Validation

The outdoor village market on Wednesday and Saturday

in the largest village in the sector of the high school.

This was a restful and fun day for Shauna and me, but not for Lori and Richard. Shauna had meetings with bank people and the Rwandan branch of Tuf Stuff solar power for cell phones, batteries, radios & lights. Emanuel, the Manager here has an amazing story of entrepreneurship starting at age 12. He will come next week to tell his story to our students and plan how they can start businesses selling the product. I stayed at the guest house to finish recuperating to be ready for an intense week. In the afternoon Shauna and I met with Debbie from the women’s coop and she took us down side streets and alleys, down narrow stairs into basements and we found beautiful African fabric for from 1/6^th to 1/10^th of the price we saw in the tourist section. It is like the pictures of Middle East bazaars, but in the basement up and down very high crumbling cement steps. It was the first really hot day.

Up on the mountain Lori found that there had been two trauma incidents over the weekend, and many students very upset by the memorial service and burial on Saturday of 54 newly found unidentified bodies in the local village. It is natural for the students to wonder if that could be their parents, brothers, sisters, aunts. Lori worked with the Project LIGHT students to help clear their trauma, and then teach more about being peer counselors. We will do more tomorrow. Richard did leadership training and will the rest of this week as he is leaving Sunday. Lori talked with Rev. Thoms and community leaders about plans for preventing this kind of occurrence again. The program Lori instituted in 2009 has not been followed since Pastor Seth left in November. That suggests that the tremendous improvement in going an entire year with no incidents is a result of Lori and Create Global Healing’s work.

There were many synchronicities today. Emanuel from Tuf Stuff has previously worked with people in Santa Barbara that Shauna and Lori know; the bank has offered to do financial training for one hour per week for the month after we leave; the crafts we were planning for our PLR students will now be used to give the high school students something creative to do after school to keep them from obsessively thinking about the genocide and feel joy; (I will be teaching them to sew by machine and hand, so they will also be learning a skill that they can use after high school); and Debbie and Shauna found several mutual connections and shared funding sources with one another. If we just do what is in front of us to do next, miracles happen.