Letters from the Field

Rwanda
March/April, 2007

Dear Friends,
Special greetings to you this Spring, Passover and Easter season.  I am writing this letter from the Carmelite Retreat House in Cyangugu, as I look out over beautiful Lake Kivu.  In the street below are the immigration post and narrow bridge leading to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and across the lake lies the border city of Bukavu with the lush green mountains and volcanoes of the Congo.  Over the ruins of war and genocide grow verdant vines, trees and colorful flowers, with the song of birds everywhere.  
It has been a while since my last letter from the field, not because I have not been working, but more because of lack of time to write.  Since my last letter in fall 2006, I have offered trainings in Canada (Toronto,Victoria), Wisconsin, Santa Barbara, Argentina (Buenos Aires, Neuquen), Ireland (Dublin, Cork), Northern Ireland, and now Rwanda. Capacitar’s outreach and teams continue to grow in many places.

Middle East
A new focus this year will be the Middle East, as a result of a January workshop for Israeli and Palestinian women in Santa Barbara in collaboration with La Casa de Maria (LCDM). The 22 Jewish, Muslim and Christian women who participated were very moved by the effectiveness of the Capacitar practices, so they invited us to come to Israel to give them more training.  In mid-July, LCDM associate director and Capacitar board member, Juliet Spohn Twomey, and I will travel to Israel to work with peace groups in Nazareth and Ramallah and with a trauma center in Kiryat Shmona.  We hope this will lead to an in-depth training to be offered in 2008-2009.

Ireland and the North of Ireland
In January, we started a new Multicultural Wellness training in Cork with 40 men and women from all parts of Ireland.  Capacitar-Ireland now has nonprofit charitable status with a small office near Dublin led by Kathleen Day, ijs. You can download a copy of the Capacitar-Ireland newsletter from our website: www.capacitar.org, under What’s New in the menu.  During January we also offered a workshop in self-care to young doctors at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, and will have a similar training in May for the National Association of Irish Psychologists. We even did a national radio interview for the Pat Kenny Show, a very popular talk show that everyone follows.  As a result of this program, the Capacitar Ireland office received over 120 phone calls.

Argentina
February took us to Argentina to be part of the graduation in Buenos Aires and Neuquen of 37 women and men who completed the Capacitar Multicultural Wellness training that was led by the Los Cerezos team.  We enjoyed staying at the beautiful new ecofeminist center of Los Cerezos, that offers retreats and workshops, as well as outreach to poor barrio women and families in the region.  We also traveled south for 18 hours on a sleeper-bus to spend four days in Patagonia visiting the very picturesque lake area around Bariloche (like the Swiss Alps).  We covered almost 1500 miles in 8 days, offering workshops in Bariloche and in Neuquen. With climate change, we experienced great extremes in weather, from snow and ice in Bariloche, to 100 degrees F in Buenos Aires the day of departure. 

United States
In March we started two new cycles of Multicultural Wellness training in Wisconsin and California.  This is our seventh year of collaboration with the Center to BE in Milwaukee, WI.  To date over 130 men and women from ten states and six countries have completed the program there.  And we started a third year of training at La Casa de Maria in Santa Barbara, CA, with another fine group of men and women from many parts of California.

Rwanda
Now half way around the world I am enjoying three weeks in the beautiful country of Rwanda, the “land of a thousand hills and a thousand problems”.  This is my second trip to Rwanda and I feel like I am coming home to some wonderful people who have warmly opened their hearts to me and to Capacitar.  In June 2006, Antoinette Gasibirege, SH, Genevieve van Waesberghe, MMM, and I offered initial workshops to over 1000 people.  The positive response was overwhelming and everyone wanted more training.  Thanks to the Catholic Irish development agency, Trocaire, and the US-based Conrad Hilton Fund for Religious, our Rwandan trainings are funded into 2008.  Our goal is to give in-depth training to 60 men and women from a broad cross-section of organizations, professions and outreach so that Capacitar methods will be multiplied in many sectors of the society.  As a result of the 2006 visit, many thousands of Rwandans are already using Capacitar in their personal lives and professions.  Besides the two trainings, we also facilitated 5 grassroots workshops for rural groups in Nyumba and Save, and three workshops for genocide widows, Igiti cy’Ubungingo staff and university students.  Along with training in basic skills and theory, we are mentoring teams in method, process and facilitation.  In all, we have worked directly with over 220 men and women during this trip.

