Mais, avant que je rentre...

But, Before I Leave...

I am afraid that this might be my last entry before I go. I have a week left. A week. A week!! I don't even know what to do with that thought. I facilitated my workshop for the last time yesterday at UC Kin, didn't have a nap in the afternoon, and stayed up all the way until ten. By all standards since I've arrived here, I should have been exhausted. But I still only managed to stay asleep until four A.M. because a dream about re-entry into Canada woke me. I finally started to drift back off about 45 minutes later and another dream about re-entry woke me. I gave up on sleep and instead just lay quietly listening to the breathing sounds of the other three women and two-year-old child sleeping in the room with me and tried to imagine what it's going to be like to sleep in a room alone.

I've got to admit that I'm still nervous about coming home. Really. It's silly; I've lived in Winnipeg all my life. It is the most familiar place in the world to me. But I just feel like it's going to look differently. I am trying to grapple with the thought of clean, lit streets at night and strong water pressure. How is it that I've only been here for three months, but those basic amenities are starting to seem somehow unnatural? Hah! Wierd. Perhaps it is again guilt rearing its ugly head, creeping up behind me to remind me that this is not my life and that I am going back to a place where there is no malaria and even if there were, most people would not have to choose between buying mosquito nets or feeding their families. Perhaps guilt is making me disassociate from all of that good stuff. I don't know. But before I go, I want to take inventory of all of the wonderful things about this wonderful country. I want all of the good things to be first and foremost in my mind when I arrive back in 'Peg city.

Sounds
-the sound of men selling bread in big metal tubs on their heads, walking around tapping a knife on the side of the tub
-the sound of walking shoe-shiners clapping wood together
-the sound of walking manicure/pedicurists tapping glass bottles together
-the sound of kids walking around at night when the power's gone off tapping on tin cans; selling palm oil to light lamps
-the sound of women selling fruit on the side of the road letting out a big 'eeh!,' then arguing rapidly in Lingala about the price of fruit or the exchange rates
-the sound of people sweeping out their compounds
-'eaupure! eaupure!'
-'eeeehhh, mondele mbote!'
-the collective 'awwwwwww' from the neighbourhood when the power goes out, and the shouts of joy when it comes back on... every single time
-falling asleep listening to the music drifting down the road from the local pub

Sights
-a million different fabrics in a million different colours... and being able to tell which one just came out
-not one woman wearing shoes that fit her
-rows upon rows of people with oranges, water, apples, bread, and whatever other fruit that's in season in multicoloured plastic tubs on their heads, walking to their spot first thing in the morning
-groups of five to ten guys all leaning up against cars that don't belong to them, all wearing shades, all wearing D&G, Versace, and Prada... all unemployed but so cool
-psychotic taxi drivers pulling across into the middle of intersections covering both lanes of traffic going in either direction and stalling
-papaya trees growing out of the side of massive heaps of garbage and bearing fruit
-the Congo river

Smells
-..... I'll have to get back to you on this one

Sensations
-the feeling that comes along with feeling something very light touch your arm or hand, and then looking down to see a small child looking up at you in wonder and shyly smiling while standing behind her mother
-the feeling that comes along with other small children being terrified of you because they've never seen white people before, and then everyone in the room rolling around on the ground laughing
-the feeling of sitting in the middle of a group of women speaking in a language I don't understand and quietly trying to break manioc leaves off of their stems without getting my hands tapped and shown how I'm doing it wrong (but having no idea what the difference is in the way I'm doing it)
-the feeling of no personal space
-the feeling I get when Pascal's mother greets me or starts clapping upon my arrival

I had an interesting experience tonight. A delegation of ten young people - nine from Canada, seven from Winnipeg, all here on missions - came to dinner. Papa had told me that we were having a group of Canadians in for dinner and I honestly expected them to be middle-aged, not my age. So when the all filed in the door I was surprised, and had no idea that they were from my city. Ma ville! We talked, but not about Canada. We talked about Congo, about various cultural and other types of experiences we've had since we've arrived. I believe that all but one of them had ever been here before; Paul said that he got the Congo bug a few years back and has been back every year since. I know the feeling and I haven't even left yet. Many ex-pats have mentioned this to me; something about this country that gets in your blood and draws you back no matter how far you go or how long you're gone. Hello, my dear aunt was gone for 30 years and has returned home now en permanence. So we all sat out in a big circle in the courtyard after dinner and talked about Kinshasa. We had a lively discussion about mondeles. It was great. Papa, Paul, and I all laughed. The rest of them giggled nervously and all looked uncomfortable with the whole ordeal. I felt like an insider looking out, or an outsider looking in... at how I felt when I first arrived when I heard that word and every time I went out and attracted so much attention. I didn't even realize that I don't even realize anymore whether or not I am attracting attention with my skin or that the word mondele doesn't bother me anymore. In fact, I have begun correcting people when they mistake me for Chinese. They'll say 'neehaw!' and I'll say 'te, te, pas chinois. Mondele.' When they all filed out at the end of the evening and we walked them up the street a bit, I got a wonderful and bizarre feeling. I felt this huge sense of relief that I was not with them; that I was staying here in my home in Binza. Their visit this evening made me feel closer to my family.

