On the Ground in Burundi

The art of conversation is one of the things that makes us human, and we start learning it in our earliest years. The teachers I’ve been training to teach the new primary school English curriculum have told me that one of their personal development goals is to be able to have a conversation in English. They’d like to learn common expressions, as well as some sayings and proverbs, which are very important to significant conversation in Kirundi. They’ve also told me they’d like to be able to tell a story in English, or discuss something they’ve read.

Out of these requests, I developed a teachers’ conversation group for the middle term of Burundi’s school year. We used a young reading collection of Aesop’s Fables as our text, filled with common English idioms (to take a closer look; he breathed a sigh of relief; not if I can help it!), and of course some of our most cherished sayings: One good turn deserves another; Slow but steady wins the race; If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. I would stop in the middle of a fable to ask teachers to speculate on how the drama would work out.
Question: The ant knew the dove was in trouble, but what could he do?
Answers:
(1) He could call to the man and say, “Stop!” and the man would look to see who had called him and the dove would fly away. (Léocadie Bakundukize)
(2) He could bite the man, and then the man would lose his balance and the dove would fly away. (Nazaire Nshizirungu)
These are pretty sophisticated answers in terms of grammar and syntax, and we would spend some time working out the tense sequences together. Then we’d read the end of the fable and discuss the moral. (The equivalent of One good turn deserves another in Kirundi means something like A good thing gets the load taken off its own head by another — Ineza yiturwa iyindi.)

To practise the expressions learned in the fables, the teachers would act them out in small groups, appreciating and reinforcing one another’s efforts. Helpless ants were rescued by wise and loving doves, while vain crows were flattered out of their cheese by wily foxes.

At the excellent suggestion of the teachers, we also went on a nature walk one afternoon, learning to name what we saw, and to talk about the essential activities of rural Burundi, namely, farming and raising animals. We began in my backyard with herbs and salad greens, and then moved on to the fruit trees and animals at the seminary next door. We had lots to compare notes on, from farming to cooking to close calls with bulls.

Human beings have been having conversations like this for thousands of years.

Girls from rural Burundi on the shore of Lake Tanganyika after receiving eye exams and glasses in the capital Bujumbura.

I was born in the Great Lakes Region of North America, in London, Ontario, about an hour’s drive from Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario. I now live in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, a little over three hours’ drive from Lake Tanganyika. Burundi is nestled against the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, with its capital Bujumbura at the northern tip. On clear days, the mountains of Eastern Congo offer a gorgeous vista across the Lake, reminding me of when our family lived in Lausanne when I was girl, and we could see the Alps of eastern France across Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) from our apartment balcony. I’ve come to love Tanganyika, and am always a little surprised not to taste or smell salt when I dive into this vast body of water. I’ve also visited Lake Kivu in Rwanda, another natural border with Eastern Congo, whose beautiful, faded city of Bukavu I contemplated from the Rwandan side in Cyangugu. Kampala offered me a glimpse of Lake Victoria, and my hope is eventually to follow the Rift Valley as far south as Lakes Malawi and Nyasa.

The Great Lakes Region of Africa stops short of Malawi and Mozambique, however, and is generally understood to comprise Burundi, Rwanda, (Eastern) Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya. It’s the region where our species originated, and has thus known humans longer than any other part of Earth. In more recent years, it has also been the site of terrible conflict and human devastation. Burundi’s long civil war, Rwanda’s genocide, the multinational war of the late 1990s and early 2000s in Eastern Congo that may have taken over three million lives, the post-election violence in Kenya in 2007-2008, and twenty years of child abduction and warfare in Northern Uganda — it’s a grim list. Add to it South Sudan, across the border from Uganda, and you have a recent chronicle of human misery that probably cannot be surpassed anywhere in the world. Only Tanzania has managed to establish a stable and peaceful society, although still a very poor one.

The people of the Great Lakes Region understand that their precarious stability depends very much on what is happening in neighboring nations, and have been developing regional organizations and programs to study and reinforce peace in the region. Since 2009, I’ve been participating in one of these programs. It’s called the Great Lakes Initiative, and is sponsored by the Center for Reconciliation of Duke Divinity School, along with some partner organizations in the region. Representatives of the Great Lakes countries meet once a year for study, prayer, sharing, and a pilgrimage to an inspirational site. This year, we spent a week together in Kampala. I went as part of the Burundian delegation, and also as a French/English translator. In our morning plenary sessions, we heard reports from the different countries participating. Here are some of the comments that most struck me. From South Sudan: “Corruption is as serious a concern for us as terrorism for the United States; 75-85% of funds can’t be traced.” From Kenya, regarding upcoming national elections in 2012, the first since the violence after the 2007 elections: “Inside, the Kenyan person is still not healed, despite programs, structures, and tribunals since the post-election violence. Kenya is in deep groaning still.” From Congo: “Congo has become a sanctuary of rape.”