Trauma Healing Trainings
Our two Trauma Healing trainings, held for 3 days each in Butare and in Cyangugu, involved people from Rwanda, Burundi and Congo DRC coordinated by Genevieve van Waesberghe, MMM.  Genevieve, who is founder of Igiti cy’Ubugingo (Tree of Life Center for Trauma Healing and HIV), is a remarkable networker.  So the trainings included a wonderful cross-section of men and women from around the country.  Among the 60 participants are: the Igiti cy’Ubungingo staff; two psychiatrists who work in centers they founded for survivors, youth, sexually abused women and children and persons with addiction; psychology and medical students from the national university; religious working with orphans and rural communities; HIV counselors; trauma counselors; Eugene Murenzi, a priest who founded Komera Center (Rise Up!) for deaf and mentally disabled children, along with three members of his staff; a priest from Bujumbura, Burundi, who heads the Justice and Peace Commission and who is also vicar of his diocese; Caritas, a vibrant woman who coordinates many outreach programs for the poor and traumatized of Burundi; and three Congolese women who work with orphans, youth, women who have been raped and assaulted and HIV, and Apolina, a Congolese who helps children accused of witchcraft.  Participants range in age from 22 to 70, from grassroots to professional. Some are survivors.  Some have gone through horrific experiences.  All are committed to healing and transforming the violence and trauma of their countries.

During the trainings Genevieve served as my French translator, and Antoinette Gasibirege, my Kinyarwandan translator.  Some of the participants knew English, (from being in exile in Uganda), and English is one of the official languages in Rwanda. There were many excellent questions, challenging insights, and humbling reflections.  How can Capacitar practices be used: With angry, violent children? With people when they learn they are HIV positive?  With widows who are hysterical during the genocide memorials? During the gacaca (local genocide court hearings) when we are afraid?  To help victims take on their lives? To help parents stop beating their children?  To change cultural practices in families where women and children are sexually abused?  Does Capacitar take away hunger when there is nothing to eat in the fields?  These were remarkable questions that reflect the reality of the lives of the majority of people.

The question on hunger touches the heart of Capacitar’s method of popular education. We teach people how to fish, rather than giving them the fish.  The challenge is to help participants understand Capacitar’s application of popular education and empowerment, based on Brazilian Paolo Freire’s concepts from Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The method of education in Rwanda, and in many places where we work, is often one of rote memorization with a dominator model, where students are “objects” given facts and knowledge from the teacher. Freire’s method turns that upside down, awakening people to their own wisdom, empowering people as “subjects” of their own process. While Freire’s method (see, judge and act) focused on cognitive analysis with a social application that often led to revolution, Capacitar “embodies” Freire, awakening people to the wisdom in their bodies and spirits.  Once people reconnect with this inner wisdom and strength, they are never quite the same.  A light goes on in their eyes, deep healing often results, leading to change in themselves and their communities.

Another challenge, especially with psychologists and medical professionals, is recognizing the difference between a therapeutic model and popular education.  Psychologists, counselors, doctors and nurses are trained with a scientific method using interventions or therapies with their clients to change the problem, disease or situation. Popular education on the other hand gives people tools for what they can do for themselves.  In this way people become “multipliers”, using the tools for their own self-care, and then sharing the tools with their families, communities and societies.  This method is especially significant in places where there is massive trauma with few resources and just not enough therapists to go around.  This approach is also more appropriate in areas where psychology and therapy are not accepted in the culture.

Another dimension to our training is helping participants become aware of an energy-based approach to healing, as well as to facilitation.  We often look at how to hold a group that is very depressed or battered, and how to shift and raise their energy so they actually begin to change physically and emotionally. Most people who have suffered deep trauma believe that they can never feel better, that they can never heal.  So we ask people to measure how they feel physically and emotionally on a scale from 0 to 10, before doing Tai Chi or a Capacitar practice, and then after the exercise. Most report a higher number after, and people can see that they are actually improving with the release of stored stress and trauma and with the awakening of their body energy. This is often a great surprise to many people and they usually want to learn more!  The exercises are actually impacting both cognitive and emotional brains. As this shift in energy occurs usually joy and laughter spontaneously emerge from the group.  So the trainings are energizing and lots of fun for everyone!  The hardest part in a short workshop is to convince people to take 5 or 10 minutes a day doing one or more of the exercises for self-care.  Most women, in particular, have learned from culture, church or society that they must be of service to everyone else, so self-care is considered wrong or selfish.

Often people ask what we teach during these trainings. The Rwandan Trauma Healing training consists of three modules that will run until the end of January 2008.  The training includes: three intensive training sessions to offer a survey of Capacitar energy-based practices; study and discussion of current theories and articles on healing models, trauma theory, cosmology, energy and field theory, consciousness, leadership, popular education and facilitation skills; and a practicum that involves application of the work to a group and peer mentoring.  Participants are required to apply what they learn by offering a series of workshops to one community group throughout the year, and then to reflect with peers and with the facilitators on high points and challenges they encounter. Through this process over a year’s time, we usually see remarkable growth in skill and in deep personal healing and transformation in participants, as they become excellent Capacitar “multipliers.”   

