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.

Project LIGHT Launched

Project LIGHT Ambassadors,
HeadMaster, & Interpreter

What a wonderful, amazing day! The birds start their joyful singing at dawn—I have never heard so many different, yet harmonious melodic bird sounds. There are many more trees around this guest house than where we stayed last year. We are all exhausted from a nineteen hour day and three hours on Rwandan roads. They are much improved from six months ago due to the work of released genocide prisoners, but we still get our chiropractic adjustments and sometimes have to hang on to stay in our seats. The rains have produced such lush deep green vegetation and the landscape is breathtaking. I don’t need my carbon filter face mask for the red dust yet due to the daily rains. They are supposed to end in two weeks.

I continue to be astounded by these young people. They have a combination of innocence and naiveté that is endearing and refreshing, with acute observation and creativity that is delightful to witness. I introduced the Change Game to them where the person who is “it” is to let everyone observe them, then leave the room and change something about their appearance or behavior and come back to let the group discover what they have changed. The first person changed two things, one of them being adding a small dried flower petal perched on top of his ear. Each person after him increased the number or subtlety of what they changed.

They showed such delight and gratitude for receiving the T-shirts made by the students in Children 2 Children at Pacific Grove Middle School (see the createglobalhealing.org website for video of them Skyping with the Rwandan students). The California students also sent crystal hearts with their blessings. Our Project LIGHT Ambassadors accepted the challenge of healing themselves, creating lives of their dreams, and preparing to become leaders not only of their country, but possibly of the world.

One of the things that became very apparent today was the arrogance of those of us in the West. I tried a test inventory to determine how satisfied they are with areas of their lives now, in order to help them with what is most distressing to them, and to measure the change after our program. This test, developed by someone in the U.S., is purported to be multi-cultural. It is so far from understanding the lives of these people and how to use their knowledge base as a basis for their responses that it took two hours to administer the inventory when the publisher quotes eight minutes as time of administration. A part of our mission is providing education to the “helpers” of the world about the true needs and characteristics of the people in Africa (we are barely learning them ourselves, but we have excellent teachers in these young people).

Internet down again. I cannot upload pictures nor send this blog (nor receive e-mail). Since the internet is our only affordable means of communication with the U.S., it is frustrating and feels isolating. It makes me appreciate more the isolation of our students, who until a few months ago had no internet nor computers, no means of transportation to get the 1.5 hour drive into the city, no telephones (the adults there have cell phones which get service most of the time), no newspapers, very, very few books, and only one very old T.V. with very poor reception. Before Create Global Healing brought electricity two years ago, there was even no possibility of T.V. This leaves the students left out of the 21^st century. On the other hand, it creates an environment where relationships are primary, there are few distractions from connection with the earth, and they are much less affected by the sensationalism, consumerism, negativity and fear from the popular media. Their survival depends on having resources and learning skills including technology, but I hope they do not pay the heavy price of chronic stress, fear and the drive to consume that plagues our Western world. We are heavily emphasizing values, self-healing, and heart-centeredness along with vocational and entrepreneurship in order to bring as much balance as possible. I will attempt to write tomorrow, but technology here may interrupt that.

We are ready

Tomorrow we make history. We board the van at 7:30 AM for the 1.5 hour drive up the mountain. We have been working all day today to prepare, knowing that when we meet the students we may change many parts to match what we are told is needed, or what we see is needed. Our best, most essential preparation is to be so grounded and solid in our connection to Universal Intelligence, spiritual guidance, God, or whatever name you use that we "hear" when we are to abandon all previous expectations and risk something new. We are about to test our vision of how to create with the people of Rwanda a program that heals, trains, and inspires young people who have been traumatized beyond imagination. We will see if they move on to build lives that are emotionally stable, economically sustainable in harmony with the environment, and contribute to creating peace and equality in their society. Will their journey with us form ripples throughout Africa, and then other conflict-ridden parts of our world? Will this become a model for moving societies toward the cooperative, heart-centered human experience that many voices say is necessary if we are to survive? It is possible. I say this almost not believing it myself, but the world-wide momentum that Project LIGHT has fostered, and the leaders of cutting-edge thought reaching for solutions to our global dilemmas who are supporting this project suggest that it must be tried.

