Friends Peace House newsletter piece

Ruth Plett and Krystan Palinkowski, Canadian Mennonite capacity builders at FPH, are encouraging the Rwandese staff in putting together a bi-lingual (English/Kinyarwanda) newsletter to help the many 'peace' agencies in Rwanda to network. My contribution may be helpful to those who didn't begin reading this blog at he beginning, or who remember only that the beginning was around 70 posts ago.

As a volunteer with AGLI, the African Great Lakes Initiative of Friends Peace Teams, I am working for a few weeks at planting time during the rainy seasons over four years on a project called Growing Together in Rwanda. My main qualification for this work is that at home in suburban London I have had the same vegetable garden for over 30 years and it is still productive. To me the connections between good nutrition, good physical, emotional and spiritual health, and peace, are clear. At the most basic level, when people have enough to eat they are not so driven to compete over vital resources.

I began by teaching small scale vegetable gardening using organic techniques. The work has extended into diet, nutrition and promoting African Indigenous Vegetables (AIVs). The phrase 'growing together' suggests both 'working together on growing food' and 'building peaceful communities by working together'. My work was initially based in Friends Peace House, and I now also work with teachers and workers in the Friends Schools and with women's church groups.

This year a major part of my work is for a project with Batwa (now formally renamed as 'historically marginalised people) near Ruhengeri and Kayonza, in conjunction with HROC Rwanda. (HROC stands for Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities.) Through 2010, and continuing into 2011 if our funding from Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends is renewed, a series of events first reassures and recruits participants, then gives a basic HROC training in trauma healing, follows with a vegetable growing workshop and concludes with another HROC training and a community celebration. The words of Nyiramajambere Esperance, a participant from a village near Kinigi, capture the essence of the work: 'In the first workshop on trauma healing I learnt to recover from my inner wounds. Now your teaching about vegetables and how to grow them will help me heal my outer wounds.'

Elizabeth Cave