Reconciliation Conference

Here I am in a fancy new internet cafe in Kigali, called Blue Cafe, right next to the central mall. Since I was here a year ago, new developments are evident all around the city. This particular cafe is a wireless hot spot, so Kigali is keeping up with technological advancements!

This past weekend has been chaotic but also very fruitful. Sarah and I arrived Thursday at 4am and left our hosts home at 11am for the days events. We attended a celebration at a Psychiatric Day Care centre, where Shalom has been training staff in nonviolent communication. Mentally and physically disabled children sang and danced for us, the staff put on a play illustrating what they had learned and we had a tour of the surprisingly well-equipped centre. Miss Kigali was also present, along with journalists from well known radio stations and newspaprs, so it was quite an event!

From here we went on to a secondary school where I ran a training session on nonviolent discipline. Teachers told me the average class had fifty students (and we complain in South Africa when here are forty in a class!). They seemed a motivated, committed group of teachers and we talked through some of the challenges with regards to the practical implications of alternatives to authoratative discipline models.

On Friday we spend the day in Rwamagana where we held a mini conference with forty leaders of the Rwamagana district (this is a rural area about an hour from Kigali). I spoke about storytelling and reconciliation which I think was less relevant to them than the other pertinent topics of forgiveness where some passionate debate took place around how we actually forgive and what the implications are.

On Saturday we went back to Rwamagana for Shalom's major PREST (Peace and Reconciliation through Song and Theatre) event. A choir that my colleague, Basabose, has been training in reconciliation performed an entire self-produced program on reconciliation, with songs and plays all related to the process of reconciliation in Rwanda. It was really quite remarkable and I could well imagine this sixty-strong choir touring the world with their heart rendering stories from genocide related experiences, followed by songs they themselves have written about unity and forgiveness. The choir is made up of people that would have been on opposite sides of the conflict which adds to their powerfl testimony. We also showed some movie clips on reconciliation which pulled in a crowd of some thousand people!

We spent the night at a guesthouse in Rwamagana, and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast on Sunday morning, followed by a church service at a Pentecostal church, where Basabose preached on our need to be bringers of peace, bringing a gospel of reconciliation. What moved me during the service was that when the collection was taken many of these villagers brought the best of their produce (peanuts, cow grass, vegetables, sugarcane) rather than money. Rather suprisingly, these items were then auctioned off to the highest bidder at the end of the service!

On Sunday afternoon we held the Shalom Board meeting and by the end of the evening we were all tired through and through! This morning I slept in though, and enjoyed breakfast on the verandah of my hosts house, in the lovely Kigali climate with birds all around. It is truly beautiful and I am so happy to be here. Perhaps at a later stage I may have time for more than a mere run down of my activities!

Travels

On Wednesday I'll be off to Rwanda and Burundi again for a little under three weeks. This is an annual trip that I've taken for the past three years. What I'm particularly looking forward to is the warmer weather after an increasingly cold Pretoria winter.

My travel companian, Sarah, and I will arrive in Kigali at 5:30am on Thursday and in the afternoon I'll be running a two-hour training session for teachers at a secondary school on nonviolent discipline in schools. Even though it feels a bit hectic to be doing something like that after our badly timed flight, I'm looking forward to seeing how some of the principles I've been applying in the South African context pan out in the Rwandan context.

On Friday, I'll be attending a conference on reconciliation hosted by Shalom, Educating for Peace, where I'll give a talk on Storytelling as a means of healing and reconciliation. Again, this is a good opportunity to see how ideas I've been working on in my PhD thesis will pan out with a live audience. I'll focus on reconciliation in the South Africa context, though, leaving some room for application into other contexts.

The rest of the time in Kigali should be somewhat more low key and we'll travel through to Burundi the following Thursday. In Burundi we'll be spending time with Youth for Christ, where we'll probably get to spend a significant amount of time at their orphanage.

I hope to have internet access to be able to update this blog with my travels. But if not, I'll be sure to fill everyone in when I get back!

The Sinner or The Dancer

One day there was girl who loved to dance. But she knew that dancing was a terrible sin. Some nights, while lying in bed she could not sleep for the twitching of her body, and furtively she would crawl out of bed and dance in the silence of her room. Afterwards, she would feel wracked with guilt and shame and the next morning she would come before God on her knees, pleading that she might be forgiven.

