The Best Laid Plans...

The girls dorm top left

with clothes drying on

the lawn (day without rain)

I rested last night so I could keep my eyes open after 3:00. We expect the students to, so I’d better be a proper model. I made it until half-way home today.

We had a full day planned, beginning the Transformational Leadership training and several other things. When we arrived at the school, we were told that four of the girls had been hospitalized due to trauma incidents. I mentioned before that the whole month of April commemorates the genocide, and many, many images and sounds of the massacre are shown in newspapers and on T.V. Tomorrow is the final memorial service in every village and sector. We were told that twelve other girls were sleeping and had been triggered and crying all night. We checked in with our Project LIGHT group and three of the young men had been called to help hold and carry the girls to the hospital (one in a health center nearby, and three all the way to Kigali). We did Energy Medicine and breathing exercises with them and then Lori and I went to the dorms to check on the girls. They were no longer sleeping, but eight of them were in full flashbacks, screaming and crying as I have never heard in person before. One girl was screaming over and over, “They are going to kill me—no, no. God has left me.” (translated) Other students, about three for every girl in trauma, were holding them, stroking their heads, comforting them as best they could. The girls in trauma were not present; they did not recognize anyone or anything that was being said to them. I asked for guidance and all the unseen help available. I helped the comforting girls with how to touch and breathe to create more calm, used Reiki, used intuitive healing, did surrogate Energy Psychology and learned the Kinyarwandan words for “safe now” and “you are not alone.” I had a translator only about ten minutes, as she was helping Lori with the most severe girl most of the time. The doctor was there when we came in and had just given the girls shots which he said were not working, but it made our work more difficult. One girl I worked with was able to calm enough to tell the translator that she fell and hurt her back and that was why she was still crying. Her cries before had sounded like a baby (and she would have been a baby during the genocide), but now were loud whimpers which did sound more like pain. I was going to do energy work on her back, but another girl began to thrash and scream, so her friends put a mattress on the floor and carried her to it so we could work with her. The two things that seemed to work with her were my doing surrogate Tappas Acupressure Technique and the Energy Medicine life force points on the bottom of her feet. After coughing and seeming like she coughed up something that was stuck in her throat, she calmed down and went to sleep. When she awoke about 20 minutes later she asked for water and was present. Her friends took her to walk outside. I went to work with another girl, training her friend and starting to use energy work. She was calming, but still sobbing. The principal decided to take all the crying girls to the hospital because they were triggering the other girls. Lori and I knew we were making progress, but we also know we are there for only a few days and they are there all the time. Sixteen girls ended up in the hospital. The community officials from the local village were called, and promised to provide whatever was needed for the girls and the school over the weekend. We taught our eleven (our most traumatized girl was in Kigali for an appointment—another miracle) how to breathe and hold someone in trauma, and practiced all of the trauma healing techniques they know to date on themselves so they can help over the weekend. There are over 150 new students there this year. The principal who was at the school for all the past years that Lori has been there, Pastor Seth, and who has been trained by her left this year, and there is a new principal who has had no training. The Headmaster, Rev. Thoms, who runs the program with Lori was gone to Uganda until Sunday night. Had either of them been there last night we feel confident there would have been a different outcome.

I am so grateful for all the training I have had in my own healing, Energy Psychology and Energy Medicine, and intuitive healing. Even with all of that, there is no way I could think of what to do. I had to allow a higher power to direct me. In a situation like that, I didn’t care what the other girls thought about the weird pose I was in or that I was tapping on one girl’s hand or that I closed my eyes and smoothed my hands down her back. I had some struggle to keep focused on love and seeing the girls whole and calm. Hearing and seeing the unbelievable pain and terror they were in and having my own momentary flashbacks to scenes from the movies “Hotel Rwanda” and “Beyond the Gates” brought up anger at the perpetrators that I had to clear as quickly as I could. I am now even more dedicated to teaching as many of the students as possible, and as many people in Rwanda as possible to use Energy Psychology, mostly EFT, to release trauma symptoms and feelings as early as possible so that they do not get into the space of losing themselves in the past reality. It is very, very difficult to bring someone back from that. I am also even more in awe of those who have healed and forgiven.

I want to mention another aspect that was very disturbing from our time in the dorm. The mattresses are about five inch foam, most of them smashed down, stained, many of them with big hunks torn out. I would not be able to lie on them for more than five minutes. The sheets are worn thin and stained. None of them match (I’m sure they don’t care about that, but I’d notice). It would take $4,000 to replace the mattresses. One donor has raised $1,000 for mattresses so far. I’m going to put the link to my First Giving page in case any of you know of an angel, or many angels, who could help with this. Here is the link: http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/kathryn-brewer/create-global-healingproject-light.

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.