Her Voice & Our Next Steps, April 2014

Traditional Rwandan dancers

April 2014
 
She has no voice. Awful things have been done to her, but she has no voice. It’s not just that the system does not give her a voice, which is very often true here, as judges and prosecutors give very little weight to the testimony of sexually abused minor girls. It is that she simply does not have the ability to speak. You see, she was born with a disability such that she has never been able to talk.  

Anna with some of the IJM staff ladies

Her neighbor knew she could not talk. One day, as she was going to get water for her family (there is no indoor plumbing in most houses here), he grabbed her and raped her. He knew she could not tell her family or anyone else who had done it to her. She might point at him, but what proof was that? He would go free. She has no voice.

A few months later, however, she realized she was pregnant. When her guardian noticed, she asked the girl who had done this to her. She pointed at the neighbor. The police arrested him but then let him free because what evidence did they have? She has no voice. 

After her baby was born, a prosecutor asked IJM to assist in making sure DNA samples were taken from the girl, her baby and the neighbor. The neighbor was no fool; he ducked every request to come and give his DNA sample. But, the prosecutor and IJM were relentless, eventually getting a warrant and forcing him to come and give a sample.

Two months later, the DNA test funded by IJM showed with near certainty that the neighbor was the father of the girl’s baby. She has no voice, but the prosecutor, IJM and science spoke for her. 

In February 2014, a judge found the neighbor guilty and sentenced him to prison for life. In the meantime, IJM is teaching the girl sign language so that she can communicate with those closest to her and providing her and her child with social services so that she is less vulnerable to further abuse. She has no voice, but she is learning to communicate, and until she can do so on her own we have been blessed to speak for her.

                                    ________________________________________

Lane hiking down a volcano in Rwanda

A Personal Note

I pray all is well with you. This week marks three and a half years for our family in Rwanda (four and a half total in Africa!). It has been a time of stretching and blessing, hardship and fun, difficulty and great joy, and we are so thankful for this opportunity and your partnership in it. We have decided it is time to move on, however. 

As of June 13, I will leave my role as IJM Rwanda field office director.  

We do not yet know what is next (or where) but we are looking forward to a couple months this summer in Dallas and Austin to decompress, rest and pray about what is next. 

I leave IJM with great thankfulness for my team, our clients and the amazing privilege it has been to serve with such a passionate, fun, godly and professional group of people, in Rwanda, DC and around the world. Though I am leaving IJM, I will always be an advocate and supporter of the work – it is too important, too urgent and too close to God’s heart to ever really leave it. I hope you all will remain active supporters and advocates of IJM as well.

Our plan is to land back in Dallas on June 24, spend a couple weeks with our families, then head to Colorado for a week-long missionary debrief (kids included), and trips to see great-grandparents in Baytown and friends in Austin.  We look forward to spending time with you all soon.

Blessings from Rwanda, 

The Mearskats
Lane & Anna
Caleb 11, Abby 8, Luke 5, Joshua 2

Mears Family - March 2014 in Kigali, Rwanda

Mama Brigitte

We are so proud to work with people like Mama Brigitte. The IJM Rwanda office is full of people like her, all amazing, all with stories of faith, and all serving God through their work.

IJM Rwanda Social Worker's Story as a Genocide Survivor Helps her Bring Healing to Others

Posted on the IJM.org website

Apr. 11, 2014

 

Brigitte, on the left, with Baraka, IJM Rwanda Director of Aftercare

KIGALI, RWANDA – Brigitte takes a deep breath and smiles as she speaks. Always warm and quick to laugh, it’s clear she loves what she does. As a social worker with IJM Rwanda, Brigitte helps children and their families process trauma and find restoration after sexual violence.

“I give all my time to hear their stories. Telling and sharing is part of healing.”

This month, the world remembers the twenty-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Brigitte survived the violence that devastated her country, and she has seen firsthand the very worst that people can do to one another. She has also seen how people can help one another heal.

Her tone of voice steadies and she chooses her words carefully when asked what she hopes the watching world will see as eyes turn back to her country:

“I would like the world to know that hope is the tree that has grown courage, sacrifice and resilience in Rwanda.”

