Wednesday, October 29, 2008

"It's Real"



So Dan and I continue to play like sponges and soak up the beautiful music, smiles, weather, and overall warmth of Rwanda. We're learning new Kinyarwandan words each day--I learned "murabeho" yesterday: "goodbye."

Sunday we went to an Anglican church for worship and it was wonderful! Our days are filled with meetings, site visits, good conversations, and lots of de-briefing at night. 

Yesterday was quite a day for Dan and me. I'm grateful for the opportunity to be drafting the Administrator's speech for an upcoming USAID conference, and was in desperate need of some "material." Many of you will know that I dread drafting these things, and I actually really stink at anything verbal except for talking too much. I got my first C in Reading Comprehension in the second grade. So yesterday I needed all the help I could get.

Dan, I, Tom Allen, Glen, a USAID colleague, and another new friend, Elizabeth, went to visit Nicholas Hitimana's for-profit venture called Ikirezi. Ikirezi is much more than the organic-geranium-plant-growing, essential-oils-for-export venture it appears. Through growing cooperatives, 830 widows of the genocide work alongside each other to cultivate their eight rows each of geraniums just as they do their relationships with one another. But it's not that easy. Many times, widows of genocidaires work directly with women whose husbands were brutally killed by those same men.

After Dan and the rest peeled off to visit another site, I had the privilege to speak with Odette. 

Everyone in Odette's family except for two of her five children were killed in the war. Her parents, three children, and siblings died in a church up the road where Hutus and Tutsis were ordered by Hutu extremists to separate, so that they could execute the Tutsis. When the Hutus refused to leave their neighbors', spouses', and friends' sides, thousands died.

Odette and some of her family had retreated to Uganda, where her husband died fighting for the RPF, the rebel army which would come to take back Rwanda from Hutu extremists and put President Kagame into office. Odette had nothing.

She came to Links Ministry, Ikirezi's sister organization, looking for enough income to buy soap to bathe herself and her children. Today she's the treasurer of her geranium-growing cooperative at Ikirezi; she's generated 4 seasons' worth of money, her remaining children are in school, and she can buy them clothes and food.

After telling me all of this, Odette asked if she could explain to me (through Nicholas) how she "came about really forgiving those who killed her family, and not having anything left in the back of my heart." She explained that she hated westerners and Hutus for what they'd done to her family and her friends. But one day, during a meeting with the women of her co-op, a Hutu from the North came, knelt down before this group of women, and, weeping, begged forgiveness for what his people had done to theirs. She continued to forgive those Hutus around her, and she says God's since replaced the fear she had of them with love.

She just has one last "test" for this healing, she told me. She has to go to that church up the road...and she's so afraid. But she'll go--she says that forgiveness hasn't been easy, but when one gets healed by God, that "it's real." I'll say.

Pray for Odette and for this country.

All for now! Murabeho.

Campbell

2 comments:

LP17 said...

Wow! I wish I could come over and see all that you have already seen. Think about the wonderful stories you will be able to tell your children one day. Guess what? Just now when I was reading your blog I felt Baby P flutter for the first time! Crazy, huh? She must love her Aunt Campbell and Uncle DV. Miss you.

Zach and Noelle said...

What a story of the LORD's grace and redemption! The mighty God of history is at work in the lives of the people of Rwanda. We will be praying for Odette and countless others like her. Love you guys.