2nd April, 2007
DAVID ADAMS

It’s a nation devastated by genocide. More than 800,000 died in an ethnically motivated 100 day killing spree in Rwanda in 1994 which shocked the world. Yet for Dr John Steward, the central African nation is also becoming increasingly characterised by hope.

LIVES TRANSFORMED: Since 1997, Dr John Steward, here with two Rwandans, has been to Rwanda 15 times to work with people and organisations engaged in facilitating reconciliation and healing among those traumatised by the killings of 1994.   “The media is not telling the good stories about Rwanda and people don’t realise that these fantastic changes are taking place in people,” says Dr John Steward. “Having shared what I’ve learnt, Biblically and theologically, to Christian audiences, now we want Rwandans to tell their stories to the whole world.”

Dr Steward, who first went to Rwanda in the mid-Nineties to work in the area of reconciliation and healing, says he has encountered numerous stories which illustrate just that.

“As people came to tell us stories, we began to realise that if we listened to the stories we can hear the hope,” says Dr Steward, who has just returned from a three week trip to Rwanda - his 15th visit - where he consults with organisations like World Vision on how to run a series of reconciliation and healing workshops.

He recalls sitting in one workshop with a woman named Josephine, a former teacher who had lost numerous members of her extended family in the genocide. The group was asked to write a letter to say goodbye to someone they had lost and Josephine did just that - writing to her brother, her uncle, her nephew, her niece, her aunty, her neighbour and her friends, until after she had reached 50 people, she stopped.

“She was sitting next to me and I watched her write those lines and put her head on the table,” recalls Dr Steward. “She said in the feedback that ‘I stopped writing, not because I ran out of names, but because I was tired’. And to my amazement, 10 minutes after she said that, she turned to someone and said ‘You know, I think that if I met the killer of my brother tday, I think I’d think I’d be ready to forgive him. And we hadn’t even talked about forgiveness.”

Josephine, Dr Steward later learned, had done just that. Despite avowing that she could never go back to the place where her brother died, Josphine ended up doing just that and went even further, tracking down and speaking with the man who had killed her brother, telling him she forgave him and asking him what he was now doing to help the survivors of the genocide. He and his wife have since become friends and Josephine is now at peace.

Josephine’s story is one of a number found on a DVD resource called Choices: On the way to peace which Dr Steward has created to illustrate the sort of work they’ve have been involved with in Rwanda over the past 10 years.

Designed to be used for small group studies, it features three 30 minutes sessions which look at issues such as the common responses to pain or trauma, forgiveness, healing and “peace-building”.

Dr Steward, who lives with his wife Sandi in Melbourne’s south east, says that in the short term, monies raised from the sale of the DVD will be used to fund a trip to Rwanda in November where he’s taking its producer to make a second DVD - this time filled with positive case studies aimed at showing a secular audience the truth of what’s been happening in Rwanda.

“The media is not telling the good stories about Rwanda and people don’t realise that these fantastic changes are taking place in people,” he says. “Having shared what I’ve learnt, Biblically and theologically, to Christian audiences, now we want Rwandans to tell their stories to the whole world.”

In the longer term, he hopes the money raised from DVD sales will be used to help fund the ongoing healing and reconciliation workshops in Rwanda.

“It’s very hard now to get money for healing,” Dr Steward says. “People say ‘Well, I hear Rwanda’s stable and I hear the Government is doing well and I hear the church is growing - why do you still need to keep doing this 10 years later?’ And the answer is that trauma doesn’t go away overnight. We’ve probably only impacted about 15,000 people and we know another 100,000 people who would benefit from it. So we want to raise funds for that.”

Dr Steward first went to Rwanda back in 1997, almost three years after the massacres of 1994. Having completed a doctorate in soil science, he had previously worked as a missionary and theological teacher in Indonesia before spending more than 13 years working with World Vision in Australia.

In 1996, his department was closed and he and Sandi began to sense that this was an opportunity to head back overseas.

“God was beginning to speak to us and I sent an email to about 20 friends saying ‘Look, I’m going to be out of a job, please pray for us’. And a Mennonite friend in America wrote back and said ‘Two days ago I was on the tarmac about to board a plane to leave Rwanda and the director (of World Vision in Rwanda) said to me ‘We’re looking for a person who has these characteristics and background and experience to come and head up our peace-building work here in Rwanda’ and this brother in America said ‘And I think you’re the right person for the job”.

