Managing Trauma’s Effects on the Practitioner.
( as tested and tried in Rwanda)
Background
To appreciate the scope of the Rwandan genocide is difficult: in terms of human and material loss it equated to 3 NY Twin Tower collapses per day for 100 consecutive days – or 50 first Bali bombings per day for 100 days, without the external logistical and medical support which accompanied both these disasters. Over 800,000 people died, both Tutsi and moderate Hutu, mostly by hand-held weapons, in 100 days among a population of 7 million living in an area half the size of Tasmania.
My story is based on 16 months of living in Kigali 3 years after the Rwanda Patriotic Front had quelled the Hutu government that promoted the genocide and embarked on a slow recovery. (1) We arrived about 1000 days after that horror, at a difficult and uncertain time in 2007 when almost 2 million Hutu walked back in from a punishing 2-year existence in emergency camps in Congo/Zaire, Tanzania, Kenya and Burundi.
Thousands of Hutu died in those crowded camps due to starvation, exposure, malaria and cholera. Some camps were controlled by the [self-] exiled leadership who were intent on regrouping to continue their genocidal hopes; so people also died there because of their ethnicity or sympathy with the Tutsi [which often occurred because of so many mixed marriages]. Some thousands continue today to live in Congo, keeping alive their hope of completing the genocide; and keeping their hand in by destabilizing Rwandans through cross-border incursions.
These relatively short-term refugees came back to Rwanda to find their homes occupied by other returnees – their traditional enemies [Tutsi and moderate Hutu] who had lived troubled lives in exile in nearby countries for 10, 20, or 30 years. The latter simply took advantage of the post-genocide relative quiet to fulfill the desire of most Rwandan exiles: return to the motherland. Many felt they were reclaiming their ancestral property. Now they were discovering they were also reclaiming the bones of their dead loved ones, their dismantled houses, and the hatred, guilt and shame of those who had long wished them dead.
(1) that process is well-described in Romeo Dallaire, Shake hands with the Devil, Random House, 2003
What to do?
Can you therefore imagine how bewildering this was for me; how my involvement in Rwanda began among a people swirling in chaos and confusion, where unhealed emotions of guilt, anger, trauma and loss chafed against long-standing tensions about difference, status, privilege and power?
In an attempt to unravel the complexity for one who did not speak any of the 3 favored languages, I was blessed with a Director who welcomed me with the words "this is a very complex situation, do not make any plans for at least 3 months, and use that time to listen and learn".As part of my settling-in I visited groups attempting to promote peace and reconciliation and found limited evidence of progress. The common response to my questions about hopeful signs of healing or forgiveness was a long silence and then you’re new here – things like that don’t happen in Rwanda. People came to my office to tell me their stories – full of grief and loss, blood and broken bones. For weeks there was not one happy or hopeful story.
I tried to work with a group of church leaders but my translator would tell me with a sigh that, while the group was expressing deep thoughts, he was unable to put their words into adequate English. I felt dumb, useless and out of my depth. With time I looked for a few Rwandans who appeared to be facing the deep questions of “how did Rwanda descend into such anarchy and shame, and how do you recover from that?’
One survivor, whose remaining, living relatives numbered five persons out of a clan of several hundred, showed me how the Rwandan reality was more complex than the simple division into Hutu, Tutsi and Twa. We found 7 social groupings.(2) These suggested different experiences of marginalisation over many years. I saw that nobody in Rwanda had escaped the recent history unaffected. When I sat in a meeting I realized that everyone present either had relatives who died or relatives who participated in killings, or both! Everyone was wounded and a candidate for healing.
For the next 16 months I lived and worked there, then visited Rwanda every six months for the following 9 years – those 18 visits kept me in touch and I could see the progress in the country and in many individuals [and the deterioration in others]. My main focus was to mentor healers and peacebuilders from a range of programs. This has given me so many Rwandan mentors and teachers. In return I have cried and laughed with them, and participated in conversations with simple [!] topics like ‘…so, what do we do now?’
(2) Chapter 9 in Clark & Kaufman ( eds), After Genocide, Hurst, 2008
Looking back
After leaving Rwanda in mid 1998, when the government would not renew my work permit, my spouse and I participated in a debriefing session in Melbourne, where the counselor made two observations and asked:
1. Why do you have hope, when that is not the view of others from here that have discussed their Rwandan experience with me?