After translating plenary sessions in the morning, I participated in an afternoon seminar for leaders of educational institutions. Our group included Congolese, Ugandans, Tanzanians, South Sudanese, Burundians, and Americans. Our leader (the rector of a university) began provocatively with these words: “I hate schools. I hate education. Education is dangerous. So much of the turbulence in the Great Lakes Region comes out of education, especially higher education.” Responding to his invitation, we catalogued all the things we deplore in education in the region: the harshly punitive environment of most schools; the high failure rates, suggesting that failure itself is a goal of the system; the mutual fear of learners and teachers; the sexual exploitation of girls; the pitiful remuneration of teachers; the emphasis on rote learning and obedience rather than discovery and creative thinking; the rigid and unrealistic requirements established by administrative bodies; the culture of corruption. Then we were asked to imagine an ideal educational institution, one in which we would like to serve. After several minutes of silent reflection, we each shared one element of our vision. Here they are: no distinction between faculty and staff; all children go to school, and the whole population knows how to read and write; a system that isn’t too bookish and theoretical, that prepares a child to learn practical skills they can do something with; a dedicated group of colleagues; early childhood development as a base; qualified faculty in all disciplines; a university producing graduates of high moral uprightness; more universities and secondary schools; state salaries for teachers; a continued celebration of difference and a decrease in division.

The leader of our seminar, Dr. David Kasali, does more than talk about his vision of education. In 2007, his organization, Congo Initiative, founded a new university in Beni, North Kivu Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo: Université Chrétienne Bilingue du Congo (UCBC). It’s the only university in Congo that uses English as well as French as the language of instruction, and it graduated its first class in 2011. After the Great Lakes Initiative Leadership Institute in Kampala, I visited UCBC in Eastern Congo at the invitation of David and his wife Kaswera Kasali, with whom I spent an inspiring week that gave me hope for the whole region. UCBC’s goal is to transform Congo by raising up a generation of transformed young people. One of the key elements in this process is taking on gender inequality and the oppression of women and girls — the situation that led the spokesperson of the Congolese delegation to the Great Lakes Institute to say that their country has become a sanctuary of rape. I met with a group of young women studying at the university who told me they felt it was the only institution in the country where they could be safe from sexual harassment and violence on campus. During classes I visited or taught myself, I was impressed at both the number and the lively participation of women studying at UCBC. The staff told me that women’s enrollments go up each year, and that they have also seen a marked rise in the level and assurance of women’s participation. Great work, UCBC! Look at what can be done in only four years.

During the Great Lakes Institute in Kampala, we heard other stories of how people in the region are creatively transforming situations of violence, injustice, and extreme poverty. That gave us things to celebrate as well as lament. I’m impressed at how the Great Lakes Institute makes room for both, neither glossing over the real and long-standing afflictions of the region, nor sinking into despair. It gives me faith in the capacity of our species to adapt and transform itself once again in the region of our birth.

Those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t teach, teach teachers. . . . I don’t think so. I love teachers the world over and am eager to help those in rural Burundi in any way I can. When I reflect on my own teaching conditions over fifteen years at Wellesley College, I’m deeply humbled by the dedication and resourcefulness of teachers in rural Burundi. They face so many challenges: classes of 70 – 80 young children squeezed into spaces meant for 50; class time lost to heavy rains that either keep children from coming on time or interrupt lessons because of the din on the roof and the darkness in unlit classrooms; high levels of absenteeism among pupils whose malnutrition brings on frequent illnesses; and the difficulty of introducing pupils to a European language they hear nowhere but school (French), and which becomes the sole language of instruction by the Fifth Grade.

Added to these challenges is the new one of integrating a Francophone country into the East Africa Community, where English and Swahili are the international languages. The Burundian government has responded by requiring English and Swahili to be taught in every grade of primary school. Each year, they train a small group of teachers (theoretically one per school, but in fact far fewer) to teach the next grade level of English or Swahili. But most primary school teachers have no training in these new languages, and often no idea of how to pronounce even the simplest lessons in counting, classrooms objects, or greetings. As responsible professionals, they’re acutely aware of their shortcomings. And as residents of East Africa, they’re eager to develop their personal capacities to communicate with Kenyans, Ugandans, and Tanzanians in the common language of English.

So in January, in response to numerous requests from teachers, I developed and taught an intensive English course for them. Participants came from five different schools in two provinces to meet at the Gitamo Primary School in the afternoons. I used poems and songs to build confidence and capacity in English pronunciation, intonation, and speech rhythms. We began a lesson on clothing with A. A. Milne’s wonderful stomp, Happiness: “John had Great Big Waterproof BOOTS on, John had a Great Big Waterproof HAT, John had a Great Big Waterproof MACKINTOSH, and THAT (said John) is THAT!” The class was delighted to learn to sing Sam Cooke’s classic pop song, “Wonderful World,” which helped them learn and pronounce school subjects in English (Hi-sto-ry, not Hee-sto-ry; Bie-aw-luh-gy, not Bee-o-lo-jee): “Don’t know much about History, Don’t know much Biology, Don’t much about a Science book, Don’t much about the French I took . . . “

Participants also loved the picture books that some of you have generously given me. Grow, Tree, Grow, with its simple text, was great for reading aloud and teaching about the four seasons we experience in the northern hemisphere, so that the terms Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter might have some meaning for people living five degrees from the equator in alternating rainy and dry seasons. Two books beautifully illustrated with Caribbean scenes presented more recognizable images of rural markets, banana-farming, and family gatherings that might be in Burundi. They also allowed us to work on the present continuous tense that we use so often in English: What are they doing? — They’re loading bananas into the lorry. — What’s happening? — The people are waving flags and celebrating independence.

