This is Goreth’s daughter Bella in one of Myriam’s JOY jerseys. It was way too big for her, but she had no desire to wear anything else. Happy Fourth dear ones! Here’s hoping you have all the courage you need for whatever journey your soul is taking you on these days. I’m hoping the same for myself.
The Journey
by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Doreen, modeling the necklace Odette sent her, with Odette’s daughter Lillian looking on in admiration
“Doreen.” Odette says, murmuring in Kinyarwanda. “I love her so much.”
“She was the first baby for me to take care of,” Odette tells me, “even though she was not my own.” She tells me this as we walk to see our brothers, to buy phone cards so we can call Doreen to see how she is doing since Sam got hurt. “I was only ten! Can you imagine that? Me, like Madeleine, with a baby on my back?”
I can. Doreen has Odette’s playful spirit and wide open heart. She is sassy and funny and bright. She wants me to take her picture. I don’t even have to ask her to smile. She is happy in part because she has worn down Odette and Odette’s mother and convinced them she cannot go to school a minute longer. At twenty, she is too old and has missed too much. She won’t be a big woman in a little girls’ class for another second.
I can see the pain of this, but also the possibilities. Doreen is not stupid. She knows her success will come by being a strong woman in the village, her chance for a career requiring formal education long past. She will take Sam, the love of her young life, even now and build a future with her own hands. She can do this, all disapproving murmurs be damned.
Just you wait and see.
Where she got this fire, nobody knows, but I think it has something to do with her mother, Francoisie.
When Francoisie was Doreen’s age, she fell in love with Odette’s brother who convinced her to defy the village elders and the law and run away with him to the city. She was scared at first, but when he reminded her they would be required to live apart for eight whole months, she was gone and in his arms before they knew she had left.
Odette was a little younger than Madeleine when that happened and she still remembers one year later, when that spirited girl returned home to Odette’s mother’s house, round and happy as the late afternoon sun, all sins of passion and nonconformity forgiven. When her pains came, the old women helped her, but the baby was too big for her body and she broke under the stress and weight of it all. In the end, the doctors came, the baby was born and they named her Doreen, thanking God that her mother did not die after all.
But time did not mend her mother’s body the way the doctors promised and when Doreen was five months old, the doctors in the city told Franciosie she was pregnant again and that this baby would not hold. She died of complications from a miscarriage before anyone back the village knew she was at risk. Her husband, Odette’s brother, soon after fled, for reasons he alone knows, but I would like to think it was because he had a broken heart.
Everything will be okay, Odette’s mother said, taking the child into her arms. Her name will be Tumukunde.
And she will be mine, Odette answered, tying the dear baby girl on her back with a cloth.
“What does it mean–Tumukunde?” I ask Odette as we wave goodbye to our brothers and walk back home.
“It means, ‘We should love her’,” she says. And then she starts to cry a little, remembering that baby and the way they carried her with that love and that name all those years.
Odette and I have been talking about how much we would love to help Doreen along in her power as a woman in the village. Throw $1 or $10 or $100 in the pot today and all the funds will go towards helping Doreen build a foundation of security (cows are good for this in the village) and a future of possibility (a small business in the market would be good, too). Odette & I are prepared to help her each step of the way. The timing of this feels just right to us as Doreen’s fiancée Sam is recovering from a serious motorcycle accident last weekend, making Doreen’s independence and economic viability more important than ever.
jackie-boy, madeleine and nate, lucy, josiah and carter running in the park after our photo shoot with pbs
“May we never break the strong spirits of our daughters. May we teach our sons to become loving and nurturing men. In so doing, we hold the key to universal peace.” (not attributed)
This quote comes to me from Brene Brown. Still musing about boys and girls and how we create a safe space for them to grow into the truest most beautiful versions of themselves. Being with my sisters and our kids today made me long for this all the more. How sweet would it be for all of us–parents and kids from here and faraway–to find a way to do this together?