2. You seem not to be traumatized even though you have been in a traumatizing situation. Any ideas why?
We could answer the first question – we had been there long enough to see, hear and experience the emergence of hope in Rwanda. The answer to the second question was a mystery at that moment but it led us into a quest to understand.My rumination has uncovered ideas – which may provide one or two handles for you to grasp; most likely you will recognize ways in which you already support yourself.
1. Prayer – we chose not to go to Rwanda until we had recruited 100 prayer partners. Each person committed to pray on one day a month – so we had 3 people praying for us daily. That meant serious and regular communication from our end. People prayed and some still remind us: I prayed for you on the 13 th of the month. We also prayed at home, at work and in the vehicle as we traveled.
We also brought symbols of our faith such as a holding cross, some pictures to focus our reflections, photos of our praying partners, music.2. Reflection – to keep these pray- ers informed we wrote a daily journal and sent a weekly summary via email. Called Drinking from the Waterfall the writing of our experience and reflection on its meaning helped us to externalize much of what was inside.
3. Sharing our shocks and struggles – activism in traumatic situations needs and anchor, so we are not carried away by the torrent. One of our first actions in Kigali was to go to the Jesuit center and ask if they could suggest someone as a spiritual companion. No-one was available, because we did not speak French. To fill the gap we developed a discipline of sharing: each afternoon at 5 my spouse walked into my office and extracted me. We sauntered to the spot where dozens of our Rwandan colleagues were climbing into minibuses to get safely home before dark. After fare welling them we walked around the streets and talked about the day, processing as much as we could before reaching our home as curfew came into force. It was hard to build connections with the itinerant expat community but we shared as we could in bible study and prayer, as well as attending local services in Kinyarwanda. We found the propensity of Rwandan Protestant preachers to shout at traumatized audiences, and to demand that all adherents should forgive, to be inappropriate. Our great comfort was on the 3 weekends where we traveled 90 mins to stay with a Ghanaian colleague and his spouse [a genocide survivor] -- where we shared our faith, prayed, ate, sang and watched Fiddler on the Roof. In response to the love that developed between us he asked us to host his wife in the last 12 days of her first pregnancy. And so our African “granddaughter” was born the week before Christmas 1997.
4. Meditation – in Melbourne my wife had learned to meditate to help her cope with back pain, while I had been taught meditation to increase energy levels while filming training videos. In Rwanda, after reading Thomas Keating(3) on unloading the unconscious through contemplative prayer, we chose to end our evenings by sitting with the Lord in the silence. As the horror stories and painful experiences that had been told to us that day came back into awareness we released them to God and refocused on our choice to be held in the love of Christ. We slept well, and woke sufficiently refreshed to face the challenges of the new day.(4) By lunch time, the only way I could return myself to the office was to walk continually repeating the words of Heb 12: 2 Jesus, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.
(3) Thomas Keating , Invitation to Love, Element, 1992
(4) My observation is that meditation during the day increases energy, whereas at night it enables relaxation and preparation for sleep.
5. Focus on the essentials – once I knew that my time in Rwanda was limited I focused on enabling my team of Rwandans, and declined all invitations that would draw energy away from that task. Over a few months I taught this group of seven everything I could. But the price was disappointing others whose requests I declined. John Steward has left the church was a label I was forced to wear for the sake of maintaining the focus. Several years later some of my critics admitted: looking back we can now see what you were doing.
6. Eating well – Rwanda is not a desert, but green and productive – called “Mille Colline” the land of thousands of hills, it’s well-watered for 8 months of the year and often feels like paradise. As part of our health-care plan we were blessed with natural and tasty meat, fruit and vegetables. Fresh fish from Lake Victoria came daily in the back of utility wagons, covered by layers of ice. Clean water flowed into our house. We ignored the bat droppings in the kitchen.
7. Knowing when I need a break – I asked my team to plan into their life a day off after stressful events, while their adrenalin levels stabilized. We took as a motto ‘work hard and play hard’. I’m told I was the only departmental manager with a budget for staff lunches – we didn’t do it often but we did it well and it built morale, and increased compassion among us.
