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But even in such dire situations people can transform their faith into practice. Here is my now favorite testimony from our HROC program in Africa. A Tutsi participant in a HROC workshop in Burundi made the following comments:
“ During the crisis, Hutus took me from home and brought me down here to hang me on that big tree you see outside. I thank so much those Hutus for when we got here, they told me to run away. And then they started to shout loudly as if I am shouting for being killed. They told their friends that they killed me already and that the screaming they heard was from me. I am thankful to them so much. They saved my life. One of them is here.” They hugged each other. It was a great time.
Laura Shipler Chico worked for AGLI in Rwanda for twenty months and wrote a number of excellent reports. Below is an email I once wrote her, followed by her response.
From Dave to Laura:
Since I am in a theoretical mood, before I have to go back to doing the mundane details of AGLI work, in your Nyamata report you have the comment:Some see genocide as an extreme result of psychological projection: when one group projects all that is hated about itself onto another group, the target group comes to represent all that is bad and shameful and evil about ourselves. Then it becomes not only possible but necessary to exterminate.
I have found this to be extremely thought provoking. Can you add more to this idea so that I can understand (and think) about it more? I am wondering if this is not what the US is doing with “radical Islamic fundamentalists,” i.e., when we are talking about them we are really talking about ourselves.
From Laura to Dave:
To put it simply, someone once told me that every time I criticize someone, I should just add three little words to the end of my sentence: “just like me.” It is eerie how consistently it works! This is psychodynamic theory – beginning with Sigmund Freud, continuing with Anna Freud (his daughter) and others. The theory talks about the defense mechanisms the mind or psyche sets up to protect the ego – or sense of self. Among these defense mechanisms are things we have all heard of – denial, acting out, intellectualization, etc. One of the most basic ones is “projection” – projecting that which we don’t like about ourselves onto someone else or a group of people, in order to preserve our own positive self-image. Absolutely, when folks in the US talk about radical Islamic fundamentalists, we are really talking about ourselves – I absolutely agree that this is part of the complex swirl of why it has been possible to sucker the American public into this war between civilizations. When we listen to how Bush characterizes the “enemy” and we add the three little words, “just like us” to the end, frighteningly, it almost always works.
As I listen to people discuss the personnel policy issue with FUM which defines marriage as between one man and one woman, I hear a lot of this projection--defining FUM as “them” even though as an FUM member “we”, Baltimore Yearly Meeting, are part of “them”.
One aspect of the mindset of “us-them” is that the customs of “them” are not even considered. For example, when FUM’s personnel policy statement was developed I don’t think FUM realized that at Friends Theological College – where Ann Riggs from Baltimore Yearly Meeting soon is going to take up the position of Principal – there was a Muslim who wanted to be married to a second wife as allowed by his religion. He was told that if he did so, due to this policy, he would be fired from his position at Friends Theological College.
In Africa, all countries except South Africa are legally homophobic. In Uganda there is a newspaper that “outs” supposedly gay men and asks the Government to arrest them under the anti-sodomy laws. In Kenya, when the former Attorney General, Charles Njonjo, wrote a pro-gay editorial, another columnist responded that this was equivalent to Charles Njonjo supporting cannibalism.
The African Great Lakes Initiative once did an Alternatives to Violence Project workshop in Lumakanda where Gladys and I live and I asked some of the participants later what effect did this have on them. One young man responded that a friend came to him with a great burden; he had strong homosexual feelings. He said that before the workshop he would have considered his friend “sinful” and would have avoided him. Instead, the young man talked and discussed this with him, although I doubt that he realized that those “homosexual feelings” weren’t just going to go away. This is a small step forward. Are Baltimore Yearly Meeting Friends going to continue to participate in such ongoing developments in Kenya by staying a part of FUM?
Here is a letter to the editor, published in the Sunday Nation, a newspaper with a circulation of more than a million, from Sunday, December 28, 2008. It was written by a student identified only as “J. M. (Miss)” in response to an article on “vice” in boarding secondary school. I have no idea how this ever even got into the newspaper.