Sometimes she would walk past night clubs, those dens of the devil, and hear the thump, thump of the music and her feet would involuntarily start moving to the beat. Her body ached to dance. But again and again the voice from the pulpit had made it undeniably clear that dancing was a sin. How she struggled with this sin! How she would repent of this sin and beg that God would release her from it. How she longed for this thorn in her flesh to be removed. It was an endless, exhausting cycle of sin, repentance, turning over a new leaf and then falling into sin once more.

But then things started to change. Some new people joined her congregation and said that dancing was okay. She started discovering that there were others in her church that liked to dance. In fact, she caught more and more people dancing in public! One day one of the upstanding members of her church invited the whole church to his wedding. To her surprise, at the reception there was a dance floor, and couple after couple of her God-fearing community were moving onto the floor and dancing to the music! Very nervously and shyly she made her way to the floor. Her stomach was in knots with fear and desire. In a dark corner, she started to tap her feet and bob her body. The relief was unimaginable. Before she knew it, she was taken away by the music and lost herself in the rhythm all around her. As she danced the night away, a deep joy filled her being and for a moment she thought she sensed God dancing with her.

Are there sins we hold before God in guilt and shame, that we struggle with endlessly, that trip us up in exhausting cycles of repentance and forgiveness that one day we may find are not sins at all? I’m starting to feel like I’d like to dance a little more…

Amahoro Gathering Overview

There is so much I could or want to say about the Amahoro Gathering that I don't know where to start! But being quite a blogging sort of crowd a large number of other people have blogged about it and covered various things I might otherwise have written about.

Some of the highlights for me were encountering Adrian Vlok, previous minister of Law and Order during the Apartheid regime, hearing from Paul Verryn, the Methodist pastor who has opened his church doors and now has some 3000 homeless people sleeping in his building every night and being challenged by Rene August to speak out as a woman, emotionally and vulnerably, as my contribution to reforming my community.

But perhaps more than any of the stirring talks, I appreciated all the spontaneous conversations I had with Kenyans, Burundians, Ugandans, Rwandans, Zimbabweans, Australians, Americans and South Africans I would normally not speak to. These conversations, normally over meals, were more transformational than any planned event at Amahoro. Melanie Lorenz has blogged about the 'ministry of presence' which describes best what I hold onto the most from this Gathering. I'm sure to write more about all of this over time but in the meantime, here are just some of the links to Amahoro related blog posts for the interested:

• Steve Hayes at Emerging Africa has blogged about an Amahoro synchroblog here.
• Melanie Lorenz, an apprentice at Nieu Communities, Pangani has blogged about the Ministry of Presence and about the legacy the West left Africa. Here she mentions Brian MacLaren's reference to the 'haves' and have-nots', something that stayed deeply with me as well.
  
• Joe Reed from the same community blogged about his impressions of the Gathering here.
  
• Tom Smith blogged about being white and African.
  
• Cobus van Wyngaard blogged about Adrian Vlok (in Afrikaans) and about his personal transformation due to Amahoro here.
  
• Mark Riessen from Australia blogged about the Amahoro Context.

It will be clear from all these people that Amahoro has left a deep imprint in all our lives. Although nothing tangible came out of it in terms of something achieved or some sort of action plan, lives were changed, and out of that transformation I trust will come transformations in our respective communities.

A diverse God

I'm sitting in bed, wrapped up in blankets in the loft of my dorm at the YFC Cyara Campsite in Magaliesberg where I'm attending the Amahoro Gathering, along with several hundred others from all over Africa and some from the US. (Thanks Melanie and Barbara for the tip on the loft-I love it!).

One thing that stood out for me after the morning session yesterday was the diversity of God. In the keynote address yesterday morning Dr Kenso Mabiala from Ugana mentioned that God is not one in spite of being three but God is one because God is three. The suggestion was that for a Western way of thinking the trinity causes endless dilemmas (how can God be three and one at the same time?) but that in an African paradigm, God's 'threeness' is the very thing that makes God one.

And because God is diverse God can encompass all our complex diversity.

The first day of the conference has been excellent and I've enjoyed every conversation I've had so far with such a wonderful diversity of people, from Kenya, South Africa, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and the US.

Steve Hayes blogged about his thoughts prior Amahoro here and will probably soon blog about his thoughts with regards to yesterday. Roger has also blogged about it here. His description of what happened during a session with Adrian Vlok (former Minister of Police during the Apartheid regime) is a must read. I will blog about it myself when I get a chance.

Cartoon

Thanks to Nic Paton for posting this on Emerging Africa. The original cartoons and others like it can be found at ASBOJesus.