Dec 26 th was a great day for us – after 9 months in the country we received our first invite to visit one staff family. But since then the offers of hospitality became embarrassingly numerous and frequent.8. Participation in healing processes – this is a long story, not all of which can be told here. You can find some of the detail to read(5) and view.(6) Healing of painful wounds seems to be a missing dimension of the modern Christian gospel; it is a crucial contribution from Rwanda to the rest of the world. Terentius (c.190-159 BC), an African slave could say that time heals all wounds(7) because in his case is seemed true after his French master emancipated him. This is reflected also in the second part of Hippocrates’ (c. 460-400 BC) statement Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.(8) After Rwanda my own conclusion is that: time brings perspective, but only healing heals our deepest wounds.
(5) Catherine Claire Larson , as we forgive, Zondervan 2009. Meg Guillebaud, After the Locusts, Monarch 2005
(6) John Steward , Choices on the way to Peace, www.rwandanstories.org
(7) Publius Terentius Afer, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations , Macmillan 14th ed, 1968
(8) Hippocrates, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations , Macmillan 14th ed, 1968
9. Listening – One hot and dry afternoon our Kenyan psychologist flopped wearily onto a chair in my office and uttered words which I immediately wrote on my whiteboard: Ah John, everybody has a story to tell, a pain to bear, a wound to heal(9) These insightful words were never rubbed off that board, and became a key lesson - we learned so much about the value of people telling their stories both one-on-one and in confidential small groups. This was the setting for hearing the stories of hope and change, the evidence of God’s working. When I participated I also received the gift of being ‘listened to’. Several writers have suggested that: Listening is the greatest form of loving.(10)
10. Truth-telling – Our human propensity is to hold unpleasant things close to our chest, to not tell the truth. As well to do this safely we need a trusted person and a safe space – you all know about that. Over 60 % of Rwandans have unprocessed trauma; many are now beginning to pay the price in broken marriages, suicide, mental illness, depression and cancer. Or the energy may burst out into acts of outward expression, usually violence. Rwanda now has its first post-genocide mass murderer – a youth who was released from jail on compassionate grounds without processing his pain and shame. One never drinks from an already opened bottle; you only drink from the bottle that is opened before your eyes. I estimate at least 15% of Rwandans are in a place of desiring revenge or seeking to damage others – some of the locals say it is a higher percentage than that. Hiding our emotions or rationalizing them submerges energy within the body. In telling my story in a small group I shared some of my pain; each time I told my story the pain lessened. (11) The tendency in Rwanda has been to keep the story inside and get on with life. In denial this energy either damages us, or our relationships or both.
11. Personal conversion – by facing my own truth and accepting when the evidence showed I need to be transformed in values, attitude or behavior. I participated in my own change process in the 16 months before going to Africa. This not only saved my marriage, but also prepared me to recognize the common elements of human need, whatever the culture. In Rwanda accusing, blaming and scapegoat- ing are common. It is the exception for people to understand and face the reality of their need for change. Rwanda offers hope because there are many unforgettable examples.
12. Seeing every one as a human being created by God –I had decided never to ask the ethnicity of a Rwandan person, I wanted to treat all as equal. I also learned to stop referring to ‘killers’ and instead to speak of each by name and then add, if needed, that they had killed some-one. After I hugged one man who killed 3 people I felt shocked, asking myself – why did I do that? After a while I realized – well, why not?
Application
Before I went to Rwanda I understood little about trauma. But once there I saw its debilitating effects and its subtle power to divert energy for living into pure survival based/ resulting in non-action. The internalized energy creeps slowly but surely into the inner life and grips it in either a kind of paralysis or else it energizes inappropriately.
Practitioners in such work are not immune to the side effects. The approaches taken by my spouse and I were not taught to us, but ideas we caught through being stuck in life’s hard corners. We had served in Indonesia in the years after the 1965 coup, we had worked 5 weeks in Cambodia after Pol-Pot, and members of my nuclear family have suffered life-threatening trauma at least four times. But Rwanda was the ultimate reality check.
By hard work, acceptance, faith, and continued openness to receive I can share this daunting and complex journey and say ‘we did what we could’ in Rwanda, the country that went mad. And God added to it timely acts of grace.
This is my story (12)
John Steward
Cranbourne, August 2010
(9) Lincoln Ndogoni, personal communication, 1997.
(10) Source probably Henri Nouwen, but Scott Peck wrote something similar, as did Paul Tillich.
(11) I did this weekly in Melbourne during my 16 month process of facing my truth before going to Rwanda, where I sought to continually model this openness among my colleagues.
(12) This material was presented to the 5th National Conference of the Christian Counsellors Association of Australia, Inc. in Melbourne on Sept 12, 2010