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.