Rwandan boy who followed me out to the road after I visited his school. He wanted me to take his picture.
I’m sitting at my kitchen table with my soulsister Fatou, trying to do something on my computer, so I don’t disturb her while she does work on hers. This is torture for me because I love Fatou and all I want to do is tell her stories. Here is the last thing I told her before swearing on ten copies of the Koran to not say another word until she finishes her work:
One of the thing that has been haunting me about my time in Rwanda is this thing about boys. Being a good little third wave American feminist with my well-worn copies of Naomi Wolf on my shelf, I went to Rwanda with no qualms about singling girls out for special privileges, boys’ hard feelings be damned. On arrival, I realized immediately this approach was not going to work, so books around for everyone, but still. What to do about the huge inequities that girls face without turning boys into oppressors before they’ve made their first step?
To shake up things even more in the well-defined category department, I was incredibly aware that supportive men were the reason why the books could even get delivered in the first place. No matter how much I wanted to talk to those girls, if Innocent and Michel had been unwilling to help me, I would have been screwed.
Ask any African woman you know to tell you the trouble with African boys and she will give you an earful. The cultural blueprint for men in Africa too often carries a laundry list of things that would make any Western woman have the police on the phone for a restraining order immediately. There are huge issues with women’s empowerment across the continent–no one will argue with you on that one. But hold that next to this: for every horrible story I have heard about violence perpetrated against women in Africa, there is a story of a man weeping at the feet of his wife, wishing for a way to marry without carrying a woman off to rape her first (carrying marriage). Does any living human being survive being violent without some part of the soul collapsing in on itself?
Things need to change, not only for girls’ sake, but for the sake of boys as well.
It’s like this, my soulsister Brene Brown told me on the phone the other day. You can keep pulling the girls and boys out of the water before they drown or you can go to the head of the river and discover the source of pain that lands them in the river in the first place. This rang so true for me. What if girls get the message that they are capable at the exact same time that boys hear they can express their empathy and compassion? Put those two pieces together and you change the world.
This made me think of the houseboy who stole away behind the house to read his copy of Learning to Help Ourselves and Others. He startled when I found him there, but he didn’t stop reading.
I know this is a very simplistic way of drawing the lines and considering the solutions, but I’m sitting with it all quietly this afternoon, while Fatou types. Trying to see those boys and girls together in one circle–strong and peaceful, powerful and kind.
Tonight Nick, Jess, Dave and I sat out on our back patio and feasted on falafel sandwiches while being slowly devoured from the ankles up by killer mosquitoes. After being in Rwanda for ten days where the just right bite could give you malaria, I decided I didn’t mind one bit. Halfway through dinner, Nick brought up Sigur Ros, an Icelandic band I had never heard of, and the night went from an ordinary family dinner to a kind of infomercial on the virtues of the band and the imperative that we go see them in concert RIGHT NOW no matter what the cost.
I love this kind of dreaming. And this kind of demand. After listening to a few amazing songs, we spent an hour looking up airfare to the show in Montreal. And then the show in Seattle. In the end, we decided to save ourselves a collective $2000 dollars no one has and go inside and watch the videos on YouTube instead. Do you do this at your house, too?
We watched video after video, and with each one, we were each in our own ways able to touch that kind of longing and desire that often remains locked behind doors we forget ever existed in the first place. I don’t know how that happens or why, but I’m learning to be glad for the return of the ache and for the magic of simple things to bring you back to your senses. There is lament and the secret fear that you have sold your soul to all the wrong things, and then there is the unexpected way your hand finds the key that unlocks the door that lets the light come streaming in just in time.
Can you dare to believe that it’s never too late? That everything your heart desires is a seed waiting to blossom? A dream determined to tell you the truth that will set your heart free?
Here’s the video that wrecked us this evening. I hope you will watch the whole thing and then lie on your bed and try to remember the beginning of things, before you stopped believing you could fly.