I had another emotional event last week. The day that John and Charity left I was a mess. Their leaving really brought it home to me that I, too, would be leaving all too shortly (interesting choice of words I've made...). I cried. Then Maman Therese started crying. Then Claudia started crying. We were all standing in the girls' room with one arm around each other crying. It must have looked ridiculous :) That thought occurred to me right in the middle of our orchestra but it didn't make it any easier. I have begun my goodbyes and until-next-times.

I have to start saying that.

Comment faciliter un seminaire de resolution de conflit au Congo... ou Quoi eviter en facilitant!

How to Facilitate a Conflict Resolution Workshop in Congo... or What to Avoid When Facilitating!

The Workshop
In 2008, my dear friend Jessie Robinson and I wrote a conflict resolution workshop as a final project in a course facilitated by Karen Ridd at the University of Winnipeg called Violence and Nonviolence. We were interested in writing a workshop that addressed specific needs of women who had experienced domestic violence at the hands of men in their lives; neither of us, as undergraduate students, had any expertise in trauma healing as such. Therefore, at Karen's advice and encouragement, we tailored our workshop to deal specifically with issues of the loss of power that women may feel as victims, and how they might be empowered once again. We facilitated the workshop in June of 2008 at Outreach, the Fort Garry Women’s Resource Centre’s satellite location, for six women and found that we had a great deal of success in offering the skills and tools that we did.

The day before I left for Congo, on a whim, I packed my facilitator’s manual. After being read by a few different people, I was asked to facilitate our workshop at a school in Sanga Mamba in Kinshasa for a group of young girls who are in the process of learning to become seamstresses. Additionally, I was asked to facilitate for their teachers during a separate session. My facilitations were arranged through Pasteur Ya Namwisi Mukambo, who is a member of the administrative board of the school.

The Students

With the group of girls, I was able to follow my facilitator’s manual relatively closely. Oh wait, did I mention that there were fifty-five girls participating?? Yes, that's right. 55. Actually, we did several head counts throughout the morning. We started with 37, and did another count twenty minutes later and had 46. 45 miutes later, I asked that we count again, and the result was 63 participants. I had to put my foot down. I really didn't want to deny anyone the opportunity to participate, but really. I'm just a kid from Winnipeg who wrote a workshop. Did I mention that I had only facilitated once before, with a partner and six participants? Right. So I cut them off at 55. I started by attempting to do an icebreaker with them. The girls did, at first, have some difficulty understanding the instructions. When I attempted to move around the circle one by one, giving each participant a chance to play the game, the girls on either side of me feigned ignorance and claimed that they did not understand French (even after it had been explained to them in Lingala). There were however, enough participants who were bold enough to give the game a try. I ended up proceeding by letting them call out as they built up the courage to participate instead of going around the circle in order; with 55 participants in total, we ended up with enough bold participants to have some fun in the end. It wasn’t until about an hour after we had begun the session that morning that I realized that because the students are taught in rote, the concept of participatory learning must be unfamiliar to them. It would not make for a positive experience for any of them if I were to force each one to participate. Therefore, I carried out the rest of the workshop’s activities in the same manner as the first icebreaker in order to gently introduce this new concept.

After the first icebreaker, I did two brainstorming activities with the girls. The first brainstorm was in setting guidelines of behaviour on the rest of our time together that day, and the second was in identifying both negative and positive aspects of conflict. Upon reflection, I realize now that the brainstorm sessions themselves would have been put to much better use as icebreakers, as they slowly opened the participants’ minds to the idea that they could be free to speak their minds and that they already possessed valid knowledge.

