A year ago, I was invited to join a very special group of women in London in supporting the multiple award-winning NGO, Women for Women International. Women for Women is highly respected in a field of hundreds of NGOs because of the effectiveness of its programs, the strength and integrity of the women who work in the field, and the values and courage of its remarkable founder, Zainab Salbi. It is one thing to read about how an organization—which has served over 148,000 women in war-torn countries since its inception in 1993—helps women move from victim to survivor to active citizen, and quite another to witness it first hand.
For the next week, in addition to writing the monthly advice column, DivineGuidance, I will be reporting daily from the field in Rwanda and sharing the stories of the women I meet. Their stories are inextricably bound up in the events of 1994, when close to a million people were murdered while the world stood mostly idle, waiting for the conflict to settle. It is my hope that by giving voice to these women and their stories, you share this journey with me. It is one of hope and despair, of natural beauty and inexplicable horror, and of tuning your mind and heart to the Rwandan people as they move into the future by healing their past.
Day One
I land in Kigali, the largest city in Rwanda with a population of one million people, Saturday evening. The breeze is gentle and the clear evening sky shows no sign that heavy rains will fall intermittently tomorrow. My initial tour of the Kigali city center happens the following day with a fellow member of Women for Women. We notice the gorgeous green of this land of 1,000 hills, the restored streets, and buildings in the city center. Kigali is sparkling clean and new. Our driver informs us that no plastic bags are used in Rwanda and that people will wrap items in paper or use re-usable baskets for all shopping. He then proudly adds that the last Saturday of each month, every Rwandan, including the President, Paul Kagame, cleans the streets for half the day. It is called community service and people are happy to do it. I think about my husband and his childhood dream to become mayor of Boston so he could ban all litter. Then the psychologist in me takes over and I wonder about symbolic meanings of cleaning and scrubbing and making right, of our driver’s emphasis on what is positive and his single-minded focus on pointing out the beauty that surrounds us. He drives us past the Kacyiro monument of a mother and child holding hands. The father is absent, but after the genocide, children were lucky to be alive and most no longer had a father. In 1994, 70 percent of the post-genocidal adult population in Rwanda was women.
