Burundi Diary # 1: What we do here

Bujumbura, Burundi
March 24, 2008


In the following week I will write you a little diary here on my blog from a country that you probably don’t know much about and which is struggling to achieve peace, democracy, development and reconciliation but receives very little attention worldwide –not even for the positive results it has already succeeded with.

You may want to see much more about Burundi here and exactly a year ago I wrote an article in the Christian Science Monitor.

On March 16 I went on mission in Burundi for two weeks. So I am here in this beautiful heart-shaped country that used to be called an Oasis of Peace. I am here to do mainly three things as part of TFF’s work here since 1999, namely to

a) give a two-day seminar on an International Communications Strategy for Burundi with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
b) b) run a two-day seminar with the Amahoro (Peace) Youth Club, and
c) c) shoot a series of 10-min videos about Burundi, its people, some intellectuals, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, travel around in the country and help you see the wonderful potentials and the beauty here.


Working with the government

With me on the plane from Sweden was Gunilla Ivarsson, a Swedish journalist with 35 years of experience as professional radio broadcaster. Gunilla and I, last week, did the two-days seminar with staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Presidency, Vice-Presidency, Ministry of Information and the Parliament.

The purpose is to discuss how to increase the international media and other attention to Burundi and its remarkable peace process in order to attract more foreign assistance, humanitarian aid, development aid and what could be called peace aid. To do so, the country needs to tell its positive story, to be “branded” by a positive “logo”, image and dissemination to relevant media, embassies, government and the donor community. In the process it will have to seek to break through the general media negativism: that only “bad” news make news. Which may well be the larger task!

The seminar ended in a draft International Communication Strategy for Burundi, produced by the participants themselves. If anything can secure a speedy follow-up, it is the feeling that they own this themselves. The day after we handed over this common result of the seminar to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, HR Antoinette Batumubwira who promised to read it quickly and share it with relevant national authorities including the Presidency.

We hope it can move quickly through to the decision-making stage, not the least because this minister is herself a journalist, trained in sociology and mass communication in France. Likewise, the – also female – minister of Information in this country is a journalist who has worked for several years at BBC in London. Mme the Minister will write a letter to TFF’s potential funders to ask for support so that TFF trainers can rather soon begin follow-up activities and more training here.

We are very hopeful that this seminar will be an important step to promote Burundi’s peace process.


Working with NGOs and student

Today and tomorrow TFF Board member and Burundi coordinator Ina Curic and I conduct a seminar with the 13 founding members of the new Amahoro Youth Club, AYC. It is a continuation of the 2005-2007 Amahoro (Peace) Coalition of NGOs that was discontinued last year for economic reasons and because of lack of commitment among too many organizational leaders. (In this country, horizontal coordination and synergy is very difficult to realize because each NGO is quite “individualistic,” protective and seek funds abroad individually. That a Coalition can do things no one can do alone and that there is synergy from horizontal co-operation is an argument that has not yet matured everywhere.

Be this as it may, peace work is trial-and-error and we are now into a new project with people who are young, well-educated, committed to promote a better future and who are not narrowly focusing on any particular organisation; they are members of the AYC in their personal capacity.

The AYC has been trained and assisted by Ina in several fields including the writing of statutes. We now help them in formulating a Mission statement, brain storm about future projects and select project ideas which are SMART: Strategic, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound (See Lisa Mighton, Access to a Voice. Communications Planning for Civil Society and Community-Based Organisations, 2006). We discuss the infrastructure with them: Do they need a common meeting room, how to finance the first months, generate their own income through activities so there will be no begging and little dependence. Strategic issues simply means to define Who can do What, When, How, Why and to what Cost? We deal also with issues of work ethics – coming on time, reading materials, honouring agreements and following-up on decisions – and the ethics of doing-it-yourself.

While you must listen carefully to the cultural subtext, you must also state squarely what you find acceptable in an inter-national and inter-cultural project. There is a political tradition of passivity here, a sense that somebody else can do things or provide resources. There is a huge problem with time; time and agreements about time and agendas mean something completely different here and in Europe. This creates repeated friction. Those of us coming down spend about 50+ hours on the return trip and teach and train to our best abilities – and people from around the corner cannot get their acts together and turn up at the seminar in time (or can drop out without saying a word to answer mobile phone calls or go to other meetings).

Someone said today that people here will say about a Burundian who turns up on the agreed moment for an appointment or is well-prepared for the agenda is like a “muzungu”, i.e. like a white man. My answer was that, if so, it is more productive and furthers co-operation more to be a muzungu than a Burundian in today’s globalising and interacting world. Every culture has its positive and negative aspects – ours too – and I believe we can only deal constructively with them if we discuss them in the open. How do you say that this is unacceptable and that you consider it highly impolite?

Much of what we tell each other in conflict-resolution classes simply will not work here, one reason being that any Burundian will say that “we usually do not say what we really thing, particularly when we disagree, we tend to say more what we think the others want or expect us to say!”

Hopefully this type of friction and “cultural clashes” – bigger and smaller - can be employed as fruitful-for-all learning experiences…

The third objective is to shoot a series of 10-minute videos for the TFF Video Channel on YouTube.com (LINK…….). There is such a beautiful, fertile landscape with millions of smaller hills (collines), red soil and tea, coffee and banan plantations.

The videos will also depict street scenes, citizens, a governor, a couple of NGO leaders, a minister, the positive developments and certainly not hide all the remaining problems you find here. It is still a volatile system – could fall back into violence. Remember, Burundi is only putting its genocide of 300.000 people behind it and it struggles hard with very small means (average income per capita is 145 US$ a year) and very little assistance from abroad – per year about the same as one (1) hour of US presence in Iraq costs…

I’ll soon tell you more. Until then…..

Amahoro!

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