A Moment of Grace
Brigitte’s memory of the genocide in her nation is sharp. She turned on the radio one April morning to hear that the President’s plane had crashed. The shocking news was interrupted by reports of unrest and warnings to stay home. She and her husband had been married less than year, and she was eight and a half months pregnant.

Later that same morning, men wearing masks and wielding machetes and knives burst through the doors of their small home.

They ordered Brigitte and her husband outside, commanding the newlyweds to lie down and be killed.

Suddenly, a voice cried out.

It was a 15-year-old homeless boy from their neighborhood. Brigette’s husband used to buy him meals and would stop and chat with him.

Though he was with the armed men, the homeless boy begged them to spare the life of this couple, offering his own life in their place. The boy’s courage saved Brigitte and her husband that day.

Raised from Death
In the weeks that followed, 800,000 Rwandans were killed. Entire families were murdered at once, women were systematically raped, and churches became mass gravesites. Neighbors turned on neighbors, and refugees fled the country in droves.

Brigitte gave birth to a baby girl in the midst of the violence and chaos. She named the little girl Anny. The city was running out of food and water, and they subsisted off of porridge. “That was a very difficult moment in my life. How was my baby supposed to survive?”

A couple months later, the same homeless boy who had saved their lives showed up again. He told Brigitte and her husband it was time to leave Rwanda—they were the target of an upcoming attack, and this time he would not be able to stop it. Brigitte strapped two-month-old Anny to her back, and they set out on foot. They walked for more than a week. It was painful and terrifying.

They escaped dangerous roadblocks and finally crossed the border into Congo. Miraculously, Brigitte’s fragile family stayed alive. When she remembers those summer weeks in Congo, she says, “It was there God raised us from death.”

Going Home to Hard Questions
Brigitte and her husband returned to Rwanda on August 13, 1994. It was the day before their one-year wedding anniversary. The destruction of her country and loss in her own family was unfathomable. Half her siblings were killed. Her parents were missing. Her friends and colleagues and neighbors—gone.

“Why did I survive? This was my main question. No one could give me an answer. Two months later I found my dad’s body. He was completely naked—no clothes at all.”

Brigitte felt hollow inside, filled with little but grief and anger. She says, “Life was nothing for me. I stopped going to church because people had been killed in churches by Christians. Christians killed other Christians!”

Over the next few years, Brigitte slowly started sharing her questions with an older man who she views as an uncle. “He took time to listen to me. He would not interrupt me when I started to talk. I realized that talking is good if you have someone who gives you the time.”
Brigitte started praying and attending church again. She did not find all of the answers, but she knew that she was not alone with her questions.

Brigitte, pictured in the background. She has helped Mimi,* a survivor of sexual violence, process her trauma and plan for a safe future. Brigitte helped Mimi take tailoring classes so she could earn an income doing something she loves and make a living to support her daughter.

Hearing People Talk
“I decided to give my time to hear people who need to talk,” Brigitte explains. She went back to school to become a social worker. Brigitte joined IJM’s aftercare team in 2008. She counsels children who have survived sexual assaults and helps their families understand their trauma and provide a safe and sustainable home.

Brigitte says the first step in her job is always to show compassion: “They cannot tell their story without compassion.” She develops specialized treatment plans to meet each child’s holistic needs, and she provides trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy.

Brigitte challenges herself to keep learning and growing so she can give her clients the best services possible. She got her MBA while working in 2010, so that she could help families start income-generating projects and small businesses.

The Power of Hope
Brigitte knows that healing is a process—for her country, and for the children she works with on a daily basis. Her unique ability to empathize and the trauma-focused training she has received through her work at IJM allows Brigitte to impart hope through her job.

“[After the genocide] it was hard to understand how God let people down like that. But talking to other people helped me to have hope, to look in front of me not behind me, and to be able to say God is always God. To have hope in God.”

She pauses, then continues, “If I’m a survivor, it is God-made.”

Read Mimi’s story (on the IJM website) to meet one of the survivors of sexual violence who is now thriving with care and counseling from Brigitte and the IJM Rwanda team.

Also, here on our family blog almost exactly a year ago. Click here. 

