My Journey back to Rwanda by Judithe Registre

I first worked in Rwanda in 2001. Since then, I have had the privilege to travel through the country on numerous occasions.  Each time I am in Rwanda, I am moved to see the transformation that has taken place and continues to occur as Rwanda redefines itself.

We hear a great deal about how corruption is rampant in Africa, how African states are useless to their population, and how poverty is eating away at people’s dignity. I can go on with this list that so typifies the illustration of Africa, but that is not my goal as I reflect on my visit to Rwanda. Yet I will make this one point before I proceed. There is too little being said in the discussions that lump Africa into a single country about how a country like Rwanda is defying all of those odds that are given for the African Continent all too often.

The leadership’s commitment to womens involvement in all aspects of Rwanda’s development to the rebuilding of its infrastructure and human resources development are just a few of the things that move me as I encounter Rwanda again. Despite all these things, I am most startled by what I have witnessed through the Women for Women Program. Building Rwanda’s infrastructure, such as roads, homes, schools, and myriad others is perhaps the easier thing to accomplish based on the commitment and available resources. What is significantly more difficult to do in Rwanda because of the conflict is to refresh people’s souls and help them regain their trust in each other. This, I know all too well, is a long journey and will continue with each succeeding generation. Yet clearly, the group in society with the greatest potential to contribute to the rebuilding of trust is without a doubt the women of Rwanda.

At Women for Women International, the groups of women that come together to participate in the comprehensive educational and vocational skills training do so despite their different backgrounds. What they have in common is a willingness and determination to change their lives and those of their families and communities. We support them in that mission. In Rwanda, seeing women from different ethnic groups mired in that drive to transform their communities is the beacon of light that helps one understand the possibilities that exist for continued growth and stability in Rwanda. Forgiveness is not often granted without understanding, and with each group discussion, understanding is generated. You often see women building those bridges of trust. Indeed, such bridges are absolutely vital to Rwanda’s future. To hear a woman—a total stranger who has never met me before—say that she loves me and wants to see me to do well, motivates me to find the strength I need to love my neighbors. Hating does not help the pain go away; it never will. Her realization is perhaps that forgiveness might help lighten the load of the pain she bears. And with each burden that is laid to rest, the women find the peace and understanding they need to consolidate the foundation of the bridge of trust.

While in Rwanda I am reminded, that we do more than simply help women rebuild their lives by gaining skills and knowledge. We help them build trust through understanding, which is an ingredient that is perfectly essential to peace and nation building.

Sister to Sister in Rwanda – by Linda Bauer

Sister to Sister in Rwanda

April, 2009

The trip from Kigali to Rwamagana is a little more than an hour’s drive along a surprisingly well‑paved two-lane highway.  From my open window in the van I see lush green rolling hills and red earth, small mounds of farmland, banana trees, and wetlands filled with stalks of sugar cane and squat tea trees rushing by me.  Along the sides of the road many people are walking, all of them balancing something on their heads – baskets of deep red tomatoes or dusty brown sweet potatoes, plastic jerry cans filled with water, long thin branches of firewood, bundles of thick sugar cane or dark green cassava leaves – and everywhere the smoky scent of cooking fires permeates the air.  The beauty of Rwanda mystifies me.

At a crossroad in Rwamagana we leave the paved highway and drive several miles on a rutted, kidney-jarring, dirt road; ten of us bouncing along in the Women for Women (WFW) International van, the local children running alongside waving at us, the women hoeing their small plots of land gaping at us as we drive by, wondering who we are and where we are going.  I am traveling with the trainers from the Kigali office to enroll women from this rural area into the program – and to meet the woman I sponsor.  She has no idea I am coming.

More than one hundred women wearing long dresses and headscarves in brilliant African prints and infants tucked in their laps or swaddled on their backs are waiting patiently for us on the grass under the shadows of shade trees and brightly-colored rain umbrellas.  They study us curiously, especially me, the only white woman in the group.  Later I would learn they had many questions about me, wanting to know if I am “a woman or a girl;” meaning, if I am married or single, among many other things.