After going over the five conflict styles with them – accommodation; avoidance; compromise; collaboration; and competition – I organized them into groups and asked them to come up with a two or three minute skit that exemplified a conflict and that made use of one or more of the five conflict styles in its resolution. This role play activity was by far the greatest success of the day. Whereas when Jessie and I facilitated our workshop for the women in Winnipeg and decided halfway through the morning not to include the role plays, here in Congo the opportunity for theatrics and drama was perfectly culturally appropriate. They were fantastic! The girls got right into them, and all wanted to be the first group to present. We ended up drawing numbers from a jar. During each one, the whole audience also got involved; clapping and calling out to the 'actors' in response to occurrences in the skit. Their skits also gave me some invaluable insight into the types of conflicts that are common and most pressing in their lives. Very interestingly, three out of five groups presented skits that addressed common conflicts regarding cell phones. When I first arrived in Kinshasa and was given a cell phone to use during my stay here, I was warned against leaving it unattended anywhere or carrying it in a place that could be easily accessible to a pickpocket because it would be sure to go missing. Not only is theft a major issue, but so is cell phone credit; there are no land lines in Congo, and all plans work on a pay-as-you-go basis. I have tried to restrict the number of people that I’ve given my phone number out to, but still I get text messages and quick phone calls on a regular basis from people who have somehow come across my phone number and are asking me to recharge the credits on their phones (the assumption being that I, as a Westerner, have plenty of money to share). In fact, as I was writing just five minutes ago I got a phone call from one of the student participants in this workshop asking me to recharge her phone. Wireless communication can be a major issue of contention in many contexts here in Congo, and it can cause major rifts in relationships. The other two groups presented different issues. One group’s conflict was between a husband, his wife, and his mistress; he was treating his mistress better than his wife.

After the skits, we took a lunch break to snack on bread, roasted peanuts, and pop, and continued on after approximately a half hour. Although I did continue with the second and third sections of the workshop, I read through them quickly and left out all but one activity. The reasons for which I decided to leave out the parts I did are as follow:

First, the girls were getting restless. Even after taking a break and having something to eat, they had still begun itching to leave because each day of school here in Congo (and in much of Africa) only lasts for half a day. Second, after having spent the morning with them, upon reflection I had realized that because they do not live in an egalitarian culture and society, many of the issues concerning women’s empowerment that are addressed in the workshop do not transfer culturally. Further, I became mindful of the fact that I could potentially do more harm than good if I were to try to convince the young girls that they could independently control their decisions and their lives; an individualistic world view that does not exist as such here in Congo. Decisions need to be considered in terms of the ripple effects that they can have on various family and social groups. There are issues of face-saving and collective conflict resolution processes among parties to conflict that involve intermediaries that the material concerning empowerment in my workshop does not address. Because I have not done an adequate amount of research into this aspect of Congolese culture, I decided to dilute the empowerment messages in the latter part of the workshop. After outlining the seven-step conflict resolution process in the workshop for the participants, I finished with a simple empowerment activity whereby I asked the girls to finish the following phrase: “I feel powerful when…” I saw positive results with this activity and noticed several of the girls smiling and clapping for one another.

What worked and what was challenging
To my surprise the girls did incorporate the conflict styles into their skits. I was concerned that they might have difficulty with conceptualizing the application of the new information in a learning environment that was so different from what they are familiar with, but this was not the case. They did a great job of exemplifying the uses of the styles in conflict and moreover of incorporating them into their own contexts. This has given me a strong indication that there are aspects of conflict and how conflict is experienced that are universal.

However, not all of the workshop’s material proved to be universal. The participatory learning facilitation methods didn’t carry over to a rote education setting very smoothly. In fact, I don’t believe that the role of a facilitator as I understand it – as a person who fosters critical thinking and participants’ abilities to come to their own conclusions – is a role that these girls, at their age and level of experience with this type of workshop, are familiar with. By the end of the day, they had come around and seemed more comfortable with actively participating, but it was incredibly slow going during the first few hours. Further, the concept of women’s empowerment that I attempted to offer them did not transfer culturally. This message was shaped in my Western, egalitarian society. Here in Congo, I do not find an egalitarian society. I find a culturally embedded hierarchy of power in both social and familial roles. Both socioeconomic and political systems in Congo reproduce and reinforce this hierarchy. I had sensed, by the middle of my facilitation, that to push the empowerment message without a way to make it meaningful or relevant here in Congo could mean that the conflict resolution skills and material that we had spent the entire morning working on might end up being rendered obsolete to them. Therefore, I read quickly through the sections on power and only facilitated the empowerment activity with them at the end of the workshop.

Did I mention that there were 55 participants? I found that a little challenging.