I’m in a deep state of soul shifting these days with more stories to tell but no words to express them quite just yet. I am not quite sure what Rwanda did to me, but I’m still doing my best to find my way around the inside of my heart. All the soul furniture has been moved around and I keep bumping into things I didn’t know were there.
Certain things are comforts during strange times like these. The gentle care of my urban family, the unexpected call from a neighbor and friend, the love and understanding of Odette and the steady stream of poetry from the last twenty years that plays like ticker tape inside my head.
For all you closet poets out there, here’s three phrases I can’t shake along with a song. Be the first to name the poems along with the poets and I will send you the song from iTunes just because.
“now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened”
“the land was ours before we were the land’s”
“Call it / whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.”
Betty’s daughter, standing in the doorway of her home in Kigali
A few hundred thousand little girls with no memory of the genocide
Hundreds of primary schools waiting to teach them reading, writing and a little bit of English
A generation of well-educated Rwandanese women determined to do their part
A deep well of compassion from fathers, brothers, sisters and mothers for women, girls and the injustice of the artificial limitations placed upon them
A strange and wonderful dream planted carefully in the hearts of a brother, a sister, a friend and an ally for the purpose of this hope and more
Happy Friday, everyone. I’m chopping wood, carrying water, trying to get my feet planted back on the earth. Do we light candles for that? If you still have the willpower to hear one more story, please check out this very special podcast I did days after I got back with Stephanie Roberts of ListenShare and Elemental Interactive.
I am sitting in a church service under a tent listening to group after group of little children sing for me as the honored white guest. This makes me feel slightly ill and very strange. I am not fond of God at the moment. Please do not ask my opinion of Jesus. I am wishing for a comment card at the end of a wooden pew, so I can make a formal complaint. As far as customer service goes, I am thinking Jesus and God should be fired for their performance in Africa. I am shocked they still get this much attention, as the widows and orphans and women with AIDS swelter from too much heat and too little shade. Our tent is more of a tarp on sticks than anything else. I marvel that it doesn’t fall down.
I try to listen from my upholstered chair, the one they carried up the hill from the village especially for me. I sit back relaxed, sipping my Fanta while the children sing and the women sweat. I try to look happy and serious at the same time. I try to hide how angry I am. I bide my time through songs fantasizing about communists and anarchists and activists in some other tent somewhere singing the same songs with different words.
Songs of power to the people.
Songs of defiant, rebellious hope.
A preacher from a neighboring town comes forward to give the message. The pastor of the little tent church places Michel (mee-shay) beside me to translate and then decides this is not enough. He marches Michel next to the man and orders him to say every word out loud for me in English. I dread how long this will make things. I hope everyone will not be too bored.
The message is about faith. I know this because the Michel says the word so many times in the next hour that I learn to recognize the word in Kinyarwanda first. Kwizera. I like how it sounds, even as I fear the concept is being passed out like a tranquilizer to all the suffering people. I hate how cynical I am. I wish to be a little child again so I could hear these words without judgment, without thinking.
I prepare to be annoyed, but I am not.
The man is talking about the kind of dreaming I believe in with all my heart. He is telling them this is the way of God, to deeply hope in things you don’t yet see. To take risks for the sake of good. A hundred times over in the weeks before I came, this kind of faith was sown into the garden of my heart. A hundred times the words came to me as one impossible thing happened after the next, “If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can move mountains.”
Mountains moved, indeed.
By some unexpected magic, I feel the tightness in my chest loosen a little, and I begin to breathe. I feel sorry that I am being so hard on Jesus. I feel tyrannical to be so insanely annoyed with God. I acknowledge to myself that for every kind of hardship here there are some that do not exist.
The sadness of believing we have been left here alone.
The desperation of thinking you must do everything on your own.
The isolation of carrying your hard times like a secret in your heart.