Audace Ciza and Salathiel Barasumbana consider Jodi’s question, with curious onlookers at the classroom door.

I also taught action songs and games to use in class. Simon Says was a big hit with the teachers, who enjoyed stumping one another, and equally with the school children and others passers-by who crowded against the windows to watch them, grinning and laughing as they observed the leaders of their community bending to touch their toes, jumping up and down, or waving their hands over their heads. Lots of good action verbs, and of course, the parts of the body in English. We drew our biggest crowds after class, though, when I opened my laptop outside to see if I could get online with my thumb drive modem. That’s one of the beauties of teaching teachers — you know that everything they learn will reach a whole community.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I spent Christmas in a remarkable place called Buta, nestled into a landscape of gentle hills in southern Burundi. Over the last decade or so, Buta has become a pilgrimage site where people come to pray and honor the memory of a group of high school students who stood together against the inter-ethnic violence that ravaged Burundi during its long civil war. On April 30th, 1997, their boarding school was attacked at dawn by one of the armed groups that terrorized Burundi during the civil war. After several hours of machine-gun fire, the attackers descended the hill from which they’d been shelling the school and surrounded the senior dormitory. When they entered, they ordered the students to separate by ethnicity so they could kill the group they considered to be their enemies. The students, who had recently returned from an eight-day retreat emphasizing unity, refused to separate, saying that they were all sons of God. After three futile attempts to make them separate, the attackers opened fire on all the students, killing forty and wounding others.

This may not seem like holiday reading. But what I want to share with you is what has grown from the sacrificial love these students expressed for one another in the moment of truth when they refused to be separated. Buta now has a sanctuary in their honor, called Martyrs to Fraternity, where Burundians of all backgrounds gather to pray for lasting peace and justice in their country. I had the joy and privilege of attending mass there on Christmas Eve in a standing-room-only assembly enlivened by girls’ and boys’ dance groups and a wonderful youth choir. The day before, I greeted some of the current students at Buta as they waited for their rides at the end of the fall term. They were as excited as young people anywhere preparing to go home for Christmas.

After the Mass on Christmas Eve, I joined the community at the Monastery of Mary Queen of Peace, just up the road. The monastery has been founded by Father Zacharie Bukuru, who was principal of Buta at the time of the massacre. Father Zacharie’s book, Les 40 Jeunes Martyrs de Buta (Karthala 2004), describes how he worked with his students over a period of years to create a culture of peace at Buta, reviving traditional dance and other cultural activities that would draw students together as Burundians, and spending long hours with them in the evenings to hear and transform the messages of hatred and violence that many were hearing in their families as the civil war took its toll. Near the end of his book, Father Zacharie affirms that certain students came to the point where they could offer their lives after a long work of inner peace-building — “Certains élèves en sont venus à offrir leur vie au term d’un long travail d’apaisement intérieur.”

Father Zacharie himself is no stranger to this work. In the days and weeks that followed the massacre, he prevailed upon the local community and the army not to take the kind of indiscriminate ethnic reprisals that often followed such events during the civil war. He himself has long forgiven the attackers who killed students whom he loved and had formed over a period of years, and has founded his monastery to pray and work for peace and stability in Burundi. Nearing sixty now, he is a man of radiant joy, mischievous humor, and complete commitment to the ongoing transformation of Burundi. As he beamed at the dancers on Christmas Eve, I was reminded of a comment made to me by an official during the ceremony to open the road project near my home in northern Burundi. Gesturing toward a group of women dancers, the official turned to me and said, “This is how Burundians will heal themselves.” To be sure, it takes more than dancing to recover from a long civil war, but as I joined in the Christmas Eve celebrations at Buta, I felt the strength that Burundi is drawing from its own traditions in the work of rebuilding communities of trust. It’s a privilege to be serving alongside them, and to be invited to share in their joy.

Gitamo Primary School has ten classrooms, twenty-two teachers, and 1224 pupils. Another 200 children are nominally enrolled in the pre-school, which has no classroom and three unpaid teachers whose attendance is understandably spotty. When it’s not raining, the pre-schoolers gather in front of the Quaker church that shares its small property with the school it founded in 1994, just after Burundi’s long civil war got underway. Gitamo is a typical example of what in Burundi is called une école sous convention, that is, a public school started by a private organization (usually a church) that retains some influence over it. The state pays teacher salaries and benefits and provides text books and teaching materials (chalk, maps, other visuals). It inspects school buildings and evaluates the staff. The founding organization appoints the principal and may introduce elements into school life that reflect its own mission, for example, a peace club.