I sit on a wooden bench next to the WFW staff in the warm April African sun as one of the trainers translates Kinyarwanda into English for me.  The trainers finish telling the women about the program and then direct them into smaller groups.  My sister, Marie Odette, is called out of her group to meet me.  My first memory of Marie is of a young woman in a long brown print dress carrying a wooden bench for us to sit on and placing it under a shade tree.  We hug each other as though we are old friends who have reunited after a very long time apart.  Marie is a pretty, shy woman with a quiet demeanor, but she carries the look of sadness in her dark eyes.  Through my interpreter I learn that she and one brother are the sole survivors of a family of thirteen; she lost the others to the 1994 genocide.  She points to a small cemetery on the side of a hill where they are buried.  She tells me she had once planned to enter the convent to become a Catholic nun, but after her family was killed she lost faith and grew frightened of living alone and wary of the soldiers who drank heavily and congregated in her village; so she took a young man as a husband for protection.  She says he is a good man and tells me they make and sell banana beer to earn a living.  Then she smiles and tells me proudly that she has started her own business making donuts.  I ask her if her donuts are good.  Her smile turns into a wide grin and she says, “Yes, they are very good.”

Linda and her sister, Marie

Marie Odette, my sister in Rwanda

We pass the afternoon asking many questions about each other; Marie wanting to know where I live and what I do for my work, and if I have children.  She tells me she keeps losing babies and that it makes her the subject of gossip among the other women who seem to have little problem bearing many children.  We encourage her to go to the medical clinic for an examination instead of continuing to seek the advice of the traditional healer in her village; before we leave she promises she will go to the clinic and get the needed treatment.

All too soon the time passes, Marie thanks me for traveling such a long distance to meet her and is very grateful for the small gifts I have brought her; little practical things that are so commonplace to me are very special to her.  And she thanks me for supporting her so that she can complete the program and grow her little donut business and someday open a small shop.  And I feel it is the least I can do to help her accomplish that dream.

Women pause so that I can take images of them with their umbrellas. They remind me of African "Geishas"

The groups begin to break up and the women start to leave to walk back down the dirt roads to their mud houses to resume their daily chores – planting fields and carrying water, cooking meals, washing clothing, and tending to small children.  But here in the late afternoon sunlight as they cross the threshold between the grass and the red earth they appear like African geishas twirling their open umbrellas, their babies tied on their backs with wide swaths of padded cloth.  They pause graciously so that I can take their photographs.  Then Marie stands hand-in-hand with of one her friends and more women come to join her.  As they stand arm-in-arm and hand-in-hand and smile at me with their beautiful wide-open grins and I smile back at them, at once I feel we are all connected.  That we are universal sisters with the same hopes and desires, loves, and dreams, and that day by day we are changing and enriching each others lives through this connection.

I would like to thank the staffs in both the Washington, DC and Kigali offices for making the arrangements for me to meet my sister, Marie Odette in Rwamagana, Rwanda.  It was truly an extraordinary experience that I never dreamed would have come true nearly two years before while I was still living in San Francisco and first started sponsoring a sister through WFW after learning about the organization by watching a 60 Minute segment by Anderson Cooper about the brutal rapes of women in the DRC.  Marie is the third woman I have sponsored.  Thank you to Priscilla and Sara in DC and to Peace and Berra and all the staff in the Kigali office who picked me up at my hotel, allowed me to hitch a ride to the rural villages and attend workshops at the Kigali office, and for enthusiastically translating for me.  They always made me feel welcome.  Thank you to my fellow Tuesday night volunteers in the DC office who enthusiastically supported my trip and wanted to hear all about it upon my return, and for their patience when I repeated the same stories to others over again.  And most importantly, thank you to Zainab, for her tireless effort in raising the consciousness of people all over the world to the plight of women in war-torn countries who still live under deplorable conditions and suffer unspeakable inhumanities and indignities that no woman should ever have to endure.  And to Women for Women International for improving the lives of thousands of women through their innovative sponsorship program.  For in the end I do believe that if we can improve the life of at least one other woman in this world then we have truly done something significant and good with our lives.

Rwanda/DRC Trip – by Sara Sykes

In the Women for Women International headquarters office in Washington DC, I sit in a small office everyday.

I type on my computer.

I answer the phone.

I rush down the hall, eager to finish a task, brief someone, put out a fire. Sometimes, I go outside, walk to Starbucks, stretch my legs.

I discuss our programs. I talk about the women we help. I say things like, “By the end of our program, our women can bring their vocation to market” or “During our program, our women meet in small groups and learn about human rights.”

I talk about our sponsorship program. I say, “For just $27 a month, you can help improve the life of a woman survivor of war” or “For just $27 a month, you can have a sister across the world.”

I say these things, I believe in what we do.

Then, I had the opportunity to travel to Rwanda and DRC with our founder and CEO, Zainab Salbi.

