HUTUS AND TUTSIS

Today will be an interesting day. I am hanging around the apartment while it is being cleaned. This will be our last night in it as tomorrow we move to a hotel and the apartment becomes home to the new doctor-professor. This afternoon I am invited to be a spectator of the Chamber of Deputies in the office of their Speaker. This is one house of their Parliament and the Speaker is a woman of whom they are deservedly very proud.

My contact is a young lawyer who works as a policy adviser to the Parliament. Sue and I took him out for dinner last night and reflected a bit with him as to the difficulty of maintaining the spirit of these wonderful people together with the demands and discipline of organization, accountability, participation, honoring of differences and eventually unity of purpose. This is a journey they are on and have not yet accomplished. However, the dream of building something of real value for their children from the wreckage of their parents is truly captivating. The genesis of the genocide at least in part was the past failure to fully appreciate and honor those organizational efforts toward inclusion however megere they may have been. Eventually the Hutus and Tutsis lost hope in those institutions and resorted to name calling, stereotyping, and eventually violence.

When it comes to these hard tasks the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. We want to believe that somehow intuitively answers to our differences can just show up because we believe so strongly in the spirit. None of us like rules of procedure, committee work, submission to authority of leaders, agendas for discussion, etc. However, without the hard work of the flesh...the organization of ourselves to honor differences, debate viewpoints, so that all are honestly heard, not just those who like to hear themselves speak, holding each other accountable, and jointly finding unity of purpose...we seem to fall into the predictable divisions. Sounds a lot like our problems organizing churches, businesses, schools, and government, doesn't it?

God's love,

dlm