The Quakers began their school in a small, unfired brick room with a dirt floor that still serves one of the five classes of first graders. At a right angle to it are three larger but still modest additions in unfired brick, housing four classes each of first and second graders. Since 2005, when primary education became free in Burundi, enrolments have sky-rocketed far beyond the capacity of the government to build and staff new schools and classrooms. Most primary schools run on a system of parallel morning and afternoon sessions, in which pupils study half-days only to allow twice as many to attend. Since mornings are the optimal time for concentration, pupils alternate morning and afternoon sessions, coming one day in the morning, and the next in the afternoon. I would have thought this would be difficult for the youngest children to keep straight, but apparently they have no trouble remembering when they’re supposed to come, even over the weekend. Another reason for the alternation is the much greater likelihood of rain in the afternoon. Until I started teaching in rural Burundi, I had no idea how many hours rain (which falls daily during eighty per cent of the school year) could cut from class time. Pupils with only one set of school clothes, no umbrella and no raincoat, can’t come to school until it stops. Its din on a tin or tile roof without a ceiling to deaden it makes hearing even oneself impossible, and the gloom of an overcast sky precludes reading the board in classrooms whose the only source of light is the sun. I learned early that if it rains during class, the best thing to do is to get everyone to stand up and dance.

 In 2002, the Quakers were able to add three new classrooms in fired brick, and in 2006, a consortium of aid agencies built a new block that includes three more solid brick classrooms, latrines, teacher housing, and a covered area for preparing and serving a school lunch funded by the World Food Program. (Apology: In an earlier posting, I wrongly stated that this school lunch program had been suspended. It continues in all public primary schools in Ngozi Province, which is a wonderful thing.) WFP provides beans, corn meal, canola oil, and salt, which are supplemented by greens contributed by school families, and prepared by volunteer parents over wood fires. Each pupil is required to bring a stick of firewood every day as fuel, which can be tricky in this deforested country. (As a property owner along a public path used by many of Gitamo’s pupils, I have lost a number of pieces of fencing to this requirement.) All pupils, whether on morning or afternoon session, including the 200 unhoused pre-schoolers whose haphazard instruction makes for haphazard attendance, turn out between 11:30 and 12:45 for the school lunch of ugali (a bit like polenta) with beans and greens.

It’s quite a production to feed nearly 1500 children in little more than an hour, without benefit of machinery. I visited recently over lunch hour to see how they do it.

The first thing I saw was a group of children who had dragged one of the recently felled trees along the main road over a hole in the ground to create a piece of playground equipment. The biggest girl jumped up and down on the raised end, bouncing her delighted friends and smaller children down the length of the trunk.

Under the tin roof of the canteen, parents had prepared huge pots of ugali and beans, from which they were preparing to ladle servings into the plastic dishes the pupils carry to and from school on their heads.

Some children ate their meal at school, sitting or squatting on the ground. Some bundled it up to carry home on their heads. Others ate as they walked. Those who ate at school washed up at the standpipe installed as part of the new block, not far from the latrines, which I hope encourages them to wash their hands after using them, since many of the illnesses they suffer from are intestinal and highly infectious. At the end of my visit, I accompanied some of the homeward bound children, watching them balance their plates on their heads or deftly stuff fingerfuls of ugali and beans into their mouths while walking. I thought about everything they have to do to stay in school: find firewood, walk long distances, sit four to a desk in semi-obscure classrooms, study in a language no-one speaks at home, and learn their curriculum in a foreshortened school day. They carry it all so lightly.

Burasira Seminary inaugurated its new basketball / volleyball court this weekend as part of the festivities to open their academic year. Founded in 1951, the Seminary is Burundi’s oldest institution of post-secondary education, and an important center for the region I live in. I rent my house from the Seminary, and have enjoyed a warm friendship with them since I moved to Burundi in 2008. As our first partnering activity with a Burundian educational institution, ON THE GROUND IN BURUNDI paid for cement to complete the new court. It is the only recreational resource of its kind in the region, and is already enjoying steady use by local youth, teachers, and police officers.

Father Daniel Nizigiyimana watches Divine Ndayiragije sink one

Youth in our program have begun meeting there on Friday afternoons for pick-up games. We were delighted to have the Rector of the Seminary, Father Daniel Nizigiyimana, join us recently. Over six feet tall, Father Daniel towered over the young people we’re working with, playing supportively and appreciatively with them. The Captain of the local police post, Jeanne Misago, also made an impromptu appearance one day, pursuing an energetic game in a mid-calf-length skirt and thongs. Jeanne is my next-door neighbor. She’s been the local fashion plate since she took over the post a couple of years ago, and a nursing mother since the birth of baby Munezero late last year. Looking for a way to get some exercise on non-basketball days, I recently decided to try jogging around the Seminary’s soccer field. Knowing I wouldn’t get far on my own, I invited Jeanne to join me. After a sedate warm-up lap, she grabbed my arm and said it was time to run now. Cradling her nursing breasts with her other arm, she dragged me around the field at a clip that I thought would kill me. I know she was in the forest with one of the rebel groups during the civil war, starting when she was probably no more than a teenager herself. Here I am, I think, racing around this field arm-in-arm with a woman whose strength and energy were tested under conditions I can’t begin to imagine, and whose generous sharing of them now is the only reason I can keep going.

