The beginning of Thriving for women in Rwanda
Having worked in local Christian community development in Northern Ireland for more than 18 years, I was so interested in what my visit to Rwanda would teach me about how the process worked in a country where poverty manifests itself very differently to here in the UK.
I have reflected on what I saw, the people I met, the concerns they had, what made them laugh and what made them cry and I have come to an unsurprising conclusion. No matter where you are in the world – people are people. They love, they laugh, they cry, they hurt, they get angry. Some are better off than others, some make better choices, some deal better with their life circumstances – but people are people no matter where they live.
Let me tell you two stories: one from Africa and one from Northern Ireland.
Margaret lives in Uganda. The big issue in her community was lack of access to clean water. Women and children spent much of their time walking long distances to collect water and as a consequence children did not go to school and women did not work. The economic situation of families was not good.
Margaret was chosen by her village to train to be a water tank builder. Her husband laughed at her and told her that she would never be able to make a difference – she was only a woman. She was living in a patriarchal society.
So Margaret was trained with the support of a Tearfund partner and helped her village build the water tanks they needed to collect water from the roofs of houses. Things greatly improved as less time needed to be spent on walking to collect water. Children were able to go to school and women able to work in other jobs. The village is beginning to transform.
A sense of belonging
Another Margaret lives in a town in Northern Ireland. She lives on a public housing estate controlled by a paramilitary organisation which exerts control on the daily lives of the people who live there. She is married to one of those who belong to the organisation. She is living in a patriarchal society.
Margaret was trained with the help of a Christian community organisation supported by Tearfund in community leadership. Her confidence and skill grew and she began to understand the difference that she could make in her community. She worked to enable women in the community to come together to learn about their own Protestant identity and begin to understand more of the Catholic community. She facilitated an older people’s group and inter-generational work – finding out the needs of her local community and seeking to meet them. She is now the Chairperson of her local residents association. That community is beginning to transform.
In both these situations there is a long way to go. The poverty might have looked very different, but the issues were the same.
What was I expecting when I traveled to Africa? Perhaps I had an idealized view of what poverty might look like.
Poverty is never simple. It is a symptom of a series of interlocking factors which conspire to bring people down and prevent them from thriving and flourishing. I don’t always know what issues there are in other poor countries. Is the government corrupt? How much support do people have? What is the attitude to women? How active is the Church?
However, when I started working in local community, coming from a very privileged background, I thought I knew what caused people to be in poverty and had a simplified idea of how they would be able to get out. What I had not thought through was: the complex and unfair nature of the benefits system; that not everyone has the same intellectual ability; that poverty affects mental health as well as physical and mental health saps your energy for doing anything; people in general are not very self-aware and they rarely can see for themselves what might be glaringly obvious to others. (I include myself in this category!!) That’s just for starters. I may also have been getting some of my theology from the media.
God has brought me on a journey of understanding, not just of the needs and issues of the local community, but of my own heart, understanding and prejudices. It has been a steep learning process, painful at times, but also joyful, exciting, rewarding and funny.
I’m glad I had the opportunity to travel to Rwanda and I met some incredible people who taught me a lot about faith, about courage and about forgiveness. But God placed me in Northern Ireland and our fields are just as ripe unto harvest as in Africa. We are equally in desperate need of transformation.
Can I encourage you to go on a journey of understanding in your own local community? It will bring about transformation not only of your community, but of your church and your own heart as God blesses your endeavors. I pray that those in your community would know the love of God through His people and begin to understand that,
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
John 10:10
Ripples on a Pond 