The Teachers
With the teachers, our workshop was transformed in a way that it dealt only with styles of behaviour and communication in conflict. When I arrived in the morning, I had a moment of panic when I found that 28 out of 30 participants were men. It was not their gender in and of itself that made me panic – although I must admit that this, too, intimidated me – but it was the fact that I was about to facilitate a conflict resolution workshop written for women who’d experienced violence at the hands of men for men. I had to ask myself why I hadn’t thought of this before I agreed to do the session for the teachers. I should have known that it would be almost exclusively, if not entirely, men; I have experienced time and again since I arrived being the only woman in countless professional and/or academic settings. My session with the teachers was much shorter than that with the students. I only presented the first section of the workshop, covering just up to the final role play after having introduced the five conflict styles, and ended our session together right after the role plays had been discussed.

What worked and what was challenging
The brainstorming and the role play activity went over quite well. The teachers were much more active participants, which made my role as facilitator much easier when it came to generating and encouraging discussion in a language that I am still working at ameliorating. However, I did not touch on a key aspect of the workshop at all. Men do not experience power in the same way as women do. I was presenting this material in a hierarchical culture in which, contemporarily, men occupy the majority of the upper rungs of this order – which, I must add, is not to state that all men abuse their more powerful status. Because, in addition to their inherent power as men they also hold positions of authority as teachers, to give a workshop on conflict and power to this particular group would have entailed entirely different material. As I have not done research in depth into how men experience loss of power, I am simply unqualified to address these issues at this time.

Unfortunately, I ended the session rather abruptly when all three skits had been acted out and we had had brief discussions about the styles their skits exemplified. I kind of panicked and just said ok, we're done. Lol! Not my most shining moment. Had I had a chance to think it through, I might have adapted the material to my audience and facilitated a more well-rounded, albeit shorter, session. Or, frankly, I may have declined to facilitate my workshop for women for a group of men. But because I hadn’t had any of this foresight, I found myself at a loss and as a result left the participants feeling as though the workshop was incomplete. Oops.

Overall these two facilitations have proved to be incredible learning experiences for me. They were opportunities for me to step outside of my role as observer in this new country and culture and engage directly in a different role. One of the learning goals I had set for my practicum was to determine whether any of the theory and practical application of conflict resolution principles I have studied to date are transferrable outside of the Western context in which I have studied them. I feel that I can conclude that to a certain degree, the fundamentals of behaviour and communication are, in fact, transferrable. I was able to observe this concretely in the ways that all of the participants from both groups asked questions while I presented the theory and then applied the theory in their role plays through conflict situations that are relevant and real in their own lives. This was truly fascinating for me.

I also feel that I have a much deeper and more tangible appreciation of the importance of having a rich understanding of both broader socio-cultural issues, and deeper cultural nuances before preparing to do any kind of cross-cultural training. I was prepared with some of this knowledge given my extensive research into Congo’s history and contemporary social conditions. This work was validated for me after my session with the students. Upon a short debriefing in Pasteur Mukambo’s office, he informed me that one of the participants sitting next to him – who had avoided directly participating in any of the activities – had nonetheless listened intently during all of our time together and had at one point whispered to her friend that the things I was talking about were what they live every day. This gave me an incredible sense of relief and satisfaction. However, had I taken into consideration some of the social details such as their rote education setting or some of the broader cultural realities such as the social hierarchy of power, I believe that I may have had more success in getting the messages of empowerment in our workshop across to the participants. This will be invaluable knowledge in the future.

Like I said in my last post, I'm just a kid from Winnipeg. If you had told me that I'd be doing this sort of thing here I would have slapped you on the back and said 'I didn't know you were funny!'

17 jours avant... ?

17 days before... ?

Forgive me. This is going to be a bit of a ramble. I don't have much of a theme, as I've had in my other posts, because my head is spinning a little and I need to spit it all out at once somehow. So this is where I'm going to do that.

17 days before I leave Congo. 17 days. Ooohhhhhh boy oh baby, what a strange feeling. I feel torn. I certainly feel differently about Canada at this point in my life. I have had so many people express so much interest in Canada since my arrival. Why? Because Canada is never in the news and people don't know anything about it. The CBC is not among the list of international news stations that we get on satellite at John and Charity's, such as CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera. So many people have said to me "Canada is a really quiet place. Does anything happen there?" These are Congolese people mostly. Consider their frame of reference; this is a country that's been torn for years by war. Does anything happen in Canada? Well, relative to Congo, I guess no. But I'm actually really ok with that. I feel grateful for that. I feel so fortunate to know that I am going back to a place where nothing happens. And particularly Winnipeg. I mean really. But on the other hand, I feel like there is an increasing weight on my presence here, as though I am being pulled down in place. As though something in me is trying to take root here in Congo. There is so much to do here. So much work. So much need. So much life that's begging to be lived. During the past week people have begun to ask me whether I am looking forward to returning home. I kind of waver when people ask that question. My response is something along the lines of "eeehhhhhmmm..." to which people will say "but it's your home! Won't you be glad to be home? Don't you miss it?" and I've figured out the perfect response. "Canada will always be there, but I will not always be in Congo." That pretty much sums up how I feel about going home at the moment. It's not quite an answer that indicates clearly whether I am looking forward to home, but it's all I've got right now.