Léa Nkunzimana races Capt. Jeanne Misago for the ball

Léa Ninahazwe and Léa Nkunzimana arrive at the court

I’ve been especially glad to see the enthusiasm of the teenage girls who turn out to play basketball. I’ve found that the older the girls get here, the less emotion they express in public. So it’s wonderful to see them let go while playing basketball. Their skills are more limited than those of the boys, but their joy is clear and radiant. Ange Nizigama, who teaches Second Grade at the local primary school, also plays a cheerfully limited game. Encouraged by these examples, I’ve cast my own hat onto the court –  quite literally, since I go nowhere between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm without wearing it, and it keeps my hair out of my eyes while I’m playing. Since no-one will let me play with glasses on, I have an excuse for my terrible shooting. A week ago, I joined some of the Seminary priests who came out for some exercise at the end of the teaching day, even sinking a basket or two.

I’m so grateful for the way this basketball court is bringing different groups of people together in our rural community, and offering our youth a chance to forget the many pressures of their lives as they engage in sport with one another and good adult role models. In thanking me for our contribution of cement, the Rector of the Seminary told me they wouldn’t have been able to finish the court without it. I feel good about how ON THE GROUND IN BURUNDI has begun to engage with our community: by sharing resources — a very strong social value in Burundi; and by helping a local institution complete a well-conceived project that is already having a positive impact. Thank you so much to those of you who have contributed to making this possible. You’re sponsoring a lot of joy in rural Burundi, including my own.

I’d like to tell you a bit about the main road that links Gitega, Burundi’s second largest city and center for some branches of national government, and Ngozi, the country’s third largest city and my provincial town, a bumpy forty-five minute drive from where I live at Burasira. This is the road whose widening and paving will soon be underway. Much as I long for a good paved road between me and any other destination in Burundi, I’m conscious that something will be lost when the old dirt road lies under asphalt. Old roads carry stories. Some of this road’s stories have been told to me. Others I intuit as I walk along it, glimpsing signs of what this region went through before I came here, and the changes it’s undergoing now.

One of my favorites is a story told me by Jean-Pierre Niyonzima who grew up in Mutaho Commune, just across the river. When Jean-Pierre was in Grade Six, preparing for the national exams that determine whether and where Burundian children will attend secondary school, his commune ran out of chalk. Textbooks were also in short supply, so Jean-Pierre and his classmates copied their lessons from the board. Without chalk, their schooling was at a standstill, and their chances of winning a place in secondary school, negligible. Then they heard about a robbery at Burasira Seminary, where I rent my home. The Seminary has a shrine to the Virgin Mary just off the main road. At that time, it contained a statue of the Virgin, and word got out that there was golden treasure at its core. Thieves stole the statue, dragged it into the woods, and shattered it. Jean-Pierre doesn’t know what they found inside it, but he and his classmates combed the woods for the shards of plaster, which they gathered and took back to their school. Their teachers used it as chalk, and the pupils were able to finish their year. Jean-Pierre sat the national exams at the Seminary itself, and passed. “You see how she watched over you,” I teased him, knowing that he’s an Evangelical Protestant. “It’s true,” he conceded, grinning back at me. 

From the shrine to Mary, bereft of its statue but still a place of worship, the crevassed red dirt road curves up like a tawny arm around the scrubby green shoulder of the hillside. Walking along it, I glimpse small ruins — eucalyptus growing in the midst of crumbling walls of unfired brick mortared with mud where once a family made its home. These are the relics of 1993, when the long civil war broke out in Burundi and houses were destroyed all along the road, their inhabitants fleeing either to the Ruhororo IDP camp seven kilometers up the road, where many still live, or to Tanzania, whence many have returned in recent years.

Burundians share with Rwandans the distinction of being the only sedentary Africans who do not traditionally live in villages. Instead, they build individual homesteads scattered over their hilly terrain. Since houses clustered together along a roadway are anomalous, there’s even a special word for them in Kirundi: ibigwati, as distinct from the generic word for house: inzu. Various modern regimes in both countries have tried to encourage people to adopt more village-like structures, and the Commune of Ruhororo is about to launch a village project along the main road, opposite the Quaker church and school whose facilities were improved by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees and an Italian volunteer organization as Burundian refugees returned to the area from Tanzania. The school lunch program made possible by the outdoor kitchen they built ceased abruptly this year, doubtless at the end of someone’s funding cycle. Here on the ground, no-one knows why. Ntakundi — that’s just the way it is.

The President himself is encouraging people to build durable houses of fired brick next to the road — what he calls ibigwati vy’amahoro, or peace villages. Reports are that he has promised tin roofing, standpipes for running water, and even solar panels to those who build sustainably along the road. I still see many traditional adobe brick houses dotting the roadside. But in small centers like the ville by the government health clinic, more durable structures are going up alongside the older buildings.

The most urgent story of the road for me, though, is what’s happening to the trees. The Belgians lined this road with eucalyptus and cedar. Over the years, some trees rotted or were struck by lightning, and others were felled during the long civil war to block access to the army or rebel forces. Many more simply came down for firewood during that period of anarchy. Yet there were still some glorious stretches of mature eucalyptus when I first moved here in 2008, their massive trunks shouldering into an increasingly narrow road. In preparation for the long-awaited road project, many of these survivors are coming down. Some were already dead, ghostly white menaces capable of falling at any moment in the rainy season when the ground is soft and high winds can rise suddenly. I still remember waking up at 4:30 one morning to the longest clap of thunder I had ever heard. When I walked down to the Ruvubu market an hour later to meet a group of students we were taking to Bujumbura for eye exams, I learned that the thunder clap had actually been the crash of a massive rotten eucalyptus crushing one of the few brick stores and killing the man who kept watch there during the night.

