See all of the updates from our trip here.

We had a nice slow start to the day, which was much appreciated as we are still jet lagged and yesterday was jam-packed with experiences and emotions.

Good News Rwanda

After a nice breakfast at the hotel we walked to a local coffee shop that is a Kenyan chain called Java Love where we met Pius Nyakayiro for coffee.

Pius works for the organization Good News Rwanda. To be in his presence is to be in the presence of sunshine!

The organization provides amazing aid in a number of cities in Rwanda. They run education programs, they work with single mothers, and they help to get homeless children off the streets.

One of their big initiatives is to provide prison inmates with mattresses. Like many parts of the world, inmates in Rwanda are responsible for providing many of the daily necessities, including (but not limited to) their own mattress.

In the last five years Good News Rwanda has provided 4500 mattresses, primarily for incarcerated pregnant women and the elderly. Without the mattresses inmates would have to sleep on the floor.

Good News Rwanda worked with a garment factory to get custom cloth made with poems, scripture quotes, and affirmations so that the mattress covers would be made with fabric covered with encouraging words.

Pius said that they hired many survivors of the genocide to make the mattress covers. He said it was powerful work that helped to lead to forgiveness and healing, as the survivors of the genocide (who lost family members) were making mattress covers for some of the perpetrators of the genocide.

That story stopped me in my tracks and I had to ask Pius to pause for a moment, just so I could let it sink in.

We will be joining Pius on Friday to meet 100 inmates who have been through PHN’s Training the Trainer tapping program. The people now teach tapping to the other inmates.

The mountains
Rwanda is called the land of 1,000 hills, though my guess is that there are at least 99,000 more! Apart from motion sickness, we had a stunning two-hour drive to the north of Rwanda, where the country borders DR Congo and Uganda.

The photos I took from our moving van do not do it justice.

Gorillas in the Mist

We spent about two hours at The Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. It is a research and educational center situated in the shadow of five volcanoes and a short distance from where Dian conducted most of her research and conservation efforts.

More than 400 college students live on the campus and help with research and conservation efforts while they work on their college degrees. Today, 98% of the research and conservation staff are Rwandan. We had the chance to chat with the staff and meet one of the young researchers, whose work is on golden monkeys.

The center just opened last February. It was a wonderful experience.

One of the clever things they have you do as part of the exhibit is a short quiz that matches your personality with one of the seven most famous gorillas from the project.

Gorillas don’t have fingerprints, but they do have very distinct noses. The center had commissioned art of the seven nose prints of the seven most famous gorillas.

After taking the quiz, you were then tempted to buy some art work with the nose print of your gorilla match.

Looking at it through the eyes of a marketer, it is a brilliant way to connect visitors with the research on a personal level to encourage you to engage and donate.

I was matched with Titus.

Even though I didn’t buy any Titus merch, I did buy a hand carved gorilla to join my menagerie of animal figurines collected on my travels around the world.

Odds and Ends

Akarusho
Akarusho is a banana based beer, which is a local favorite. Imagine what fermented bananas would taste like and that’s akarusho for you. I am glad I tried it but I’m not sure I would go back for more. It tastes much worse coming up than it does going down, which was thanks to the motion sickness brought on by the endlessly winding mountain roads, rather than the beer itself.

Work with existing networks
At dinner a few nights ago Gunilla and Ulf were talking about the lessons they have learned from running the Peaceful Heart Network and its various projects around the world.

One of the greatest lessons they have learned is:

Partner with people and organizations that are already serving the population that you want to serve. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Don’t try to do the things you are not good at. Instead, focus on what you are expert at and join forces with those who are expert at what you are not good at.

It made me think of the Harry S Truman quote, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” So often I work outside my expertise because I want it to be “my thing”. It is a good reminder that the outcome is way more important than the credit.

Orphan families
We have been lucky enough to meet a number of people who have been helped by TTT (the version of tapping taught by the Peaceful Heart Network). Many of them were part of Orphan Families. Orphan Families were houses of people in their late teens and early 20s who were orphaned by the genocide. They were gathered together in households of other orphans so that they could have families.

I keep finding myself caught between the horror of these types of problems (a country full of traumatized orphans) and the creativity being used to try to solve those problems.

Unexpected generational trauma
One of the types of trauma we have been talking about during our trip is the trauma that is experienced by young children of modern Rwanda who ask questions like, “Why don’t I have a grandma?” In these moments children are exposed to the horrors of their country’s past, which can be traumatizing.

In one of these conversations, we talked about the trauma experienced by the teens and young adults who find out about how their grandparents and great grandparents participated in the genocide. It is a trauma that just seems too much for a young person to bear. With each passing experience I am more and more impressed with the work of the PHN and its commitment to healing the human population.

Tear Tally
I decided it would be worthwhile to record the number of times I have cried on the trip. It’s three times so far, and I feel sure there are more tears to shed.