was Live.) On each day small group workshops would focus on these themes. Each day ended with a closing worship and wrap-up session. There were some powerful speakers with inspired testimonies about their work, as well as bishops and church leaders from many Catholic and Protestant denominations.

On day 1 we wept for our culpability as Christians, for the failure of the church in the past to disrupt destructive identities that set peoples, even in the same churches, murderously against each other.

The quote from the top of the page came from the day of lament. The question by the Cardinal was deeply convicting to all of us who call ourselves Christians.

My own reflections found me revisiting a passage in the Bible (Matthew 10:37) which I found deeply disturbing in the past, but now had to consider with fresh eyes:
“Anyone who does love his father or mother more than me, is not worthy of being mine.” (I think in Luke it actually says “Anyone who does not hate his father and mother…”.)

I had not considered the extent to which we all, in our own tribal ways, inherit the best and worst of our family histories. I have no doubt that my past includes slave owning as well as other brutal behavior. I have inherited the racial hatred of my own past. I see Jesus’ call to abandon our malformed identities when we become his, as an important part of discipleship. For Burundians, one cannot be a Tutsi who is Christian, or a Hutu who is Christian, but must be first and foremost a Christian. A new creation, who must reject in no compromising terms, the loyalties and vendettas of the past, no matter how much they are an intimate part of ones own family identity. Divisive loyalty to clan must be sacrificed if the gospel is to have power to transform the world.

The paradox is that Christianity, more than any other faith seeks to welcome diversity, even as it demands such intense loyalty. We talked about the book of Acts where Peter is invited to eat unkosher food to symbolize the inclusion of gentiles into the faith. Christianity rejects the exclusive standard of The Law, invites people of all cultures and languages to interpret the Bible, yet, in this diversity seeks to maintain an identity as one family committed to love each other. So in a sense, the gospel at its best, I believe, redeems these very same marred identities, even as it undermines them-- loyalty does not mean conformity! Diversity is to be tolerated, even celebrated. No culture is privileged over another.

I won’t go into this much more, but we, as westerners were challenged by our own conception of African peoples as being ‘tribal’, where we do not use that description of western identities. I considered the possibility of the type of tribalism we might see in our own cultural context. Are fundamentalists a tribe? Or maybe Christians and Muslims are our two most significant tribes. I think this becomes true when we see sharing the gospel as a type of team sport, where we compete for quantity. Who has more people? Who is growing faster? Are we competing for souls? If we see this as a some kind of competition, especially vis-à-vis Islam, than I think we do reduce Christianity to just another tribal group. The cautionary tales are written all over sub-Saharan Africa where Christianity was cast abroad, millions were converted, and yet there was no transformation that went below skin deep.

Indeed the blood of tribalism ran deeper than the waters of baptism in the 20th century here in Africa.

Two personal highlights:

1) I was invited to dance as part of the closing ceremony. Rebecca sang "It is Well With My Soul," and I choreographed and performed a dance to it. It was well received and I was honored to be invited to share it. I think it was more than a bit surprising that a development worker in Burundi would have such an extensive professional dance resume. I did feel that God gave me a nice outlet to use my gift in that way, something I had yet to do in Burundi until now.

2) I think I met a real living Saint. I know that we use that word to describe a really good and selfless person, but I am trying to be as Catholic as possible here. I believe this woman should be canonized. I have known many people of God, but I have never met anyone who actually seemed to be animated by something supernatural. She is called Maggy, she is Burundian, a nun, and runs an enormous orphanage/foster care center, (10s of thousands of children) called Maison Shalom in Ruigi Province in Burundi. I had not heard of her before this conference.

How can I describe Maggy? She describes herself as crazy, she is hypernanimated--bubbly, laughs infectiously, boundlessly energetic. She wears outrageously colorful Burundian fabrics and headdresses and looks a bit like Carmen Miranda in my opinion. She described an audience at the Vatican where the interviewing Cardinal asked her why she came instead of ‘Sister Maggy’. She said she was Maggie and he looked at her and said, “but you are just an ordinary woman!” (She said he was expecting a Mother Teresa type, in a habit looking beatific.)

Maggy’s story is heartwrenching. As a young woman she was growing up in the heart of ethnic struggles in the 70s and 90s. She flatly rejected her family’s own ethnic prejudices. (They were Tutsi) and when the first conflict broke out she adopted a young Hutu girl (and a Protestant!) to come live with her family. They were outraged. Maggy took in Hutu orphans during the first conflict and Tutsi orphans during the 90s. She found herself to be, ironically, the enemy of everyone. Tutsis, her family, rejected her and Hutus as well. Several times they tried to divide ethnically her growing family of children. She was threatened, fled for her life many times, but never gave up. In the 90s she had hundreds of orphans she was caring for virtually by herself. She was supported by a local bishop.

In the past several years she has received major support from UNDP, UNICEF, and others. There is a great documentary about her, and she has won several major humanitarian awards (Opus Prize) for her work. She laughs it all off though. She says she has no use for NGOs or the UN. She says “all the white people want plans!! They want to know what I will be doing in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years!! I don’t even know what will happen tomorrow, how can I know what will happen in 5 years?" She has a website at http://maisonshalom.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=29&Itemid=53 Or for Utube try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rdv24_r-Okk

As a grantor, it was a challenging question. Everything in her life has taught her that she cannot trust the future, but she has trusted God all her life and HE has not failed her. How do we partner with that, when we are limited by our strategic thinking? I don’t have an answer to that question.

But I felt I was in the presence of Christ when she was at the conference. I wonder if he was loud, and colorfully dressed, and funny, as well as passionately devoted to obeying God’s will wherever it led him.


Life on the homefront continued to move through transitions. By about Thursday we all were sleeping through the night, officially ending our jet lag. Prior to that, our waking and sleeping hours were pretty random, and much of it is a blur.

Oren finally started at the Ecole Autonome Belge. (premiere maternelle or preschool). His teacher is Madame Cecille. It was interesting watching him being brave. The morning before we took him the first day, he was sitting alone in his room looking at the ceiling. I could tell he was struggling with the idea of going. Yet he seemed to be making the decision not to cry. He was very brave the first 3 days and went in, albeit hesitantly, to his classroom. There were quite a few other students and here are some pictures of the grounds and classroom.

After school each day at noon (it is daily from 8am to 12noon), I met him to bring him home. He beamed enormously when he saw me. But when I asked him if he had a good day, he said emphatically: NO! The last two days he did cry when we dropped him off in the class. Mdme Cecille said it was normal and that we should not hang around as that only aggravates the situation. I do know Oren well and I suspected he would stop as soon as he left. He has not seemed to be really warped in any way from the first week. We will see how the second goes. I will say that I have not detected any knowledge of the French language up to this point.

Other good news: our LandCruiser is out of the shop. It is good to have our car back, although we have been blessed by the generosity of our partner Help Channel who lent us one of theirs for the week.

We had several Burundian friends over for dinner tonight along with Zachee and his wife Bridget (I still need to write a story on them) with Timmy. He and Oren played well together. We also had a visit today from Lizzie, Zack and Grace (Simon’s family.) Oren is starting to find some friends around here and that is good. He really misses his cousins Miriam and Gabriel who he got to play with frequently the past 3 months. He also found out that one of the families in our small group has a trampoline in their house! I think Oren will enjoy spending more time over there as well.

David, who I apologize for not writing much about, is doing fabulously. He is getting a reputation as a little sage as he seems to have great capacity to sit quietly for long stretches of time and take in the things around him, oh yes and he usually has a huge smile for anyone who looks him in the eyes.