I thought of that tree and that man a few days ago when driving back from Ngozi along the main road. I could see that rain was on its way. When I was about fifteen minutes from home, it came lashing down on furious winds. There was nowhere to pull over. Crawling down a long alley of eucalyptus squeezing the road on both sides, I watched ghostly branches spring from their trunks and fly across the road like chalk thrown by schoolchildren. I drove blindly through flooded ruts and potholes, engulfing the car in orange waves that crested the roof. When I could make out the road, I saw branches strewn everywhere. Praying that they were green and supple, I rolled over them until the inevitable thick white trunk lying diagonally across the road hove into view. I cut up into a small clearing in front of two adobe houses, then back down again behind the tree with my left wheels in a cow track. Within ten minutes, the winds died, and even the rain was hardly a sprinkle.

I have no idea what I drove through or around during the brief storm. Trees are being felled all the time now, their trunks lying partly in the road until people hack them up for firewood or drag them to sawpits to make planks. You can be sure that nothing is being wasted. Yet something gracious and majestic is being lost, and it will be a long time before the promised replanting can begin to make up for it. Certainly not in my lifetime.

So I wandered the stretch of the old road I know best yesterday, taking photographs of colonial trees, adobe houses, and tiny plots that must make way for the new road and its sustainable peace villages. I lingered at the dead eucalyptus that marks the edge of my own land, a ghastly finger stripped of all branches but two that jut out above the road like souls trying to escape torment, or angels bearing glad tidings. What story do they seek to express? And what shape against sky will point to my land when they too come down? 

Local youth watching a film on the history of Burundi on Jodi’s laptop

I’m settling back into rural life in my home upcountry, praying daily office with my neighbors in the Seminary community, working on the establishment of our organization in Burundi, and tutoring youth in English. Although much is familiar from my first three years here, when I served at a local school, I’m more and more conscious that I’m beginning a new life and a new project in a setting I’m coming to know in new ways. I’m excited about the project, and the degree of interest it’s generating among youth in particular. Over the last three weeks, forty-three students from five local high schools, some of them walking a considerable distance, have participated in the informal English sessions I offer at my home in the afternoons. At the same time, I find that I’m missing the daily structure and relationships that go with being assigned to a particular school, and more broadly, the sense of belonging that comes from participating in a larger organization with projects throughout Burundi and the region.

So when I woke up one Saturday morning feeling a bit like pulling the covers over my head, I decided instead to go toward people and attend the seven o’clock mass at the Seminary. A few professional women who live half an hour up the road in a small settlement that’s known as la ville had also risen early to worship, and after mass, I asked if I might accompany them on their walk home. They graciously accepted, and we set out at a leisurely pace, walking up the hill into Ruhororo commune. I’ve lived in Ruhororo since 2008, but because I was serving across the river in an adjacent commune and province, I haven’t often been to the ville, and don’t know many people there. Its focal point is a government health clinic, and when we arrived there, we found a group of people busy weaving supple branches between stakes to create a fence, participating in the community work that Burundians are asked to carry out on Saturday mornings. I was delighted to join them and learn how the fences I so often see enclosing homes are actually made.

Ange Nizigama and Gloriose Niyongere at a Ruhororo cabaret

Afterwards, Gloriose Niyongere, a nurse at the clinic and one of my walking companions from Mass, invited me to the nurses’ residence for a delicious breakfast of green bananas, which she boiled with onions, tomatoes, green peppers, celery, tiny yellow eggplants, salt, and two kinds of oil. I watched her do all this in a big pot over a small charcoal brazier that she picked up and shook from time to time to keep the fire going. (The clinic has running water but no electricity.) After a long visit with Gloriose and her friend Marie-Ange Nizigama, who teaches second grade at the local primary school, we walked to the home of Rosette Ndayishimiye, the secretary of the commune, with whose family Ange lodges.  Rosette served us a hearty lunch of beans, amaranth leaves, and cassava bread. From there, we strolled to a cabaret, where the local health committee and others were enjoying beer and soft drinks after completing their quarterly planning meeting.

Clément Baryakaziri and Jodi in front of the Ruhororo Commune Office

Before the day was out, I had visited four homes along the road near the health clinic, speaking a mixture of French and Kirundi, and being treated to everything from cooked bananas to beans and cassava bread to a goat brochette (shish kebab) and boiled eggs. My last stop was the home of the Communal Administrator, Clément Baryakaziri, who leads the local government. I’d visited him in his office the week before to tell him what ON THE GROUND IN BURUNDI hopes to do in the area by offering English-language instruction and support for secondary students. He was delighted to hear about our plans, confirming the difficulties faced by secondary students in this poor rural commune, and noting that no other group is intervening on their behalf. He took me outside his office to show me the plaster flagpole he’d commissioned, with a map identifying all the hills of the commune at its base. Through the Cooperation Suisse, he’s also secured solar panels for the communal office, bringing the first electricity into the area.

