Loss and Hope

Solange

The child was named Asante. What a beautiful name. In Swahili it means "thanks".

Unfortunately this was the child that I mentioned earlier. The child of Solange's sister. Solange has only 1 sister and 1 brother. Although she is only 20 herself, Solange is the eldest in her family. Her parents died years ago and her younger siblings have had a hard time of it. For a while they were living in a refugee camp. During which time, Solange's sister had a little boy and named him "Asante".

Eventually they moved back to their family home, in an area that has been all but deserted because of ongoing fighting. That is where they were living, way out in the bush, and in the midst of insecurity, when Asante became sick. Medicine didn't seem to help. They had no money. They took him to a "kishenzi" doctor. That is a "traditional doctor" or an "herbal doctor".

I am sure there is a place for this type of medicine, but I also know that these are often the doctors of last resort.

When there isn't a hospital nearby... when no one knows what is wrong with you... when you think someone is poisoning you... or when you just don't have much money...

you go to these "doctors".

You get the idea.

The Kishenzi doctor gave Asante some form of treatment. But he died. And now the family owes $50 to the doctor anyway.

But what other options did they have? Doing anything feels better than doing nothing.

When Asante died, Solange was summoned by her sister and brother before she had a chance to get a hold of me.

She had no money in her back account because all her savings went into the small plot of land that she bought 6 months ago. She is still waiting to save more money to build a house on that plot of land, so her brother and sister can live there in safety.

She planned for Asante to live there too. But he didn't quite make it.

Solange went back to her rural home, full of shame, because in Congo it was surely her duty to contribute to the cost of a funeral for this little child. And yet she had nothing, but the promise of some land she bought for the future. They couldn't bury Asante for 2 days (a long time in Congo) because no one had the money for even the simplest of burials.

I can't think of a more clear example of what it is like to live in Congo. There is an endless, unimaginable balancing...where somehow you have plan for a future when the present is barely hanging on by a string.

Do you save money to buy the land and build a little house, so that a year from now your family can live in safety? But what happens in the meantime?

Or do you cover the emergencies that arise each month, shelling out month after month, but building nothing for the future. The tyranny of the urgent, leaving you just as destitute next year as you were the last.

It is a balancing act. Solange has now paid for the medical debt to that kishenzi doctor. And she remains with the promise of a small plot of land. If only she can find the money to build upon it, her brother and sister could have a safer place to live. It may seem a small consolation to the loss of a child, but it is also the best way to avert the next disaster, before it happens.

A tiny house in Goma, can mean a lot. It means better security, and better health care, and it means hope to continue forward. It is SHONA sales that bought that land and it is continuing SHONA sales that will allow Solange to build upon it one day.

I wish for all the world that Asante had a different life, the opportunities he surely deserved.

But I remain forever impressed by the strength of those who face these losses, often too many to count, and still believe that a different future is possible.

Please buy SHONA products and reward that hope. For Solange and her family your purchases really do make all the difference in the world.

Insecurity

One of the hard parts of life in Congo is the "insecurity".

We use this term often to talk about the sense that Congo somewhat teeters on the edge of violence. Fighting could always break out, armed robbers could always show up at night.

But the insecurity amounts to more than that.

We have a friend who is a poor farmer, in a rural region. He owns a small piece of land next to a big piece of land owned by an important person. And so he stands always on the brink of losing his small plot of land, his only livelihood.

Last week, people came onto his land and began taking his crops. He complained. And so he was put in jail for a week. He just didn't have friends on the right side, and someone else did.

His extremely poor family then spent the week buying the guards beers and handing off cash trying to get this elderly man moved to a less harsh prison.

Eventually they borrowed enough money to pay the system off, and get him out of prison. What will happen with his land is unclear.

And this is precisely the insecurity with which many Congolese live everyday. That which they have can always be taken away.

In the grand scheme of things, all that anyone has can disappear in an instant. None of us are guaranteed tomorrow. All of our lives are in fact, teetering on the edge.

But here in the US, we live with the illusion of security. And with some sense that only God, or a huge natural disaster or some other force beyond our control, can rip out of our hands that which we believe is ours.

It is a different type of insecurity to know that the people living next to you can do the same.

