Journey to Rwanda: Listening for the Creative Psalm of Sister & Brotherhood in Plain Words

 

Rwanda, the land of a thousand hills

I will listen to what you are saying,
for you are speaking peace to your faithful people
and to those who turn their hearts to you.
~ Psalm 85:1

Our blog has been silent for many months, but now it's time to get it talking again because we are preparing to leave for Rwanda in late December. This time last year, we--a group of Episcopal clergy and lay people, including college students and religious educators from the Diocese of Massachusetts--were getting ready to depart for Israel/Palestine to learn from people of different faiths and cultures who are committed to the peace process in that torn land. Now, we are preparing to leave for East Africa in a week's time. We have gotten ourselves ready through prayer, readings and film watching, group meetings, theological reflection, and a visit from The Rev. Philbert Kalisa of REACH Rwanda. We have had our immunizations, including the yellow fever inoculations required for entry into the country, where yellow fever and malaria are borne by mosquitoes that buzz around at night. We have shared our expectations and worries with each other and our friends, families, and church communities. Now, it is almost time to depart for this beautiful country with a deep and richly textured history and culture. There, we will learn about the horrific events of the 1994 genocide--and we will also learn about the ways in which Rwandans have lived not only through that dark time, but beyond it with hope and a vision for a peaceful future in which the beloved community of God is experienced as a reality.

The Rev. Philbert Kalisa of REACH Rwanda with Boston College student pilgrims.

Photo courtesy of Meredith Koch.

A small nation with a land mass the size of Maryland and a population of just over 11 million, Rwanda is tucked into East Africa between the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Tanzania, and Burundi. Geologically, Rwanda is situated in the Great Rift Valley, and its rivers are part of a system that is the origin of the Nile, which eventually runs northward into Egypt. Due to the mountains and lush landscapes of its central and western regions, the country is known as "the land of a thousand hills," which in French is "Pays des Mille Collines." In these green hills live the mountain gorillas made famous by Dian Fossey, whose experience in Rwanda is recounted in the film about her life, Gorillas in the Mist (1988).  In the east toward the border with Tanzania, Rwanda features a stunning African savannah of grassland and acacia woodlands where elephants, hippos, buffalo, giraffes, leopards, and other large animals live. All of us look forward to seeing the amazing landscapes, the animals and plant life and geographical features that make Rwanda an enchanting land not only for its visitors, but also for the people who have lived there for thousands of years.

 

Mille Collines, the thousand hills, is also the name of the four-star hotel in Kigali where Paul Rusesabagina welcomed and protected over 1,000 refugees during the genocide, when between 500,000 and 1 million Tutsi and Hutu people were killed by Hutu militias in just 100 days. Rusesabagina's story of the creative power of love for humanity against the human tendency to destroy others and the world is narrated in the film, Hotel Rwanda (2004), which we watched in preparation for our journey. After the film was made, Rusesabagina told his own story in An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography (2006), where he claims that he did nothing extraordinary in his efforts to keep people alive. He writes:

I am not a politician or a poet. I built my career on words that are plain and ordinary and concerned with everyday details. I am nothing more or less than a hotel manager, trained to negotiate contracts and charged to give shelter to those who need it. My job did not change in the genocide, even though I was thrust into a sea of fire. I only spoke the words that seemed normal and sane to me. I did what I believed to be the ordinary things that an ordinary man would do. I said no to outrageous actions the way I thought that anybody would, and it still mystifies me that so many others could say yes. 

Paul Rusesabagina

Although many have characterized the genocide in Rwanda as an experience with a pure and unearthly evil, Rusesabagina and others show us how ordinary people organize themselves in murderous and destructive ways. Evil, which seems at times to be out-of-this-world, can also be understood to be part of ordinary existence, something enacted by people gone awry in their daily lives. At the same time that we see through the genocide the presence of something so dark and ominous in human nature, we also see in Rusesabagina's life and in so many Rwandans' efforts to effect healing that it is possible to live with a love for humanity and a dedication to common decency, no matter what the circumstances of our lives. Groups like Philbert Kalisa's REACH Rwanda, our hosts for the duration of our pilgrimage, live with this kind of love, working for peace by sharing their message and considering the importance of the means by which they share it. REACH Rwanda gathers people together to tell the truth about what happened in their land and to dream of reconciliation in their communities, their nation, and the world. They strive for a world that becomes the beloved community of God, a world where, as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it in his Nobel Prize Award Acceptance Speech in 1964, we can "transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood." 

Mercy and truth have met together;

righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

~ Psalm 85:10 

Those of us embarking on this journey to Rwanda, the land of a thousand gorgeous hills and of a great human devastation, will be listening for the sound of this creative psalm as we make our way across the wide earth this winter. We invite you to join our pilgrimage through this blog, which we will update each day, from our departure from the U.S. on December 27 through our return on January 7.  We ask for your prayers and good thoughts, too, as we meet the people of Rwanda and listen to their stories of fear and hope and a world in which the beloved community of M.L.King can become a reality.

Elephants enjoying a meal on the African savannah.

~ Post by Shan Overton, Rwanda pilgrimage participant and PhD Student at Boston College

To learn more about REACH Rwanda, who will be hosting our visit, see their website at

http://www.reach-rwanda.org/index.html

The psalm selections are taken from The Saint Helena Psalter (2004), a translation published by the sisters of the Order of St. Helena, who were attentive to using inclusive language in their prayerful work.