Opening Ceremonies for work on Route Nationale 15

His real coup, though, is having won the bid to headquarter the massive road project just beginning, which will eventually link the second and third largest cities in Burundi with a properly graded and tarred road. Financed by the African Development Fund, this project will also improve tributary roads, provide latrines and fencing to adjacent clinics and schools, build up local markets, and carry out training in public health and safety. Ruhororo is often referred to as the poorest commune in Burundi. Serving as headquarters for this project, which is expected to take more than three years, will have a tremendous impact on its resources. 

That’s one kind of development, and as a property owner with frontage on the main road, I’m as excited as anyone about how this project will transform the region. I’m also excited about the subtler signs of development I witnessed and participated in during my Saturday in the ville: a locally elected health committee meeting to plan the next quarter and enjoy a round or two of drinks afterward; citizens turning out to weave a fence for their clinic; a cadre of local professionals — teachers, nurses, administrators — visiting one another and sharing food.

Marie-Berline Igiraneza going over her vowels

My favorite image of the day is young Marie-Berline Igiraneza scampering up to me with a small slate and chalk her parents have given her and writing neat rows of la voyelle a (the vowel a). Berline’s father, a former teacher who now runs an organization to promote public hygiene and environmental protection, has drawn the five vowels, several shapes, and different kinds of lines on the inside of bottle caps. Berline dumped these caps on the table in front of me, and confidently identified each vowel (except for u), shape, and line as she picked up the cap on which it was inscribed.  She’s four-and-a-half years old, with two weeks of first grade under her belt. This is development, too: an educated father, working with the materials at hand to encourage and stimulate his bright little girl as she begins school. Imagine what families like this might do with children’s books or computers. Imagine what it will mean to this rural community if we can build a community center with a small library, solar panels, and computers. I like to think of Berline ten years from now, participating in our programs for secondary students. And twenty or thirty years from now, helping take her community and nation into the next stages of their development.

Umwana atagenda yibaza ko nyina wiwe ariwe azi guteka.

The child who has not traveled thinks that only its own mother knows how to cook.

I’ve begun offering informal English sessions to secondary students from several schools in my local area. They come in the afternoons in small groups, by grade level: Grade Sevens on Monday, Grade Eights on Tuesday, Grade Nines on Wednesday, and Grade Tens on Thursday, which completes the junior cycle of high school in Burundi. On Friday, everyone is welcome, and we’ve been talking about what they’d like to do then. Requests range from drama to a choir to sports to discussions about human rights and development, or, in the striking words of one 10th Grader, “The shaping of our future — How will I manage to save my people?”

So far, we’ve been gathering at my home. We sit around the table in my living/dining room, and the students show me their English notebooks and text, pointing out what they’re having trouble understanding. By Grades Nine and Ten, they have a lot of material to assimilate. Teachers in Burundi tend to use the “talk and chalk” method, writing a lesson on the board and then going over it orally, with perhaps a little time at the end for some exercises. Many students are so busy trying to copy the lesson and exercises into their notebooks that they don’t really follow what the teacher is saying. Without notes, they’ll have nothing to study for tests and exams. Yet without listening, asking questions, and speaking for themselves, they have little chance of really learning a new language.

Jean-Claude Mbonimpa, Apollinaire Nsabimana and Eugène Nsabimana follow an English lesson on the computer while Estella Niyonsenga snaps a photo

In our afternoon sessions, I use my laptop as a blackboard, typing in new words or expressions, clarifying certain points of grammar or vocabulary, and most importantly, improvising exercises for them to complete orally. From time to time I give them a few minutes to take notes. The fascinating allure of the laptop helps keep their attention focused on what we’re figuring out together, and the small-group size requires everyone to speak frequently, and allows me to query them individually about what they do and don’t understand. While some are at the computer, others experiment with my camera to document the beginnings of what we hope will be a local youth program.

Médiatrice Hakizimana signing up for extra help in English

I’m impressed at some of the lessons I’ve seen in notebooks: the difference between “little” and “a little” when expressing relative amounts: “I have a little money” (neutral or modest) vs. “I have little money” (negative); a short text demonstrating various uses of “to get”: to get on a bus, to get to a destination, to get one’s suitcase back after a fellow passenger has thrown it out the window. Most of all, I’m impressed at how eager and quick they are to learn. One Grade 7 girl named Médiatrice Hakizimana came out on a rainy Monday afternoon when I assumed no-one would show up. She arrived wet, shivering, and completely determined to master the current lesson in her class. She told me she’d failed 7th Grade on her first try at a school in Bujumbura because of chronic illness. She came home to our region to try again at a local school. I met her after attending a service at the Quaker Church on my hill, a church Médiatrice has joined because she experienced healing there. “I want to learn English,” she told me, in Kirundi. Over the course of her lesson at my house, I realized that she really doesn’t understand French at all. This is one of the great challenges facing rural students — their low level of French, which is the language of instruction beginning in Grade Five. But what they’re all asking me for is English.