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20th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide

Dear Friends, 

Here in Rwanda, today is a national holiday, a day of remembrance. I would like to share with you some of the things I am reading tonight as I reflect and learn about what happened then and what is happening now. Please take a moment to pray for the country of Rwanda and please take a moment to learn about what happened and what we can do to prevent things like this from ever happening again.  

Anna

 

Gary Haugen, IJM's founder standing in a Rwandan church

From International Justice Mission, the organization we are serving here in Rwanda, was started because of what happened here in Rwanda 20 years ago. I am so proud of my husband, Lane Mears for working for IJM and standing up for justice in this country.:

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Gary Haugen, who was there as the lead UN investigator, realized the victims’ need wasn’t food or microloans, but for “someone to restrain the hand with the machete—and nothing else would do.” He founded IJM soon after. As we look back 20 years, we remember those who were lost and hope for an end to violence even today.

Nyamata Church

A great note written by our friend and a political officer here in Rwanda:

On April 6, 1994, an airplane carrying the Rwandan president was shot down over Kigali. On April 7 - twenty years ago today - extremist Hutu government and militia leaders began executing one of the fastest and most devastating genocides in all of history, killing one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, or about 20% of the country's population, in just one hundred days.

Unlike genocides perpetrated primarily by governments, Rwanda's leaders twenty years ago called upon Hutu citizens to slaughter their Tutsi neighbors, friends, and family members. Many who opposed or resisted the call to genocide were also killed, regardless of their ethnic group.

On April 10, ten thousand Tutsis from Nyamata gathered in the Catholic church, seeking safe haven from the wave of death engulfing their village. The church would become their final resting place, as the interhamwe militia and neighbors breached the fortified walls, first throwing grenades into the sanctuary and then entering to kill survivors with machetes, spears, and blunt force. Babies and children were not spared, as the attackers smashed them against the wall of the sanctuary.

Today, Nyamata church and the 45,000 people buried there remind us of the horror of genocide which began 20 years ago and continued for 100 days, ending when the Rwandan Patriotic Front defeated the forces of the former government, military, and genocidal militias.

Today, Rwanda's people have not allowed themselves to be defined by their past, building a nation that is a beacon of peace, stability, and growth in an often troubled region. Rather than seek vengeance for the crimes committed during the genocide, Rwanda has undertaken a process of national reconciliation, seeking to set aside the ethnic labels that divided the country in order to move forward as one nation and one people.

Today, we and all of Rwanda's friends pause to remember those whose lives were lost twenty years ago, to stand in solidarity with the survivors, and to promise to work together to continue the miraculous transformation of this country from a place of despair to one of forgiveness, reconciliation, and hope.

A picture and note by the father of one of the girls in Abigail's grade 3 class, who I believe this is his family:


Today, I will walk to remember the Million + lives lost during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsis of Rwanda. This is 1 family which is all gone save 1 person because absent from Rwanda. I mourn all the lives lost to this abomination, especially the families, which are left with no 1 to tell.

From the official remembrance website (www.kwibuka.org):

Kwibuka means ‘remember’ in Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s language. It describes the annual commemoration of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.

More than one million Rwandans died in the hundred days of the genocide. It was one of human history’s darkest times. Twenty years later we, Rwanda, ask the world to unite to remember the lives that were lost.

We ask the world to come together to support the survivors of the genocide, and to ensure that such an atrocity can never happen again – in Rwanda or elsewhere.

Kwibuka20 is a series of events taking place in Rwanda and around the world. These events lead up to the national commemoration of the genocide in Rwanda, which begins on 7 April 2014. The genocide began on 7 April 1994.

Kwibuka20 is also a time to learn about Rwanda’s story of reconciliation and nation building.
 

A New York Times article with powerful photography and stories of reconciliation:

The people who agreed to be photographed are part of a continuing national effort toward reconciliation and worked closely with AMI (Association Modeste et Innocent), a nonprofit organization. In AMI’s program, small groups of Hutus and Tutsis are counseled over many months, culminating in the perpetrator’s formal request for forgiveness.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/06/magazine/06-pieter-hugo-rwanda-portraits.html?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.z_sma=MG_POR_20140404&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1388552400000&bicmet=1420088400000&_r=3


From Isaiah 65:

"Behold I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and crying will be heard in it no more. Never again will there be an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his days...They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit..."

Never Again.