This will be the first installment of a series called “ This is what we did today and it made us feel like [insert appropriate emotion]”

Today we went to two different places, both of them poverty-stricken and intensely affected by the civil-war that has torn Burundi apart for decades, and is still not over.
The first area we went to was a community about 10 km from Bujumbura that used to be thriving with many families and houses, but early in the 2000’s one of the rebel groups took over the area, made it into one of their stronghold’s, destroyed all the houses and forced everyone to flee. There were remnants of houses everywhere we looked, and it was eerie knowing that we were walking on land where people had been killed for no reason other than their race. We talked with a cousin of Jean-Baptiste’s who spoke French, and he told us of how the community was thriving before the battle there, but afterwards people had lost friends, children and family members. It broke my heart listening to him.

The second place we visited was a repatriation camp funded by the government of Burundi, where refugees came to live if they had no family and no land to go back to. A lot of the people there had been displaced in the 1968 or 1972 conflicts, or were born in refugee camps in Congo, Rwanda and Tanzania. There was so much poverty and suffering present in that place, it is hard to describe.

After seeing the things we saw, I was overwhelmed by how much we have… we have so many material objects, but more importantly we have so much opportunity. I won the birth lottery being born in North America where we have so much, and much of what we have has been gotten at the expense of others. As a group we decided that we need to be giving more freely. We have had our moments of worrying about money, about how we may or may not have enough to see us through the rest of this trip, but today was a reminder that everything we have has been given to us, and therefore we must give freely. I am coming to a point where I don’t want to have money leftover when I return home, because I return home to an opportunity, and opportunity to work and make money. But the people here are trapped in a cycle of poverty. So we will choose to give and trust that God will provide for us what we really need to keep going.

Another thing I was reminded of was a quotation I read in a Geez magazine not too long ago. It challenges me to re-examine my motivations for being here, and I hope it will challenge you to re-examine you motivations in reading our blog, and looking at the pictures of the poverty we post on the internet.

“Anti-racist theorist Sherene Razack observes that the white, privileged and respectable identity builds itself by being able to enter places of degeneracy and come out unscathed, willing and ready to tell the tale” Razack goes on to describe the “telling of the tale” as “consumption of media images and stories”

Are we here to simply bring images back home for people to consume and say “Oh, that is so sad !” and then go on with our “white, privileged and respectable” lives ? I pray that these experiences with extreme poverty would not become another way we reinforce our identity as the “privileged” but instead would help destroy that distinction. I pray that instead of coming out “unscathed” we would be profoundly changed, and moved to action. My prayer is the same for you.

Love,

Bethany

Ps: That quotation can be found in the Fall 2007 issue of Geez magazine, in an article entitled “In the wake of Katrina, what lesson, inspiration or insight can we take from New Orleans ?” by Anna Bowen.