(Continued from previous post)
After everyone had a chance to show off their Lego sculptures and explain their visions of peace, I asked if anyone knew why I had chosen to take so long on the introductions. Their answers were all similar and right on the money – because we didn’t know each other and, especially in this culture of instability, it takes time to learn about one another. Further, we couldn’t be sure we were in a psychologically safe place until we had taken the time to get to know one another.
Equity Perspective
To broaden their understanding about each of us having potentially different worldviews, I next placed some objects on the floor in the middle of our circle – a roll of tape, some markers, Legos and pens. I then asked each of
them to describe what they saw in just a few words. “A design with many colors.” “A circle.” “These are materials we are using in this seminar.” “Things gathered together.” “A window of a house.” And, of course, “Pens, marker and tape.”
“Which description is correct?” I asked. “All of them,” they replied after a few seconds. Obviously, that’s right, and it was the first part of the equity perspective they were to learn about: no two people share exactly the same world view; and even though we in the room were each different from one another, all of our perceptions were valid and “correct.”
After going over the day’s agenda
and some basic rules of the seminar, adding some that the participants suggested, we had our first pause café with Fanta.
Designing Pathways
The next part of the seminar was the exercise about designing pathways between a series of office buildings that had been built around a central green. I stated the problem as this:
An architect in Goma built a cluster of office buildings around a central green space.
When construction was completed in the spring and the buildings were occupied, the landscape crew tried to find the architect to ask him where he wanted the sidewalks, but he’d already left the Congo for his next assignment in Burundi.
Their challenge was to take over the architect’s job and come up with the best way to determine where to place the paved paths between and around the buildings.
They worked together in small groups
for about 15 minutes and then shared their solutions. The first thing I noticed was that, unlike any of my other groups, they each restated the entire problem as though we had never heard it before. 
The second thing I noticed was before any of them spoke, they said, “Thank you for letting me speak.” This held true throughout the entire 3-day workshop. Furthermore, whenever taking anything I offered – pens, papers, notebooks, anything – they held out both hands, palms up, as though they were being offered something of value and were gracefully, and gratefully, accepting it with enormous respect. 
A small difference in cultures, but noticed.
Their solutions to the exercise varied, of course, from group to group, the most interesting (to me) being the one solution that removed the green space entirely and paved it with roads to keep the lion population down, thereby keeping the population safe! The only thing common to all the groups was that the structures went from being office buildings in the original problem description to houses or churches! As usual with this exercise, no one had thought to ask the residents of the buildings what their needs were.
We then took some time to talk about the lesson in this exercise: sometimes we think we know what’s best, but often the best resolution is to work with the people we are serving to determine together the best solution for all. In other words, using power with rather than power over. Not surprisingly, they were able to relate easily to this maxim, connecting it to their own government’s inability to work with their people to jointly discover solutions to the many social and infrastructure problems in the Congo.
Lunch, then Back to Work
Leaving them chatting together, I ducked out the back of the structure to see about lunch preparations. As in Rwanda, almost all food is cooked in
aluminum pots over charcoal braziers (or, more simply, just over rocks holding in the charcoal) and I found three women working on the 
floor to cook lunch for our 25-person group – one woman grinding garlic
in a wooden pestle; another, with a baby on her back, 
stirring the stew; and yet another supervising the operation. It looked like incredibly hard work, but I was assured that these women were grateful for the employment. Lunch that day was a bean stew with lots of garlic, boiled plantains, a little meat (beef?), rice, what they called “soup,” but was really a thin sauce, French fries, and pineapple and those little, sweet bananas for dessert. (They tell me that they're so sweet because they're allowed to ripen on the vine, but I think they're a completely different type than what we get in the States.)
After eating and resting a bit, and as it got hotter in the room, we slowed down somewhat to accommodate the heat. We did some additional exercises (none too strenuous!) and talked about finding causes rather than focusing only on effects, something we’d study more the following days. We also talked about barriers and how to move around them rather than continuing to repeatedly butt our heads up against them, hoping they’ll move or disappear. I was delighted when one of the participants, Bahizi Emanuel, who is a nurse in addition to his peacemaking work, correlated my lesson with taking antibiotics. “When we take an antibiotic and it doesn’t work,” he said, “we are foolish to continue with more and more courses of the same drug. Then it’s time to try something else.” It was really gratifying to me to hear them relating what we had been talking about to their own lives in whatever way they could.
End of the Day’s Lessons
I ended the day’s workshop with this story:
A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign that said: "I am blind, please help." There were only a few coins in the hat.
A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.
Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, "Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?"
The man said, "I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way."
What he had written was: "Today is a beautiful day and I cannot see it."
Both signs told people the boy was blind. While the first sign simply said the boy was blind, the second sign pointed the fortunate ones to their positive possibilities.
Be creative. Be innovative. Thinking differently and positively can bring some unexpected results.
An Excursion to Find Fabric…and Chukudus!
There was still some time after the day’s work before dark when we all had to be inside, and I wanted to try to find some African cloth. I had been told that it was less expensive in Goma than in Kigali, so Zawadi, Camarade and I took off on my quest. I did find some cloth (although not significantly less expensive), and made the aquaintance of many different cloth sellers.
But what really piqued my interest were the hundreds of wooden scooters, called chukudus, conveyances that adolescent (and younger!) boys were using to
ferry about huge loads of things from one part of Goma to another – bags of rice, produce, building materials – sometimes as much as 300 pounds at a time, Zawadi told me. 