I am not just a believer anymore. I am so much more than that. Being able to witness, firsthand, the impact of our programs on women, their families, and their communities amounts to more than I can ever sum up into a catchphrase, a passing conversation, a blog on a website. Maybe Chris, a South African who traveled with us to both Rwanda and DRC, had something when he said, “I have traveled with many journalists, and they are always looking for the worst. Women for Women showed me the best.”

It is so easy to find the worst around us. Don’t our friends and loved ones say that it’s easier to harp on the bad things, more difficult to pick out the good things? It is so easy to go to a place like Rwanda, find a genocide victim, despairing over her slain children, her murdered husband, the machete marks on her back. It is so easy to go to DRC, find women used as weapons of war, living in IDP camps, seven starving children spilling out of a tattered tent no bigger than a small car, their starving bellies swelling out of their ripped clothes.

But when you look, when you really look, you will find the best.

You will find our women.

When you really look, you will see our women in Rwanda. Genocide survivors working on a pineapple cooperative with their sisters, singing as they harvest their crops. Smiling at each other, sharing and learning from one another, the babies on their backs dreaming what babies dream. You will see a woman using her sponsorship funds to send her children to school, buy a cow, equip her home with electricity. You will see our CIFI graduates building a kitchen garden together. You will hear a woman say how Women for Women helped her to “not despise herself.”

When you really look, you will see our women in Congo. Pens pressed to crisp new blue notebooks. The letter a repeated across the page, a look of determination, white chalk on a blackboard. You will see women sharing their stories. Allowing their voices to be heard above the violence that’s been committed against them, an outlet of healing. You will see women who are no longer isolated victims on their own islands of despair, but banned together, rising above the rubble and rampage. You will see women cherishing their sponsorship letters, keeping them under their heads at night, bragging about the photo they received from their sister. You will see heart, and soul, and hope. You will hear a woman say, “My dream is my children going to school.”

Returning to my small office in D.C., I go back to my computer, the phone, rushing down the hall, the occasional trip outside.

But everything has changed.

The world looks brighter, throbbing with a new heartbeat around my own. Now I can say it all the best way I know how. I can reach in, see our women dancing, singing, gathering, sharing, learning, healing and hoping. I can pull it right out and share it with you, the only way I know how–the best.

I learned it from our women.

Rwanda – GAKO Farm – by Sara Sykes

April 3, 2009

GAKO Farm

I have never before felt such a strong connection to the Earth as I did visiting our CIFI program at GAKO farm in Kabunga, about a 30 minute drive from Kigali. Everything about GAKO vibrates—the clean air, green, fresh and alive with the hum and churn of organic processes and people. Our women learn so many amazing skills, from sack and kitchen gardens to animal husbandry and crop management. Mr. Richard, our technical partner and the founder/managing director of GAKO, his wife, Francine, a trained agriculturalist, and their lovely children were our gracious tour guides, showing us the incredible capabilities, power, and true worth of sustainable, organic farming.

Since land in Rwanda is so scarce (.6 HA for each family), skills such as sack and kitchen gardens are vital for our women to learn.

Small groups of our women train intensely at GAKO for six days at a time, living in dormitories and applying what they learn in the classroom to the demonstration gardens and fields that are GAKO. The result is stunningly beautiful—women, working as a unit, reusing and recycling all materials produced on the farm to feed themselves, the workers, and sell at market. The effect is so true and resonates so loudly, one realizes that the very worth of an education and training in organic farming and agriculture is infinite. These women are learning the very art of survival—food production and management—and, in turn, bringing those skills back to support their families and communities.

One women in our program explained that after returning to her home with her newly acquired skills, her neighbor said, “I want to know how to do that! Can you teach me?”

After showing us one demonstration farm on .6 HA, Mr. Richard explained that the particular family living on that farm brings in $400 a month. The goal of the Rwandan government is for every family to be making $900 a year. For a moment we were all shocked into silence.

Our concept of circles at Women for Women is truly circuitous onto itself. The circle of women gathering, learning, and then sharing creates better communities, families and nations, circles forever linked. Our CIFI program deeply epitomizes this and looking out amongst the thousand hills, the women and men working side by side, the bean, carrot, cassava, and chard growing neatly, yet inhabiting a wild quality all the same, allowed me to feel a true connection, depth, and spiritual meaning to the work we do.

Perhaps this is my circle, or, just the beginning, in Rwanda.

