It's Working

The drive back to Kigali

Team-Building Exercise

The students are starting to open up more, showing both their pain and their undefeatable spirit. Today the Archbishop of the Methodist Church in the region (100 churches) presented on “Unity and Reconcilliation.” It is a government curriculum, but Archbishop Samuel has a master’s degree in Conflict Resolution and Peace Making from South Africa and he added his own exercises and perspective. I was so impressed. The way they are gently leading the kids into understanding how and why the genocide happened and seeing that in the same circumstances, they might have done the same thing is inspired. They are totally committed to preventing anything like this from happening again, and they actually have gone to the root causes of lack of education, limited resources, outside influences, “yes man” mentality, etc. Their education system is still “call/response” based (I teach you a fact and you tell it back to me). We are focusing on teaching the young people how to take time to find out what they really think and feel, and then how to express that, both in writing and verbally. There is one girl and three boys that are able to speak up, but the rest have to be coaxed and led. Already the two extremely shy and closed girls are risking saying a few words about what they think. One of them today became the scribe for an exercise (wrote down what everyone in her group was saying), but didn’t report the results to the large group. I’m sure she will by the end of training.

The most emotional part of today happened when Marsha from Massachusetts Skyped with us. She told her story of having a leg amputated from cancer when she was a child, then having her kidneys fail and living on a machine for four years, then receiving a kidney transplant which doesn’t allow her to leave the U.S. She teaches Yoga (she calls it body prayer) and had a dream several years ago that she would be teaching Yoga to children in Africa. She did that today, and was in tears, as were all of us. One of the students did not participate in the exercise to tell all the things they were grateful for in five minutes (any student is allowed to opt out of an exercise) because he has an intense health challenge and doesn’t think he has a future. He also had a very difficult time with the vision board exercise we did yesterday. After seeing Marsha, he said he became optimistic and saw that he could have dreams. All of us on the team almost cried—but we held it together.

Our schedule is to work six days, then go to church at the orphanage for 4 hours on Sunday, then six days again. This Saturday has been cancelled because it is the end of the month that Rwanda spends every year commemorating the genocide. Some bodies have been exhumed from the local area and there will be a huge memorial service lasting twelve or more hours. We are taking that day to go to the village open-air market to buy fabric and other craft supplies as well as go to the fabric factory in Kigali, then make sample scarves that the students and kids from the orphanage will make the next two weeks. I am really looking forward to that. This Sunday the pastor and headmaster of the orphanage will be in Uganda for a wedding, so we will go to the Archbishop’s church in Kigali.

We taught the Daily Routine from Energy Medicine yesterday and practiced it today as we will every morning (the Archbishop participated with great interest), and we began teaching EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique from Energy Psychology) today on the topic of being irritated with someone or something. Then we did an unrelated exercise at the end of the day and the kids got into a mild competitive conflict. Without our team saying anything, one of the student teams started doing EFT tapping on their irritation with the other team. This is another example of how these young people take whatever you give them and use it to the fullest.

We are all physically exhausted at the end of the day, but it is so worth it. The Archbishop completes his presentation tomorrow, and I’m sure we will be doing trauma release work after that. We won’t see the kids individually until next week. We need to build safety and connection first, and give them tools that they try first on simple issues so they are ready to open up buried memories that have been too overwhelming to face without help.