I've been back at Kulungus' for just over a week now, resuming the activities and projects I had been working on when I first arrived. We finally got power back yesterday evening after eight days with no electricity. Candles for light and coals for cooking. It's a bit like camping, actually, except that we're in the middle of a city with a population of 12 million +. Back at UC Kin and at Papa Pascal's centre, things have been a little slow. The general atmosphere has felt something along the lines of "Oh, you're back. Ok, let's get organized." Lol. That's pretty much how things work around here; no one really gets a sense that things are going to happen until they are already happening. This has to do, in large part, with the fact that more often than not, things end up falling through - particularly with expats - so people have developed the habit of waiting to make preparations until there is proof that things will actually move forward. So, I spent a lot of my time in Papa's office at UC Kin while he worked on various projects and tried hard to get a group of students and teachers together to begin another Peer Mediation session. They had all been informed that we were to begin this week, but because school is out now and because there have been a whole slew of miscommunications and because there are other varying excuses coming from students as to why they are unable to attend on a given morning, I did a lot of sitting around and fiddling with Papa's laptop with an unreliable internet connection and a terrible battery that refuses to stay powered up even when it's plugged into the wall. I must share my fave excuse of the week: Thursday morning, Papa was running around looking for the students who were supposed to be in our classroom at ten o'clock. It wasn't until around noon that Jean Claude came by to let us know that he had spoken with some of the students and they said that they couldn't come to the session in the morning because it was too cold out. It was 27°C. You should have seen people, though. People were really cold. They had goosebumps and were actually wearing winter jackets. Oooohhh, Congo. En tous cas, sitting in his office gave me an opportunity to observe a number of interesting occurrences. Here are the most interesting:

Because Papa is the Financial Administrator for the university, students with issues paying their tuition often come by to explain why and ask for extensions; they're writing exams right now, and many are being chased out of the exam rooms because they haven't paid. So one student this week comes in to see Papa and explains that he can not pay his tuition in full because of varying exchange rates in different parts of the city. He had US dollars but exchanged them for Congolese Francs downtown. To his unfortunate surprise, the exchange rate in Binza Ozone (area of city where UC Kin is located) differs by two francs. So in total he was short about ten thousand francs.

That same day, two students came into Papa's office to advise him that there had been a death. A student of the university, about a year ago, got his girlfriend pregnant. The child was born albino. This student was so unhappy about his son's physical state that he poisoned the child's milk. The child died. I haven't heard any updates about this since.

The following day, students were waiting to write an exam but no one showed up with the exams for them to write. After they had waited a while, they started to get restless. The longer they waited, the more heated they became, until finally about 45 minutes after they should have begun writing their exam I heard a whole bunch of yelling somewhere close to me on campus. It went on for about twenty minutes and then began to die down. I found out later that day that what had happened was that the Dean of the faculty of Theology had not communicated with the prof of this class when and where the exam was scheduled. The students got angry and started calling all of the staff who happened to pass by them voleurs, stealers of their tuition money. !!! Someone had the sense to come and find Pascal and ask him to diffuse the situation as he is the peacemaker on campus. Ohhhh, Congo.

This is life. Keep your eyes open if you want to live it.

It turns out after all that there will be no Peer Mediation course. Couldn't manage to get a group of students to give up their vacation time to participate in a course. Go figure. I'll be spending the time I would have been following the course trying to track down publishers and get permission to translate a bunch of nonviolence literature for Pascal to use in his conflict resolution course for his centre. If I can, that could certainly take up the rest of my time. I am also babysitting two darling yellow labs during the next two weekends for a friend of John and Char's who lives at TASOK and is in the States on holidays. They're adorable. Whiny as hell, but great nonetheless. In addition, Pascal would like me to facilitate my workshop one more time here at UC Kin... oh wait a minute, I haven't even blogged about my workshops yet!! Oh man. So much has happened that I haven't blogged about. I spent almost two weeks in the middle of the bush, facilitated a conflict resolution workshop that my close friend Jessie and I wrote TWICE, made two new friends, and met Todd Howland, the Director of the Joint Office on Human Rights for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the head of the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Congo (MONUC). He has offered to let me interview him before I leave. Yeesh I have a lot to catch you all up on!

Esengo - Partie II