Updates from Rwanda – from Jon Thiele, Economic Development Specialist

Gitarama, Rwanda

It is graduation day in Gitarama. 120 very enthusiastic women from six groups are gathered around a large tree on the edge of this small town in southwest Rwanda. Non-stop singing and dancing, drums, your correspondent pulled from his chair to join in… well, the less said about a middle-aged man’s attempt at ethnic dance the better. More interesting is the story of Mukashyaka from the village of Shyogwe.

Several women told their stories– testifying, they called it– and all were well worth hearing, but Mukashyaka wanted to make very clear the change in her life over the past year. She passed around a couple of photos. The first was taken a month or two before she joined the program, and in it she kneels beside her five children. It is the image most of us have when we think of “the typical African village family”– barefoot kids in tattered clothes, weary expressions, dirt.

The second photo is from just a month ago, and the kids look they are setting off for just another day at the grade school in your neighborhood: neatly dressed in clean shorts & t-shirts, wearing shoes, hair neatly trimmed, and standing beside their obviously happy mother. Mukashyaka told us about her sense of accomplishment, about the relief at finally being able to do some good for her children, and about her determination to “never fall back to the old ways”.

Others testified to similar changes in their lives. “I look and feel so much better now”, “some old friends don’t even recognize me”. More singing, a few tears, and a lot of laughter.

I was asked to pass out the graduation certificates. These were the first diplomas any of the women had ever received, and it was an honor to be part of the very first recognition of their own personal achievment. It was getting late, and we had a long drive ahead of us, but as we drove off, no one else had gone home.

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On the road in Rwanda

It is a five hour drive from Kigali, through Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park, to Cyangugu and the border with the DRC. It’s a decent road, winding through the hills, past tea plantations, and the almost endless forest. We also drove past a refugee camp, refugees from fighting in Burundi.

“When did they get here?” I asked.

“1975.”

I do not speak French well. I must have misunderstood. “1975? Over 30 years in a UN camp? Why don’t they go back or resettle somewhere?”

“They can’t.”

That was the whole answer. Seth doesn’t talk much, but that was still the whole answer. For large numbers of people in this region, hopeless is an unbreakable fact of life. Some of their children are growing up in that camp.

Ashley Judd’s Journal from the Congo Day 2

I was able during this dialogue to complement Women for Women International’s extraordinary work by giving a reproductive health, safe water, and malaria lessons. For example, I explained that one can become pregnant 31 days of the month! Most said the only used birth control during the “dangerous” times….we talked about injectable birth control as long lasting and safe, but how they needed to use a condom each time to protect from HIV (all did have good perception of their HIV risk). We discussed the female condom as discreet option, though most said they could negotiate a condom with their husbands, as fine a tribute as possible to Women for Women International. I told them about my recovery buddy, and asked if they would be willing to make a commitment with a friend to buy long lasting insecticide treated mosquito nets; they gave their word to one another and committed to following up….today!!!!! All raised their hands and said she would begin sleeping under a net immediately. “Imagine how you would feel,” I said, “If you had to write your sponsor that you had missed your Women for Women International graduation with a case of malaria! You came here to learn how never to neglect yourself….so step up and protect yourself from malaria! (Congo’s children account for 1 in 20 malaria deaths world wide; these great women lose their productivity if they are sick with preventable diseases….)

That last paragraph is not meant in any way to suggest that Women for Women International’s work is partial or incomplete. In fact, their work is extraordinary in the maximum. I was visiting with only 20 out of thousands of Congolese women they have reached, and this group is not finished yet with their “topics.” It just means that it takes all of us non-profit organizations working in partnership to provide a complete solution to an exceedingly complex and varied series of life challenging problems that confront the poor. We specialize in health: prevention, creating recognition of problems and treatment seeking behaviors, treatment, products, and services, and we’re damn good at it. Women for Women International teaches traumatized, victimized, poor women to bathe, to learn to feed themselves, to read, count, write, parenting skills, social skills, money skills, a trade. Together we empower and protect the whole woman.

Back on that lush, soft grass, we danced, caroused, ululated, clapped, bumped, hugged, and smiled. At the very end, I lead a passionate salute to Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women international: her name rang through the air in a series of joyful waves, sung by beautiful, clean, fresh smelling, literate, skilled, empowered standing tall Congolese women!!

And at PSI we’re already brainstorming about how to cooperate more, to hire their graduates as Peer Educators, to present reproductive health activities as new women come in, etc.

For more on how Women for Women International works, and to become a sponsor, see www.womenforwomen.org