Invitation for people in Clonakilty

There will be crafts made by some mothers from our projects in Kigali, Rwanda: necklaces, plates and shopping bags.

Article on Rwanda... uncut

(Article published on One Mission Matters, magazine of the Methodist Church missionary section; here in its entirety, as we have more space!)

Rwanda, “the land of a thousand hills”, the country of the Mountain Gorillas… sure, but who isn’t thinking of the genocide first?

Yet, that was 1994 and since then the country has been peaceful, rebuilding and reconciling, so in 2015 it’s hard to see a direct impact of those 100 hellish days on modern Rwanda: the orphans are now in their 20s, at least; what was destroyed has been rebuilt or replaced; trials are mostly ended; the following wars, fought outside the country, are basically over and ethnicity is no longer mentioned. Moreover, as cynical as it might seem, in actual fact the genocide has had some very positive consequences: from the guilt and compassion of the West a huge stream of aid has been flowing for 21 years to this very small country, allowing it to grow much more than others, so that it now boasts tarmac main roads, a great number of schools and health centres, very good access to ARVs, political stability, high-ranking levels of security and an economy that keeps receiving praises for its GDP growth.

All good, then?

Unfortunately not: if the typical problems of poor countries might be slightly less crippling here due to the aforementioned development, they are all still present, at times made harder to tackle by peculiarities clearly arising from 1994.

First of all, the genocide was part of a war and in every war, especially civil and ethnic ones, the first casualty is truth: the historical truth about those events has not been fully revealed yet (watch the BBC documentary issued in October 2015), which prevents the country from achieving real reconciliation, despite many wonderful examples of forgiveness, and it may well be that even Rwandans’ terrible (and admitted) habit of lying to protect or pursue their interests is a consequence of how the country dealt, from top to bottom, with that dark page of its recent past, where so many people had something to hide. As anyone can imagine, to work in such a context of constant lies, where you cannot trust anyone, is extremely stressful.

Secondly, inequality in developing countries is quite common and astonishingly higher than in the West, but here it is even more painful to see, not only because with all that aid publicly available this “unified” society should have grown more evenly, but also because inequality works partly along those same ethnic lines which have now “disappeared” (only because the topic is banned): one portion of the population has clearly benefitted much more from some forms of aid, as only the victims-victors were entitled to receive it, and still are.

Thirdly, as in most post-disaster countries, the enormous influx of money has created a culture of “milk the white man” and a tendency to rely on external sources which permeate all society, church included, making it difficult not to feel like a wallet-on-legs and hard to instill any sense of responsibility and ownership in projects.

Last, but not least, the current leadership, in order to maintain its iron grip of power, has turned freedom of expression into “something for western countries”, as we’ve been bluntly told (“to protect us”) by a religious figure who, like too many people, justifies the dictatorial regime with the excuse that “Rwanda went through the genocide”; therefore, discussing policies or showing any form of dissent is out of the question, which is not only soul-destroying for human rights lovers and defenders, but, more importantly, absolutely incompatible with a healthy and just society.

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Those who are not accustomed yet to listening to us on soundcloud, ("MEMS Leoni") can find out here about the latest sad developments of our mission, especially's Mattia, but in Elena's words, so you can't blame him, for a change.

Nearly two weeks ago, we had a meeting with Bishop and some representatives of the the church, whom we are serving in Rwanda, and it felt more like an ambush than a meeting. They had already decided in their hearts to stop what Mattia was doing for the poor children and their mums and they did it by using the authority card.

It didn’t really matter what Mattia had to say to defend his work, as he had always kept them updated through several reports (and meetings) about his ministry and Bishop all along said that he was doing a good job; Mattia also tried to involve the church more and more, but in the past few months, even if verbally they kept saying that what Mattia was doing was good, they kept closing one door after another (literally, they locked the school where Mattia's activity used to take place), until they got the point of ordering him to stop.

It didn’t matter how many people we helped, how many people we brought closer to the church, nothing makes sense…

They complained the children clothes are not good enough... laughing at this. They brought up safety issue and more and more excuses reaching the absurdity of even telling us that our house is in the Church compound so that they have a say in whoever can come or not into our house...

It was a really hard week, with many tears, frustration, sadness and questioning why we have to go through this. The faces of the children not understanding why they couldn’t come for their sports and lessons any more and desperately asking when they could come back, what they did wrong, as tears filled theirs eyes…. The desperation of the mums that cannot meet in the church grounds just to learn to save so as to be able to send their children to school next year… The teenagers now forced back in the street in the evening instead of coming for singing, praying, dancing, lessons and Bible study….

We know we touched many people since we have been here, but Mattia felt called to serve the least of the least, especially the poor children and their mums, most of them single mothers, but now all this has been taken away from him…

Now we are in limbo, we accepted with humility what we were commanded to do and now we have to wait till the end of the month for the visit of our coordinator from the UK and only God knows how things will be then. They keep saying that they have no problem with Elena's job, but she's had many issues along the way too.

The whole relationship with this "Church" is now crumbling, as we don't want to worship, with our children, in a Church who refuses, excludes and discriminates the needy, as this is not what we can call Church. So, we've started looking for other places and recently we've been going to an Anglican Church.