Voices

Today I would like to show you a beautiful video. It is a video I made with my ESL students here in NY. My students are Spanish-speaking adults. Most of them have extremely limited English (although they are getting better by the day). We made a video of them talking about their dreams. It is beautiful. The dreams that they have are the same dreams we all have.

But I can't put it up here. Many of my students do not have documents. And so I cannot show you this video today. But here are some examples of what they said...

I have a dream that...
One day I will speak English.
I will see my children grow up with good hearts.
One day my family will be all together forever.
One day everyone in the world will know God.
Some day I will have a good job.
The world will finish violence.
One day I will return to my country and help people.
I will have documents.

You see what I mean? People are people. And we all have dreams.

We can have many different positions on immigration reform, but what we cannot lose sight of is the fact that we are all brothers and sisters.

So I am sorry to have to cut the video and silence my students' voices.

But I have good news as well.

This week we are introducing tweets live from Congo. We are receiving tweets directly from our craftspeople in Congo and publishing them on twitter in Swahili with translation.

The topics our craftspeople will be tweeting on will be limited. They can't comment on the ongoing conflict in Congo, but they can tell you a bit about their own lives. The tweets will provide at least a glimpse of their lives, their words, and their voices. They will tweet about what is going on from week to week, and some of the joys and struggles in their own lives.

Too often I take my own voice, and my own freedoms, for granted. But many people, throughout this world, live in situations in which their voices are often either silenced or unheard. So check out our website, where we are posting our twitter updates, or join us on twitter, in one small attempt to bring a few more voices into the global community? And remember you can sign our guest book, and send messages directly to our craftspeople! Both your voice, and their voices, do matter!

Stolen cloth

People often ask me where the cloth we use comes from, and how the craftspeople get it.

There is a "cloth district" in Goma which contains 30 or so shops like the one pictured above. However this picture probably gives you the wrong idea. This shop looks quiet and peaceful. But these shops are invariably crowded with women pushing in the door and yelling out their cloth selections to the people behind the counter. These are wholesale shops, where the market ladies come to buy the cloth they will sell. Each woman is calculating in her head, the price she will pay and the price she thinks she can sell the cloth for. And the trick is that there are tons of varieties of cloth, including a number of knock-off cloths, that often have the name of a high quality brand written on them, and demand close inspection to determine the true quality.

So you can picture Argentine and Mapendo in the midst of this. Pressed in on all sides, and determined to inspect their cloth with a sharper eye than anyone else.

Last week they went home crying. They had lost two vitenge (about 18 feet of cloth each). Or rather someone had stolen those cloths. Someone took advantage of the crowd and the hustle and simply ran away with two of their cloths.

We can replace them. The loss amounts to about 28 dollars.

Of course 28 dollars is nothing to sneeze at, but I think there is a more important story behind this loss.

The cloth district is located in the worst, dirtiest and most chaotic part of Goma. I used to shop there as well, and I always felt like I had to have eyes on the back of my head to keep up with half of what was going on around me.

Our craftspeople go there all the time, with crutches and metal leg braces. They haggle with vendors, buy cloth, and figure out a way to get it home.

In all of this time, they've never lost a piece of cloth, or a dollar. I think they deserve congratulations. It is no surprise that someone stole their cloth, sadly. It is more of a surprise that it didn't happen sooner. But the story that deserves to be told is not of the shameless people that would steal from these young women on crutches, but the strength and determination of those women who have braved this crowd week after week.

I used to come home from the cloth district exhausted. I can't imagine doing it on crutches.

Sometimes I talk about empowerment and forget what it looks like. I forget about the sweat and blood that gets us there. I talk about empowerment as though it is a beautiful statue I can keep on a shelf, but for the SHONA ladies empowerment is a living and breathing reality. Empowerment throws them headlong into the hustle of life

And they jump in astonishingly well. They do so well, that sometimes it leads me to wax poetic. Empowerment is beautiful. But it is also covered in the mud and sweat of everyday life. It means going to that market month after month to choose your own cloth. Empowerment doesn't separate us from the realities of life, it throws us into the midst of them, and asks us to swim. The SHONA ladies have been doing just that, sometimes they come back covered in dust, but they never once have considered sending someone else to the market. They rely on having the best cloth to sew, and they can think of no one more qualified than themselves to choose it. Isn't that what empowerment looks like?