We are all co-creating the Universe. What you and I are becoming the World is becoming.—Teilhard de Chardin, 17th century Jesuit priest and philosopher
On day four of our trip, we visit a valley in Kayonza, a province about two hours north of Kigali, and home to Women for Women International’s Agribusiness Center. The pictures our group has seen of the Agribusiness center do not do this valley, rich in sustainable crop soil, justice. Think Gregory Peck in How Green Was My Valley or Anne of Green Gables to approximate its beauty. The land of the valley, forty hectares in size, was donated in part by the district of Kayonza to Women for Women International to help launch their Commercial Integrated Farming Initiative (CIFI). CIFI will provide women training in sustainable farming and a chance to sell the produce they harvest. Pineapple will be the first crop planted here because there is high demand and it grows quickly. Possible future crops include passion fruit, strawberries, and other high-yield, short-cycle crops.
Grace Fiysis is Women for Women International’s Agribusiness specialist. Prior to this post, she worked for the IFC World Bank. Grace’s vision is that at least 70 percent of the women who are trained through CIFI will be employed as sustainable commercial farmers. “They will earn their living in a such a way that leaves the environment healthy for the next generation,” she says.
Initially, there will be ten trainers who have graduated from a WFW program who will learn farming techniques in this valley. The trainers will then teach up to one thousand women a year sustainable farming techniques. Later, in their own communities, they will be equipped to develop cooperative farming initiatives.
The women who are trained through CIFI, like all women who attend WFW programs, will be among the most socially vulnerable and excluded women. They will include genocide victims and wives of perpetrators, planting together, side by side. The concept is staggering: could you harvest pineapples with a woman whose husband had killed your child? For Rwanda to move forward, this is what it must ask of its people every day.
The people of Rwanda are meeting this challenge and the women of the WFW programs are a microcosm of the country’s progress and healing. Later that day, we see this growth, healing, and dynamism in action when we go to one of the central food markets in Kigali. We meet WFW program graduates, hard at work, selling produce they have grown or purchased wholesale. One woman greets us heartily and her joy overcomes our lack of common language. I understand her pride in what she has accomplished, her thrill in supporting herself and in employing others, and her business acumen as she offers a discount if I buy the produce that is ripe today. She embodies the new Rwanda—one that serves as a model and testimony to the resilience and beauty of human spirit.
Last night I attended Women for Women International’s benefit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. As champagne flowed with canapés, I was asked to say a few words about my trip to Rwanda. I would like to close these diaries with what I shared last night:
For several years now, a good friend of mine sends me off on every trip I take, whether it is to Euro Disney with my children or a more exotic locale, with the wish, “May this be the trip of a lifetime.”
Her wish was finally granted for me last week, when I journeyed to Rwanda with Women for Women International, an experience that I can truly describe as “the trip of a lifetime.” For me, it was not the access to high-level government officials, our five-star hotel, or even the beauty of this land of one thousand hills. Rather, it was meeting the women that Women for Women International has helped with its programs of rights awareness and education, vocational skills training, and the power of creating a healing space for a community, so fractured by unspeakable horrors, to come together and rebuild their lives. The women that participate in WFW International’s programs are determined to improve their lives, and to journey from “victim to survivor to active citizen.” These are powerful words in their own right, but the privilege of witnessing it and of being, in some small way a part of it, is truly transformational.
I hope that through these diaries, I was able to share my “trip of a lifetime,”—and its power to transform—with you.