We have technological challenges here with strength and consistency of internet and electricity. I have not been able to upload pictures of the beautiful Rwandan sunset nor the cherubic children in this neighborhood--better technical assistance tomorrow. I will write more personal stories tomorrow after our first day meeting our 12 young people for Project LIGHT. Later in the week we will begin work with the students still in the orphanage high school. Lori (Lori Leyden, the visionary who has created this project) just sent an update newsletter which you can see if you go to the website, createglobalhealing.org.

We Made It - Easy As Pie, Almost

I arrived last night and it felt like coming to my second home. We walked for an hour in Kigali tonight and had our contingent of children hugging us, holding our hands and teaching us Kinyarwandan. The guest house where we are staying is in a much nicer area of Kigali than last year & is very luxurious by Rwanda standards. There are marble floors, outlets (very weak) in the bathrooms, brightly colored mosquito netting without holes and free kitchen access at all hours. On the other hand, there is no chair or table/desk, the room is almost filled by the queen-size bed, & there is no space in the bathroom to put toiletries. There is a security guard outside, but we have the 12-room house all to ourselves at night. We are recuperating from the 33-hour trip and move from zombie-brain to excited, high energy as we plan the program and find synchronicities falling into place every hour. We have brought three sewing machines to teach sewing skills and crafting to both our Project LIGHT students and to three “crews” from the orphanage who will spend their two hours of free time after school and Saturdays learning and making the bracelets and scarves that will be prototypes we will bring back to find outlets in the U.S. to sell. This allows the orphanage school to tell the government that they have equipment (sewing machines) to teach a vocation (along with our tools for making the solar cell phone chargers and bicycle carts) so they can become certified as a vocational school which then gets them more money and equipment. We brought them two more laptops, now they need the money to hook them up to the internet. One of their requests is that we teach their teachers how to get instructional materials from the internet. They still have only one bookshelf’s worth of books for 550 students.

Headmaster Rev. Thoms says the students he has chosen for Project LIGHT are so excited and grateful and will do anything to get there by tomorrow—one coming on a three-hour bus ride to Kigali and then walking and riding up the mountain. We are weaving a program that blends trauma healing (using energy psychology), assessment of basic cognitive skills plus all of their life skills and satisfaction and planning for interventions, teaching vocational skills and business entrepreneurship with hands-on experience, enhancing their personal health and self-confidence (using Energy Medicine, HeartMath, and other programs), and transformational leadership training (using Luca Leadership Training). The mayor is coming to teach two half-days about the government unity and reconciliation programs.

The team has come together by hearing about Project LIGHT, contacting Lori and offering their expertise which is a perfect match for what is needed. Alisoun from Scotland is coming again with her energy psychology and motivational team-building experience. Shauna from Ojai brings eight years of experience working with African people creating entrepreneurship opportunities and building her own website selling their products. Marsha from Washington will fulfill a dream by teaching Yoga via Skype since she cannot leave the U.S. due to her kidney transplant (she also is an amputee like some of the students or their parents). Richard from the U.K. will come up from Tanzania to do videography and teach Luca Leadership. Paul from Santa Barbara comes as a videographer who has created documentaries about humanitarian projects. Although my role on the team comes from my energy psychology and educational psychology experience, when Lori was looking for money to pay a sewing teacher from Rwanda, I realized I have another role on the team since my first job after college was as a Vocational Homemaking teacher. That definitely includes sewing. The really amazing thing about the team is that all of us come from the perspective of offering our skills to provide what the people want, not from our own ideas of what they should need/have. All also are heart-centered and able to access guidance in the moment for the expected un-expected.

The zombies are back so I’m off to my princess mosquito-netted bed. Tomorrow we are planning specifics and shopping for supplies (we brought six checked and six carry-on bags plus a big projection screen). No time to upload my pictures tonight, but I’ll put two tomorrow. The program starts Monday on top of the mountain.