The Stewards subsequently moved to Rwanda where John was put in charge of managing World Vision’s reconciliation and peace-building efforts in the country. Spending the next 16 months in the country, Dr Steward’s role was to help faciliate the process of healing in a nation which had been torn apart by ethnic strife in 1994 which had left as many as a million people dead.

“World Vision very wisely said ‘It’s not good us doing our other work if relationships are not going to be healed and if the good that we might do is destroyed by continuing conflict,’” he says.

Previous efforts to facilitate reconcilation and healing had not gone well and Dr Steward says that as he was preparing to take up the role - including visiting reconciliation work in Kenya and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, he “didn’t have a clue” how to go about it. He recalls sitting on his bed in Nairobi the night before he flew into Rwanda and saying “Lord, I don’t know what to do - would you give me some ideas?”

“My wife and I flew in the next day and the director very wisely said to me ‘This is a difficult assignment in a complicated location, please don’t be in a hurry to do anything. Take two or three months to look.”

He says tensions in the country were high at the time with millions of refugees and exiles returning to the country. It was only around three years after the massacres of 1994 and feelings were still raw.

“People had just got on with the business of living life and the disfunctionality was sky-high,” says Dr Steward. “We realised how bad it was when one weekend we went over the border into Uganda and said ‘Look at all the smiling faces’ and we suddenly realised what Rwandans were going through.”

Dr Steward says he came to love Rwandan’s very quickly and felt “very much at home” in the country. He says that he and Sandi soon found themselves approached by a handful of people every day who were keen to share their stories.

“That brought us up to speed very quickly with how people were struggling,” he says. “And then the question became - ‘What is God using to heal people?. And what I found was there was a reconciliation industry going on where many aid agencies were funding a series of seminars that were giving people head knowledge but weren’t dealing with the heart.”

Dr Steward says that while churches at the time were preaching “forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness”, it was just increasing the “wall of resistance in people”. The Government, meanwhile, was talking about justice - which meant accusing and catching the criminals - and culminated in the public execution of the ringleaders in stadiums with people forced to watch.

“I could see none of that was helping,” he says.

They began to look around for something that could help facilitate reconcilition and came across three workshops through which people can start on the path of healing. These have since been incorporated into a program now used in Rwanda to help facilitate the healing and reconciliation process.

They include a three-day “Healing of Memories” workshop developed for people going through the Truth and Reconcilation process in South Africa by Father Michael Lapsley - a New Zealander who trained as an Anglican priest in Australia and then went to South Africa when he linked up with the ANC and was subsequently exiled before receiving a letter bomb which blew off both his hands and took an eye and part of his hearing.

The workshops also include a three day Biblically-based workshop called “Healing Around the Cross” which had been developed by a Welsh woman and an 11-day personal development workshop developed by a psychologist which Dr Steward describes as “very, very deep”.

“Almost every person who does it says ‘I wish every person in Rwanda could go through this workshop’...” notes Dr Steward of the latter.

“But it is interesting. Some did the personal development workshp and weren’t affected and then did the Michael Lapsley and were transformed. It’s one of those things you can’t predict and we can only work with people who are willing to go to the workshops.”

Since leaving Rwanda in mid 1998, Dr Steward has been returning regularly to work alongside World Vision staff and others who are working on reconciliation and healing projects to help them to assess how the process of reconciliation is working.

The latter include people working with the Anglican Church and Prison Fellowship.

“So I go and I contribute by facilitating times of reflection and times of retreat and by discussing what is working and what is not and what is God doing,” he says. “But at the same time, it’s a chance to pick up new stories and to hear of progress and change in people’s lives.”

Dr Steward says that while his work in Rwanda has been tough, it has also been a “real privilege”.

While people are responding to reconciliation and healing work, much work remains to be done. Dr Steward estimates that 65 per cent of people in Rwanda are in denial about the events of 1994, 15 per cent are focused on revenge and another 15 per cent are focused on forgiveness. Only five per cent are at the stage of reconciliation.

“We have to be realistic and recognise that that figure applies to Rwanda today...” he says. “It does mean, I think, we have to focus a lot more on the younger generation who are less likely, I think, to carry the load than older people are.”

• To order the DVD 'Choices: On the way to peace' or to find out more about Dr Steward’s involvement with Rwanda, visit www.rwandanstories.org.