Managing Trauma’s Effects on the Practitioner (as tested and tried in Rwanda)

by John Steward

To appreciate the scope of the Rwandan genocide is difficult; in terms of human and material loss, it equated to three New York Twin Tower collapses per day for one hundred consecutive days without the external logistical and emergency medical support which accompanied that disaster. Over 800,000 Rwandan people died, both Tutsi and moderate Hutu, mostly by hand-held weapons, in 100 days among a population of seven million living in an area the size of Maryland.

Photos courtesy John Steward

To appreciate the scope of the Rwandan genocide is difficult; in terms of human and material loss, it equated to three New York Twin Tower collapses per day for one hundred consecutive days without the external logistical and emergency medical support which accompanied that disaster. Over 800,000 Rwandan people died, both Tutsi and moderate Hutu, mostly by hand-held weapons, in 100 days among a population of seven million living in an area the size of Maryland.

My reflection is based on sixteen months of living in Kigali less than three years after the Rwanda Patriotic Front had quelled the Hutu government that promoted the genocide and embarked on a slow recovery. We arrived at a difficult and uncertain time in 1997, when almost two million Hutu walked back in from a punishing two-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. People also died there because of their ethnicity or sympathy with the Tutsi (which often occurred because of numerous mixed marriages).

These relatively short-term refugees came back to Rwanda to find their homes occupied by other returnees, Tutsi, and moderate Hutu who had lived troubled lives in exile in nearby countries for ten, twenty, or thirty years. The latter simply took advantage of the post-genocide relative quiet to fulfill the desire of most Rwandan exiles: to return to the motherland. Many felt they were returning to reclaim their ancestral property. But 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.

What To Do? 

This was quite bewildering for my wife and me. Our involvement in Rwanda began among a people swirling in chaos and confusion. 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 three 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 three months; stop and use that time to listen and learn.” That immediately placed me in the position of learner rather than the usual activist planner, reactor, or problem solver.

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 stories full of grief and loss, blood and broken bones. Down the road, women visited my wife and unburdened their hearts to her. 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 element. 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 and artificial division into Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. We found seven social groupings (Clarke and Kaufman 2008). These suggested different experiences and nuances of marginalization 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 a wounded survivor and a candidate for healing.

For the next sixteen months, I lived and worked in Rwanda, then visited every six months for the following nine years. Those eighteen 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?”

Looking Back

After leaving Rwanda in mid-1998, when the government would not renew my work permit, my wife and I participated in a debriefing session in Melbourne, where the counselor made two observations and asked two questions: “Why do you have hope when that is not the view of others who have discussed their Rwandan experience with me?” and “You seem not to be traumatized even though you have been in a traumatizing situation. Any ideas why?”

We could answer the first question easily. 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 the time, 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 should you be placed to serve in a similarly stressful situation. Most likely, you will recognize ways in which you already support yourself in your work of compassionate, gospel mission.

1. Prayer. We chose not to go to Rwanda until we had recruited one hundred prayer partners. Each person committed to pray on one day a month, so we had three people praying for us daily. That meant serious and regular communication from our end. People prayed, and some even still remind us of the day of the month they would pray for us. We also prayed at home, at work, and in the vehicle as we traveled around the country.

We also brought symbols of our faith to Rwanda, including a cross, some pictures to focus our reflections, photos of our praying partners, music, Bibles, and books.

2. Reflection. To keep those praying 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 (and provided us with 150 typed pages of accurate memory).

3. Sharing our shocks and struggles. Activism in traumatic situations needs an anchor so that 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 an African 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 p.m. my wife 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 farewelling 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 difficult to build connections with the itinerant expatriate community, but we shared as we could in Bible study and prayer, and attended local services in Kinyarwanda. We found the propensity of Rwandan Protestant preachers was to shout at traumatized audiences, and to demand that all adherents should forgive—inappropriate in the context of unhealed personal pain. 

One great comfort we experienced was on the three weekends when we traveled ninety minutes to stay with a Ghanaian colleague and his spouse (a genocide survivor). There, 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 twelve days of her first pregnancy. Just before Christmas, we celebrated with them the birth of their first daughter.