Chukudus are cobbled together from whatever materials can be found locally and are maneuvered by the rider kneeling on a “pad” (sometimes an old flip flop) 
nailed to the center of what would be the down tube on a bicycle. Some of them even have rudimentary brakes, although I couldn’t quite figure that part out just by looking. I was so fascinated by these that I bought a miniature one to bring home with me. 
(Interestingly, when I got back to Kigali and showed my Rwandan friends my mini-chukudu,
they told me that these scooters had also been used in Rwanda but had been banned by their government because they were “too African!”)
Another Potentially Hare-Brained Idea
Now, I have this off the wall idea about making a form of these in the USA (or providing a do-it-yourself pattern) for use by Americans who want a cheap, fossil-fuel-free mode of conveyance made from local materials for tooling around their neighborhoods, and then sending the profits back to the Congo to help with the interfaith and peace programs there.
Anyone out there interested in helping me get this project off the ground???
After everyone had a chance to show off their Lego sculptures and explain their visions of peace, I asked if anyone knew why I had chosen to take so long on the introductions. Their answers were all similar and right on the money – because we didn’t know each other and, especially in this culture of instability, it takes time to learn about one another. Further, we couldn’t be sure we were in a psychologically safe place until we had taken the time to get to know one another.
Equity Perspective
To broaden their understanding about each of us having potentially different worldviews, I next placed some objects on the floor in the middle of our circle – a roll of tape, some markers, Legos and pens. I then asked each of
“Which description is correct?” I asked. “All of them,” they replied after a few seconds. Obviously, that’s right, and it was the first part of the equity perspective they were to learn about: no two people share exactly the same world view; and even though we in the room were each different from one another, all of our perceptions were valid and “correct.”
After going over the day’s agenda
Designing Pathways
The next part of the seminar was the exercise about designing pathways between a series of office buildings that had been built around a central green. I stated the problem as this:
An architect in Goma built a cluster of office buildings around a central green space.
When construction was completed in the spring and the buildings were occupied, the landscape crew tried to find the architect to ask him where he wanted the sidewalks, but he’d already left the Congo for his next assignment in Burundi.
Their challenge was to take over the architect’s job and come up with the best way to determine where to place the paved paths between and around the buildings.
They worked together in small groups
Their solutions to the exercise varied, of course, from group to group, the most interesting (to me) being the one solution that removed the green space entirely and paved it with roads to keep the lion population down, thereby keeping the population safe! The only thing common to all the groups was that the structures went from being office buildings in the original problem description to houses or churches! As usual with this exercise, no one had thought to ask the residents of the buildings what their needs were.
We then took some time to talk about the lesson in this exercise: sometimes we think we know what’s best, but often the best resolution is to work with the people we are serving to determine together the best solution for all. In other words, using power with rather than power over. Not surprisingly, they were able to relate easily to this maxim, connecting it to their own government’s inability to work with their people to jointly discover solutions to the many social and infrastructure problems in the Congo.
Lunch, then Back to Work
Leaving them chatting together, I ducked out the back of the structure to see about lunch preparations. As in Rwanda, almost all food is cooked in
After eating and resting a bit, and as it got hotter in the room, we slowed down somewhat to accommodate the heat. We did some additional exercises (none too strenuous!) and talked about finding causes rather than focusing only on effects, something we’d study more the following days. We also talked about barriers and how to move around them rather than continuing to repeatedly butt our heads up against them, hoping they’ll move or disappear. I was delighted when one of the participants, Bahizi Emanuel, who is a nurse in addition to his peacemaking work, correlated my lesson with taking antibiotics. “When we take an antibiotic and it doesn’t work,” he said, “we are foolish to continue with more and more courses of the same drug. Then it’s time to try something else.” It was really gratifying to me to hear them relating what we had been talking about to their own lives in whatever way they could.
End of the Day’s Lessons
I ended the day’s workshop with this story:
A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign that said: "I am blind, please help." There were only a few coins in the hat.
A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.
Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, "Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?"
The man said, "I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way."
What he had written was: "Today is a beautiful day and I cannot see it."
Both signs told people the boy was blind. While the first sign simply said the boy was blind, the second sign pointed the fortunate ones to their positive possibilities.
Be creative. Be innovative. Thinking differently and positively can bring some unexpected results.
An Excursion to Find Fabric…and Chukudus!
There was still some time after the day’s work before dark when we all had to be inside, and I wanted to try to find some African cloth. I had been told that it was less expensive in Goma than in Kigali, so Zawadi, Camarade and I took off on my quest. I did find some cloth (although not significantly less expensive), and made the aquaintance of many different cloth sellers.
But what really piqued my interest were the hundreds of wooden scooters, called chukudus, conveyances that adolescent (and younger!) boys were using to
Another Potentially Hare-Brained Idea
Now, I have this off the wall idea about making a form of these in the USA (or providing a do-it-yourself pattern) for use by Americans who want a cheap, fossil-fuel-free mode of conveyance made from local materials for tooling around their neighborhoods, and then sending the profits back to the Congo to help with the interfaith and peace programs there.
Anyone out there interested in helping me get this project off the ground???
Hi Jan....I think I should have posted this comment here....not sure how these things work. Probably it'll post twice. As I stated last year...still following your blog! I love reading of your adventures and I am learning so much from your experiences. I still plan to come to Rwanda and my first visit is scheduled for this coming December. Keep up the good work and Murakoze cyane, cyane, cyane for communicating lol...Diann
Posted by: Diann L'Hirondelle | June 22, 2009 at 12:16 PM