The grassroots workshops we offered were also a great learning experience, providing the opportunity for mentoring teams.  One workshop was for 14 genocide widows, all rural women who work hard in the fields to feed their children and orphans for whom they are caring. Another group of 60 men and women, the majority with HIV, we met in a poor village at the end of a long dirt road. Many carried the weight of trauma and pain. After these kinds of groups we reflected with the team on different ways to work with the very traumatized and with people who are “victims” using the Capacitar practices. Over half the widows reported that they had less physical pain and felt more energy.  One person with HIV talked about how the dark clouds in his head released and how he felt lighter.  One bent old widow, Antoinette, with her long walking stick, shared how she now had more energy to care for her grandchildren and a number of orphans.  She was half the size of Sr. Antoinette Gasibirege and we all laughed, as the two Antoinettes stood tall and short together, both genocide survivors.      
  
Later, one student intern remarked: “I recently asked my psychology professor how can I help women and children who have been raped or beaten? And he replied that he didn’t know.  In my classes we are taught theories that don’t really apply to the reality of what we face daily in our work. Thank you for giving us the Capacitar tools to help heal our people.” 

13th Anniversary of Genocide
As we completed our two trainings and five grassroots workshops, the people were preparing for the memorials that mark the 13th Anniversary of the genocide that started on Easter Sunday, April 7, 1994.  For 100 days nearly one million people, mostly Tutsis, were systematically killed.  The memorials will continue over the next month.  This is a very challenging and often re-traumatizing time for everyone as stories are retold, films of the genocide broadcast on TV, and people relive their horrific history.  The Igiti cy’Ubugingo team will accompany people who have strong reactions and flashbacks this coming week during local memorials in Butare.  On Holy Thursday, in our final meeting with the team, we shared hand massage, blessing these wonderful young men and women as they prepare to serve the traumatized in their community. Most of the team has lost some family members or friends. And from their pain and transformation, the team is now a source of healing for many. 

Life in Rwanda
Rwanda, the most densely populated country in Africa with over 9 million people, is trying to heal on many levels.  The government has set in place a number of policies to move the country forward economically, legally and socially.  A new law that was recently passed concerns family size and birth rate.  Families who have more than three children will in the future be penalized. Everyone is concerned about this because the burden will fall on the shoulders of the poor who have large families and who make up the vast majority of the population.  Across the country there is a new policy called the “performance contract”.  The country is divided into small units of ten families and larger units of neighborhoods, sectors and provinces for organization and monitoring. Local officials are rewarded for improving performance on everything from neighborhood functioning, cleanliness, compliance with laws, etc.  The last Saturday of the month everything stops for several hours so that everyone can participate in a morning of civic cleanup, the “Umuganda”.  Throughout the country, “Gacaca” community courts are held once a week to hear testimonies and to try people involved in the genocide.  Because there are still hundreds of thousands of people yet to be tried and sentenced for their participation in the genocide, a traditional court process was instigated.  However, because of reported abuses in the legal process, the proceedings are for a time on hold until the system is improved.  Many thousands of prisoners are used for community work, farming, building and cleaning projects. So as you drive around the country you can see groups of prisoners in their pink prison uniforms, laboring on the roads or in the fields.

Congo DRC
From Rwanda, Capacitar is beginning to extend into the Great Lakes Region. Some workshops, to be led by Genevieve and her team, are already being scheduled in Burundi and in Congo DRC, where people are trying to rebuild their lives after recent violent histories.  Capacitar received a very moving letter from Theopista who now lives in Congo.  She participated in a Rwanda workshop last year and was then assigned to work in a Congolese hospital.  Theopista writes:  “You cannot imagine the situation in which these people live.  The war left them with nothing.  I have never seen such suffering.  In the hospital there are no supplies.  I did Capacitar and it helped me a lot to keep going every day, otherwise life is tough.  Many women and young girls here were raped by soldiers and now have babies without a father.  In this culture a man does not take back his wife if she was raped by another man, so you can imagine how these women are suffering, punished in a deep way.  I want to help these young girls and women to find life again within themselves, to discover another way to continue living in a positive way, to give new meaning to their lives.  Apart from Capacitar, I have nothing else to use in order to help them.  I want to learn more so I can help these people to heal in mind and body.”

During our training, Richard Poole, Great Lakes Regional Director for Trocaire, (the Catholic Irish development agency that is supporting Capacitar’s work in Rwanda) spoke of the great strength and resilience of the Rwandan people.  He said that the people have much to teach the rest of the world as they face their shadow and wounds, and work to heal their lives.  He feels that Capacitar can play a significant role in the healing and transformation of the people of Rwanda and of the region.

In this season of Springtime when new life emerges from death and from what is broken, I want to thank you for your friendship and support as together we work to heal ourselves and heal our world.

In peace and solidarity,
Pat Cane
Capacitar International Founder/Director
www.capacitar.org