The pastor of the tent church leans over and asks me what I have brought for the widows and the orphans. “When they see white people coming, they think they are bringing something.” I tell him my hands are empty, that I have come because I love Odette and I wanted to see her children. I tell him I do not have even one franc left, but that I will leave the rest of my pens and bouncy balls and books for him to distribute as he wishes. I am suddenly glad there are no comment cards to evaluate my performance as a supposedly caring human being.
There will be speeches now as everyone tries to help everyone else understand why I am here if there will be no tangible help. No food. No cash. No shelter.
Odette’s brother goes first, explaining that I have not come here for the purpose of visiting churches, but that he wanted them to meet me because I am the dear friend of Odette and her relatives. Everyone is curious now as the paradigm shifts and I go from philanthropist to sister. Then the pastor stands and explains how I came not because of money but because of love. Love for Odette. Love for Odette’s children. Love for this family.
“And we know that Love is God,” he says as a warm and quiet contentment falls over all of us like a blessing. I watch as my name is planted into the ground of family and belonging, a place where cash and services will never ever take you. I feel reprieved, forgiven, understood. Is there any reason to go on a journey like this one, except for Love?
The pastor asks me to say a few words, and I actually feel like I want to even though we are in church, the place I have promised myself a thousand times over I will never speak again. I tell them how happy I am to be in Umutara, that I have never experienced kindness and welcome like this in my entire life. I tell them that seeing their love for me and for each other is changing me.
And then I say I can see they need many things, and that that I feel like I could cry.
The children sing for what feels like hours more and then the pastor prays. I have not finished my Fanta. I stop feeling like I want to leave. I don’t wish so hard to be an anarchist or some sort of revolutionary, bringing peace and goodness to the world by sheer force. I realize the people–all fifty of them–are praying out loud for me, and I wonder how this could happen. How I could be in this place in this moment with every cell of my body on fire, telling me this dream, these needs, this contentment, is where I belong?
100+ girls run across the schoolyard to receive zines and personally written Hope Notes from the HopeRevo.com community. They couldn’t have been more excited.
After the dreams give way to long daylight hours, after you are able to move about your days without forgetting to breathe from the sheer joy of it all, there will still be the girls of Umutara.
I don’t know why I love these girls so much, but I find them now looking at me from the walls of my heart. I think they are the finest girls on earth, so tall, so bright, so beautiful. I want every last one of them to go to school. I want to see who among them will become an artist, a writer, a scientist, an expert in solar power.
We are sitting in an office in downtown Washington, Odette and I. We are talking to a kind and powerful woman about our book. We are telling her we wish for 100,000 copies to distribute to every child in every village school Umutara calls her own.
Everyone asks us why Umutara, especially the Rwandan people we meet, and I don’t know what to say other then that’s where I left my heart. “Maybe we should just say Rwandan girls and not try to explain Umutara,” Odette says. We know Umutara, despite how beautiful her landscapes or fertile her soil, is considered by some to be the backwater of the nation, that place crowded in by too many unwanted refugees returning home after a generation in Uganda. No one—foreign born or native–does development work in Umutara. It is a place almost completely devoid of assistance, aid or initiative, even though it desperately requires this and so much more.
“If they can’t love Umutara, then how can we love them?” I answer half-joking as we walk around in circles down the staircase of this beautiful building. Odette laughs and then agrees. “Okay,” she says. “This is how we will know who understands our heart.”
We are still sifting through our papers, wandering the halls of possibility, asking ourselves what next and how. We are working little by little to get Odette’s family settled and secure before taking on bigger dreams, grander plans. We do this as if on automatic. We know when we finish (and we will finish) these girls will be there ready to fly. We can hardly wait.
in Umutara
Thank you for everything you did for Goreth this week. She was out of her mind with gratitude and joy when I told her we were sending her that money. She needed this–and more importantly–that vote of confidence in her own ability more than you will ever know.
So many people sent this my way today. It totally and completely inspires me to hold on to this dream until it has wings.
My name is Jen Lemen. I'm messy, hopeful,
enthusiastic and helplessly in love with the idea
that stories can change you and me forever.