The other thing they’re asking for is computer training. I’ve told them that we hope that will come, when we have our own center, perhaps with solar panels. I look forward to the day when a group of motivated well-wishers visits us, each transporting a laptop in his or her luggage. There’s so much potential here — intelligence, determination, and a genuine love of learning. Internet coverage is expanding rapidly in Burundi. (I’m posting this from the local beer joint a half-hour walk from my house.) As ON THE GROUND IN BURUNDI gets established in North America, we hope to meet expanding electricity and internet networks in the hills of north-central Burundi. So much good can and will happen here.

Nestor Ndikiminwe, Léa Nkunzimana, and Thérèse Bahishamunda experimenting

Naho amabombe yobomberana                          Here, bombs may be falling

Naho inzuzi zosuriranya                                       Here, rivers may be flooding

Izere Imana, ntaco uzoba                                     Trust in God, it’s nothing, you’ll make it.

Izere Imana, ntaco uzoba                                     Trust in God, it’s nothing, you’ll make it

Nneoma Nwogu and Jodi in Gatumba on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, near Bujumbura

This is a chorus commonly sung by little children in the hill country of north-central Burundi where I live. Since the fatal shootings of 39 people in a bar just outside Bujumbura on Sunday evening, I’ve been singing it to myself. I was just a few kilometers away, staying at a hotel as the guest of my friend and former Wellesley student Nneoma Nwogu, who is now the World Bank’s country lawyer for Burundi. Surprisingly, we heard no shots, perhaps because of a live band playing outdoors. Instead, we were engrossed in watching a hippopotamus who had come ashore and ventured quite far up the beach toward the hotel. In retrospect, we wondered whether it came so far out of the water because it heard the gunfire that escaped our ears.

Two days later, I drove back to my home upcountry in convoy with the Seminary’s van. Nneoma’s generous invitation gave me the time to buy a good used vehicle in Bujumbura: a 1996 Mitsubishi RVR Sports Gear. It did well on the climb up the mountain out of Bujumbura, and winding our way up and down hills through the province of Muramvya. Shortly after entering Gitega province, we went offroad at Kibimba, cutting cross-country on very bad tracks down to the bottom of the Ruvubu River Valley and back up again. “Mr. Bishi” stood the test of this drive, but still has some trouble starting first thing in the morning. I’m hoping the new battery I bought Friday in Ngozi will bring some improvement. I’ve never had a 15-year-old vehicle before.

The day after I returned home, I went to a Twa settlement on my hill of Gitamo to visit some of the pre-schoolers I’d taught last year. It was great to see them and their parents. I sat down eventually at the home of Elisabeth Nizigiyimana, whose husband Joseph Kadende is the local Twa leader. Most of the other mothers and little children of the settlement joined us, and we had a good reunion. I’d forgotten just how skinny these children are. Maybe it’s more apparent when they’re in their after-school clothes, which aren’t much more than rags. Most were coughing and rubbing their runny noses. We talked and sang and laughed together, and then the whole band of kids accompanied me as I made my way home.

Léa Nkunzimana brightens up for a photo

While I was with the mothers and little children, Léa Nkunzimana, a teenager I taught in Grades Seven and Eight, approached, her eyes squinting against the pain of one of her habitual headaches. Léa, like so many youth in this area, “suffers from the eyes,” which means they’re prone to headaches and visual problems that glasses don’t seem to correct. I wish I knew what it was. I gave Léa some Ibuprofen, and she told me the next day that it helped a bit, but by then she had another headache. She says she gets them most afternoons, even when she has something to eat midday.

I met Léa and her friend Divine Ndayiragije out walking the next afternoon, studying the dialogue in their English text book. Both girls are in Grade Nine now, having overcome failure in earlier grades. They’ve asked me for extra help in English, as have several other students who’ve come by the house since I returned. It’s nice to have this request come directly from the very group we want to support with extra-curricular programming. I spoke this morning with their principal to discuss how I might structure an after-school program in ways that both the students and the school administration would find helpful. He’s delighted that I want to offer extra help to his students, especially in English, which he recognizes as the wave of the future in Burundi. He’s also asked that I help train students in good work habits generally — in the kinds of behavior that will help them succeed in secondary school and beyond.

Arsène Irankunda making the long, steep journey home from school

So — here in Burundi, guns may be firing. Here in the rural hill country, the rains may be returning and washing what’s left of the topsoil downhill into the muddy Ruvubu River, named for the hippos that used to team in it, but which are all gone upcountry now. Here in this circle of four hills where I make my home, bright children and youth may be failing because of hunger, illness, and the devastation to the education system wrought by a long civil war. But they are still trusting and hoping, still asking for more instruction and desperately wanting to learn. If they get the right kind of help, they’ll make it, and so will Burundi.

That’s what ON THE GROUND IN BURUNDI is about — giving these resourceful young people the very simple help they’re asking for so they can stay in school and flourish there. The more they’re able to do so, the better the chances for Burundi to pull out of the cyclic violence that has driven it for decades. Qualified teachers, nurses, and lab technicians are needed to staff the primary schools and clinics being built all over the country with World Bank funding. For that staff to emerge in sufficient numbers, a much higher percentage of rural youth needs to complete secondary school. We’re listening closely to what those youth are asking for so we can help them make it.