Courage pays off in a small, determined place
Quakers, including some from QPSW, are involved in a number of projects in Burundi. Laura Shipler Chico, QPSW programme manager for East Africa, reports on her recent visit to Burundi.
A five-year-old girl is dying in Kamenge. She is HIV-positive and her little body has been taken over by an opportunistic disease. The disease, says Dr Alexia of the Friends Women’s Association health clinic in this impoverished neighbourhood of Bujumbura, is totally preventable.
Dr Alexia stands in the relative cool of the clinic’s pharmacy, and gestures at the shelves sparsely populated with bottles of pills. “We just don’t have the medicine.” She shakes her head and then leads me out into the bright hot sun and paints her dream for this small, determined place.
The clinic is on its way to becoming a certified centre for providing antiretroviral treatment. They are building a women’s centre where they will provide holistic care, from trauma counselling, to family planning, to maternal health services. Behind the clinic is a rough patch of land that they are slowly transforming into a community garden. Another visitor from England has been there recently. Sacks of earth have begun to sprout small green leaves, a product of a workshop on “Growing Together”, given by Ealing Quaker Elizabeth Cave, which was warmly received as a means to help HIV-positive women grow the balanced, nutritious diet they need to stay healthy.
For Dr Alexia and her colleagues, peace and health are inextricably intertwined. The lack of access to adequate care, the high prevalence of HIV, the raw trauma thinly veiled by the bodily symptoms presented at the clinic, are all both consequences and causes of war. This clinic is just one of many local partners which QPSW peaceworkers Ruth Simpson and Cathrin Mair Daniel are supporting as programme officers in the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) office in Burundi. Their work is happening against a backdrop of change and uncertainty in Burundi as civil-society groups and the international community gear up for elections later this year. Hope and fear mingle as most players acknowledge that some violence is inevitable, and the only question that remains is how fundamentally it will shake Burundi’s fragile peace.
National and international Quaker organisations are collaborating on the development of an innovative election early-warning system combining the far-reaching Quaker network with cutting-edge technology. Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities (HROC), an initiative of Burundi Yearly Meeting (and also an AFSC partner), has created community-based peace and democracy groups around the country. Carefully selected members of these groups will be equipped with mobile phones and trained as ‘citizen reporters’, whose goal it will be to defuse destructive rumours and get word out about violence and peacebuilding efforts to a broader international audience. Many people have volunteered their time for this initiative, including former QPSW peaceworkers Sarah Jackson and Ian Brightwell. Adrien Niyangabo, HROC Director, hopes that this initiative will prove to be a moderating voice, publicising the good that is happening, and speaking out if those with power “exclude, oppress, [or] cheat in silence”. The work takes courage, but Adrien reports that a member of HROC’s committee spoke for all of them when he said: “You cannot do much for peace if you fear to die for peace.”
As politicians wrangle for the national stage, Dr Alexia, Adrien and others are working steadily at building a deeper peace: a just peace, where a person can vote in conscience without fear and a child can walk into a clinic and find that much-needed treatment is, at last, within reach.
Contact:
Laura Shipler Chico
lauras@quaker.org.uk
020 7663 1075
