This is Goreth’s daughter Bella in one of Myriam’s JOY jerseys. It was way too big for her, but she had no desire to wear anything else. Happy Fourth dear ones! Here’s hoping you have all the courage you need for whatever journey your soul is taking you on these days. I’m hoping the same for myself.

The Journey
by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Doreen, modeling the necklace Odette sent her, with Odette’s daughter Lillian looking on in admiration

“Doreen.” Odette says, murmuring in Kinyarwanda. “I love her so much.”

“She was the first baby for me to take care of,” Odette tells me, “even though she was not my own.” She tells me this as we walk to see our brothers, to buy phone cards so we can call Doreen to see how she is doing since Sam got hurt. “I was only ten! Can you imagine that? Me, like Madeleine, with a baby on my back?”

I can. Doreen has Odette’s playful spirit and wide open heart. She is sassy and funny and bright. She wants me to take her picture. I don’t even have to ask her to smile. She is happy in part because she has worn down Odette and Odette’s mother and convinced them she cannot go to school a minute longer. At twenty, she is too old and has missed too much. She won’t be a big woman in a little girls’ class for another second.

I can see the pain of this, but also the possibilities. Doreen is not stupid. She knows her success will come by being a strong woman in the village, her chance for a career requiring formal education long past. She will take Sam, the love of her young life, even now and build a future with her own hands. She can do this, all disapproving murmurs be damned.

Just you wait and see.

Where she got this fire, nobody knows, but I think it has something to do with her mother, Francoisie.

When Francoisie was Doreen’s age, she fell in love with Odette’s brother who convinced her to defy the village elders and the law and run away with him to the city. She was scared at first, but when he reminded her they would be required to live apart for eight whole months, she was gone and in his arms before they knew she had left.

Odette was a little younger than Madeleine when that happened and she still remembers one year later, when that spirited girl returned home to Odette’s mother’s house, round and happy as the late afternoon sun, all sins of passion and nonconformity forgiven. When her pains came, the old women helped her, but the baby was too big for her body and she broke under the stress and weight of it all. In the end, the doctors came, the baby was born and they named her Doreen, thanking God that her mother did not die after all.

But time did not mend her mother’s body the way the doctors promised and when Doreen was five months old, the doctors in the city told Franciosie she was pregnant again and that this baby would not hold. She died of complications from a miscarriage before anyone back the village knew she was at risk. Her husband, Odette’s brother, soon after fled, for reasons he alone knows, but I would like to think it was because he had a broken heart.

Everything will be okay, Odette’s mother said, taking the child into her arms. Her name will be Tumukunde.

And she will be mine, Odette answered, tying the dear baby girl on her back with a cloth.

“What does it mean–Tumukunde?” I ask Odette as we wave goodbye to our brothers and walk back home.

“It means, ‘We should love her’,” she says. And then she starts to cry a little, remembering that baby and the way they carried her with that love and that name all those years.

Odette and I have been talking about how much we would love to help Doreen along in her power as a woman in the village. Throw $1 or $10 or $100 in the pot today and all the funds will go towards helping Doreen build a foundation of security (cows are good for this in the village) and a future of possibility (a small business in the market would be good, too). Odette & I are prepared to help her each step of the way. The timing of this feels just right to us as Doreen’s fiancée Sam is recovering from a serious motorcycle accident last weekend, making Doreen’s independence and economic viability more important than ever.

jackie-boy, madeleine and nate, lucy, josiah and carter running in the park after our photo shoot with pbs

“May we never break the strong spirits of our daughters. May we teach our sons to become loving and nurturing men. In so doing, we hold the key to universal peace.” (not attributed)

This quote comes to me from Brene Brown. Still musing about boys and girls and how we create a safe space for them to grow into the truest most beautiful versions of themselves. Being with my sisters and our kids today made me long for this all the more. How sweet would it be for all of us–parents and kids from here and faraway–to find a way to do this together?

Other things touching my heart today:
This short story from The New Yorker which comes my way via Karen Miller
This way of experiencing music
This documentary about Sigur Ros

Rwandan boy who followed me out to the road after I visited his school. He wanted me to take his picture.

I’m sitting at my kitchen table with my soulsister Fatou, trying to do something on my computer, so I don’t disturb her while she does work on hers. This is torture for me because I love Fatou and all I want to do is tell her stories. Here is the last thing I told her before swearing on ten copies of the Koran to not say another word until she finishes her work:

One of the thing that has been haunting me about my time in Rwanda is this thing about boys. Being a good little third wave American feminist with my well-worn copies of Naomi Wolf on my shelf, I went to Rwanda with no qualms about singling girls out for special privileges, boys’ hard feelings be damned. On arrival, I realized immediately this approach was not going to work, so books around for everyone, but still. What to do about the huge inequities that girls face without turning boys into oppressors before they’ve made their first step?

To shake up things even more in the well-defined category department, I was incredibly aware that supportive men were the reason why the books could even get delivered in the first place. No matter how much I wanted to talk to those girls, if Innocent and Michel had been unwilling to help me, I would have been screwed.

Ask any African woman you know to tell you the trouble with African boys and she will give you an earful. The cultural blueprint for men in Africa too often carries a laundry list of things that would make any Western woman have the police on the phone for a restraining order immediately. There are huge issues with women’s empowerment across the continent–no one will argue with you on that one. But hold that next to this: for every horrible story I have heard about violence perpetrated against women in Africa, there is a story of a man weeping at the feet of his wife, wishing for a way to marry without carrying a woman off to rape her first (carrying marriage). Does any living human being survive being violent without some part of the soul collapsing in on itself?

Things need to change, not only for girls’ sake, but for the sake of boys as well.

It’s like this, my soulsister Brene Brown told me on the phone the other day. You can keep pulling the girls and boys out of the water before they drown or you can go to the head of the river and discover the source of pain that lands them in the river in the first place. This rang so true for me. What if girls get the message that they are capable at the exact same time that boys hear they can express their empathy and compassion? Put those two pieces together and you change the world.

This made me think of the houseboy who stole away behind the house to read his copy of Learning to Help Ourselves and Others. He startled when I found him there, but he didn’t stop reading.

I know this is a very simplistic way of drawing the lines and considering the solutions, but I’m sitting with it all quietly this afternoon, while Fatou types. Trying to see those boys and girls together in one circle–strong and peaceful, powerful and kind.