4. Contemplation. 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’s Invitation to Love on unloading the unconscious through contemplative prayer, we chose to end our evenings by sitting with the Lord in 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. By lunch time, the only way I could return myself to the office was to walk continually repeating the words of Hebrews 12:2: “Jesus, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.”

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 that as they looked back, they could see what I was doing. 

6. Eating well. Rwanda is not a desert; instead, it is green and productive. Called “Mille Colline,” the land of thousands of hills, it is well-watered for eight months of the year and at times feels like paradise. As part of our healthcare 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 small team of Rwandans to plan into their lives a day off after stressful events while their adrenalin levels stabilized. We took as a motto ‘work hard and play hard.’ 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.

December 26,1997, was a great day for us. After nine months in the country, we received our first invite to visit one staff family in his home. After that, the offers of hospitality became embarrassingly numerous and frequent.

8. Participation in healing processes. Healing of painful wounds seems to be a missing dimension of the modern Christian gospel, but 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” because it seemed true after his French master emancipated him. This is reflected also in the second part of Hippocrates’ (c. 460-400 BC) statement that, “Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.” After Rwanda, my own conclusion is that time brings perspective, but only healing heals our deepest wounds. 

9. Listening. One hot and dry afternoon, Lincoln Ndogoni, 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.” 

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. Truth-telling. Our human propensity is to hold unpleasant things close to our chests instead of to tell the truth. In order to be open and honest, we need a trusted person and a safe space. Many Rwandans have unprocessed trauma, and many are now beginning to pay the price in broken marriages, suicide, mental illness, depression, and cancer. Sometimes, 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. 

In Rwanda, one never drinks from an already opened bottle; you only drink from the bottle that is opened before your eyes. Some Rwandans remain in a place of desiring revenge or seeking to damage others. 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. The tendency in Rwanda has been to keep the story inside and get on with life. In denial, this energy either damages us, our relationships, or both. This is not a uniquely Rwandan or African problem; denial seduces people into silence worldwide.

11. Personal conversion. This occurred by facing my own truth and accepting when the evidence showed I needed to be transformed in values, attitude, or behavior. I participated in my own change process in the sixteen months before going to Africa. This not only saved my marriage, but also prepared me to recognize the common elements of human need in another culture. In Rwanda, accusing, blaming, and scapegoating 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 of change and hope.

12. Seeing everyone as a human being created by God. I decided never to ask the ethnicity of a Rwandan person; instead, 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 someone. After I hugged one man who killed three people, I felt shocked, asking myself, Why did I do that? My answer came quickly: 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, 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.

Our world is full of unexpected dangers producing unsought trauma. Practitioners in such work are not immune to the side effects. The approaches taken by my wife 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 five 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 that we did what we could in Rwanda, the country that went mad—and, God added to it timely acts of grace. 

ITEM	IT’S IMPORTANCE  SO FAR	WHAT PROMPTING  Have I felt TODAY?
1. Prayer support
2. Reflection
3. Sharing – being companioned
4. Meditation / silence
5. Focus on what is in my control; Things out of my control
6. Diet
7. Breaks:  a) adrenalin balance b) rewards c) community
8. Healing processes
9. Listening—being heard
10. Facing my pain
11. Personal conversion; being open to do deep work
12. Faith in God’s hand at work overall

Comments – key insights from this session:

1.

2.

3. 

Reference

Clark, Philip and Zachary Kaufman. 2008. After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

John Steward, PhD, lives in Australia and is a spiritual director and speaker. Previously, he served as a lecturer in theology, agriculture, and community development in East Java, initiated leadership training with World Vision for village development motivators in Jakarta, and was involved in the post-genocide reconstruction in Rwanda. He also served as a mentor in developing VANISHING POINT, a peace and conflict curriculum for secondary students, using stories of healed Rwandans.

EMQ, Vol. 53, No. 4. Copyright  © 2017 Billy Graham Center for Evangelism.  aAll rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMQ editors.