On Monday, Andrea slept in, still trying to get over the jet lag from the travel. Ebralie and I took the opportunity to visit with some friends she had worked with prior to leaving Rwanda. She had worked with the Presbyterian Church prior to joining the Protestant Council of Rwanda, known by its French acronym for Conseil Protestant du Rwanda, or CPR. Many of her friends were still working with the CPR to help the people of Rwanda. We first went to a conference and met Francois. Francois is director of Education for the CPR. He talked about the challenge facing the education establishment now that English was the official language. While everyone seemed to understand the long-term benefit of the change, it presented an immediate challenge. There are just not enough English-speaking teachers that are fluent in Kinyarwanda to meet the needs of the people.
Francois took us to a cooperative that had originally been established to benefit the widows after the genocide. The cooperative taught sewing and fabric making to a number of ladies, trying to give them a skill and a trade that could help them make a living. I was struck by the equipment they had. The small house used by the cooperative was full of old Singer sewing machines, the ones powered by a foot pedal. Unfortunately, only a few of the machines were in use. Francois explained that while the women could learn a trade, the market for their products were limited. They had hoped to establish distribution for the fabrics and products in Europe, but were generally unable to do so. Their products were too expensive for most Rwandans, and without a distribution network in Europe, the cooperative was unable to be self-sustaining. As a result, it now could support only a fraction of the women it once had. This fact illustrated an important lesson. It is important to be charitable, but to be sustaining these type projects needed to be economically sound on their own.
Before we left, we found three more ladies working behind the building. They were working on some brightly-colored fabrics. It was fascinating to see how they did it. One lady was “drawing” intricate patterns on fabric with glue. When the glue dried, they would stain the fabric with selected bright colors. Then, once the color stain had dried, they would peel the glue off by hand to reveal the intricate patterns left on the fabric. We were given a set of place mats made in this manner when we left as a gift.
Francois then took us to the headquarters of the CPR. As the name implies, CPR is an organization that coordinates church-based projects throughout Rwanda for all member churches. We were fortunate to meet with the director of CPR, Tharcisse. He had just taken the position a week earlier, yet he still took the time to meet with us for almost an hour. It helped that he and Ebralie had worked together for many years in the Presbyterian Church, and had even gone to secondary school together.
Much of the funding for CPR comes from donations from sister churches in Europe. Amazingly to me, none of their funding comes from the United States, neither from churches or the government. Tharcisse said that US churches provide significant aid to churches in Rwanda on a direct church to church basis, much like First Presbyterian Church in Nashville had partnered with the Kanombe church in Kigali. Tharcisse said that while the direct aid was helpful, he lamented the fact that many of those individual projects duplicated efforts and did not maximize the benefits to the people of Rwanda. From his point of view, the aid received from US churches would be better utilized if the projects would at least be coordinated by the CPR. As Tharcisse put it, the CPR is in every village and knows the needs of the people of Rwanda. I suggested that perhaps the inhibiting factor was that it was easier for local US churches to identify with the personal feel of an individual church in Rwanda, where they could send their members and place a plaque where a church was built. Tharcisse said that individual connection could still exist if such projects were coordinated with CPR. He said CPR did not want the money or the plaque – all CPR wanted was to identify worthy and needed projects, and assist in the coordination of the project.
One confusing aspect of the work of CPR to me was the fact that they helped build schools and hospitals in Rwanda. Given the poverty of the people, I did not think that they could afford private schools or private healthcare. I asked Tharcisse about this, and he said the schools and churches built with the efforts of CPR were public and not private, with government money used for the staffing of the facilities. I then asked him about the issue of separation of church and state, and how that was resolved in Rwanda. Tharcisse laughed, and explained that in Rwanda, there would be no state without the church. In fact, he said, by law all bills that are passed by committee in the Rwandan parliament must be reviewed by CPR for its input before becoming law. I asked how the politicians viewed this rule. He explained that CPR is operating in every village in Rwanda through all of its member churches. The government knows that CPR knows the needs of the people better than anyone, and it better understands the impact any laws would have on the people. Also, the government knows that the people trust the church more than they trust the government, so if bills have been reviewed by CPR they are likely to hold more public support. I thought to myself, could you imagine if bills in the US had to be reviewed by a church body before passing?
Finally, I asked Tharcisse if there was some lingering mistrust of the church after the genocide, given that there were some infamous instances where pastors and priests betrayed their congregations seeking refuge in the church. I didn’t want to seem disrespectful, but the issue did seem to pose a dilemma. Tharcisse acknowledged that this was a difficult but important question. I later learned that he had written an authoritative book on this exact topic, named The Churches and Ethnic Ideology in the Rwandan Crises 1900-1994. He said he felt it was very important that the church acknowledge its shortcomings, and address the issue that was out there even if it was unspoken. There was debate in the church as to how to address the issue, and some prominent theologians did not think the issue needed to be addressed. Those clergy’s argument was that the churches were again full post-genocide. But as Tharcisse said, the churches were full before the genocide, and that did not prevent it. Clearly the church had not done all it could to prevent the atrocities. Ultimately it was decided that the church in Rwanda should address the issue head-on in an effort to get past it.
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