Thursday, July 9, 2010

First of all, thanks to everybody who is posting comments. It helps me keep a link to home and my old identity, and is very comforting.

My research plans are going very well. Better than I had any right to expect. Sheila told me that readers may not know who everybody is, so I'll start with that. David Russell is the diretor of SURF, the survivors fund that raises money for rwandans affected by the genocide. David is British, very British. Gabon wilson is the director of SURF in Rwanda, and is a native of Rwanda. I don't know his story.

AVEGA is a rwandan organization that works with survivors of the genocide. The other organization i've met with is Solace Ministries, an evangelical organization that does the same work as AVEGA.

The situation i was puzzled about yesterday is clearer now. The survivor organizations are being made part of the public health system, subject to those budgetary constraints, which means that they can't offer all the services they once did. In addition, they lost funding from private sources, so can't supplement their public funding.

The research that I'm planning with David and AVEGA and Solace ministries is aimed at documenting the need for special services for survivors, and thus maybe getting some funding back. It will be a mixed methods study, beginning with a qualitative component and then adding a more structured survey component. The aim will be to show how the recovery process from the genocide works, and what the survivor organizations provided, or used to provide. Strange how a lot of the things I've been saying in my classes, and Louise has been saying in hers, are turning out to be right. There is no way that we could have designed a study without a qualitative culturally sensitive piece,

In talking to solace ministries i've learned something major about the trauma of the genocide. It is not just that people develop symptoms, although they do. More important, they lose their identity and their humanity. As the pastor of solace says: if you are called vermin and cockroaches, and hunted and raped and killed, and then shunned in Rwandan society, you no longer feel human. Treatment must first of all restore humanity and human dignity. One of the functions of the "active listening" of therapy, he says, is to convey to the person that they are worth listening too, and therefore still human. They do this in community, in the case of solace a church community, where people matter to each other. The pastor told me that people who don't have the money for public transport will walk three hours from their village just to get to the meeting.

There is a lot to learn here for the West. We talk about trauma as something that happens to individuals, to be cured individually. I've said this before, but it is becoming clearer.

Another cultural tidbit, changing the topic. Eric, my driver, asked me if I had grandchildren. When I said yes he asked me if they lived with me. He was shocked when I said no. In Rwanda, apparently, one of the grandchildren is sent to live with the grandparents so they will not be lonely. The grandchildren also run errands and do small chores for the grandparents. It is a different world.

Eric was also shocked that I didn't know the neighbors in my building.

There is so much need here. Gervais, one of the waiters at the Okapi, who denise and i really liked, asked me if I would pay for his education. He is an orphan, both of his parents killed in the genocide, and works at the hotel to support himself. I think he goes to school a bit, but can't afford the university. I said that I was sorry but I couldn't, that I didn't have the money. I also said I would ask my friends in America, which really was just to alleviate my guilt. I'm going to talk to David Russell about this, if there are ways in which it would be possible for a local organization to "adopt" him. But even if this were possible it wouldn't be simple - who would monitor him, how would the money get to him, etc, - and anyhow there are thousands of Gervais. In any event, I said desole, and he said pas de probleme, and we went back to customer waiter relations, both smiling at each other. Or did we? I think I'll be living with this for a long time.