Amahoro International A Model of Peace Building Mission in an Anabaptist Perspective (Copy)

Amahoro International

A Model of Peace Building Mission in an Anabaptist Perspective By George Makinto September 12, 2022

            “Faith without action is dead”! The book of James is uncompromising in its bluntness. There cannot be a claim of religious belief in a purely spiritual expression without a physical deed attached to it, may it be in a swift response to an immediate need, or in a life-long calling led by a spiritual desire to please God.

            Before becoming Christians, both Mukarabe and I were actively involved in secular struggles for social justice and peace initiatives. Mukarabe herself had to flee her native Burundi during the 1993 genocide in her country. After finding a job as Liaison Officer for the United Nations World Food Program following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she was personally confronted with the choice for forgiveness, reconciliation and peace building within the historical construct of the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis both in Burundi and in Rwanda. I, Makinto, was actively involved in struggles against social injustice, first as a student during the 1970’s and 80’s in the fight against Apartheid in South Africa, and later as an international musician, accompanying world-famous South African singer Miriam Makeba around the world.  I learned invaluable lessons from her artistic advocacy for racial and social justice whenever she raised her powerful voice.

            Once we became disciples of Christ in 2000, we quickly grasped an essential element in our Christian walk: our allegiance to Jesus, our gratitude for His sacrificial love, demonstrated by His death on the cross, led us to emulate Him in ever increasing measure. The bible was clear: “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 12:14) So, we started reflecting on the works Jesus did while walking this earth. Searching the Gospels, we found that Jesus was invested in multiple activities: teaching His disciples, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, dining with sinners, performing miracles and revealing to His people through deeds, that He was God incarnate sent to change people’s perspective and to turn their hearts back to Him. We learned that compassion is a physical expression rather than just a well-meaning prayer. Works are not a means to get saved but an expression of active devotion by the disciple for the savior, benefitting the people He loves.

            In the early 2000s, we began our Christian journey at a charismatic Pentecostal church in New York. We learned about the power of the Holy Ghost and his transformational work within us.  We witnessed healings, casting out of demons, and eagerly learned to speak in tongues. Charismatic worship was spectacular, but our hearts were longing for more tangible outcomes.

            Several years later, we were enrolled in the Center for Anabaptist leadership in Los Angeles California, under the inspiring leadership of Jeff Wright.   We learned about Anabaptist history and Jesus centered theology that had laid the spiritual foundation for Mennonites, Brethren, Amish, and other Anabaptist denominations. The refusal to bear arms or to use violence to resolve conflicts resonated with my own experience in Germany in 1983. I refused the draft to the German military and became a conscientious objector. Subsequently I enrolled in a civil service working on an emergency station in a hospital in Heidelberg. Equally, the quintessence of Mukarabe’s mother’s educational message to her children matched Jesus’ teaching found in the Sermon on the mount: ‘Love your enemies, bless those who curse you and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your father in heaven” (Matt.5:44-45).

            We took Jesus’ teaching to heart and were energized by the power of the Holy Spirit in us. Out of our own history of suffering injustice flowed our calling: Caring for the orphans, the widows, the fatherless and the downtrodden, raising our voice for those who couldn’t speak for themselves, and other motivational activities.

            In 2000, our non-profit organization Amahoro International was born. “Amahoro” is a word in Mukarabe’s native language Kirundi that translates into the English word “peace” but is better rendered by the Hebrew word “Shalom”. Similarly, “Amahoro” conveys individual and communal greetings and blessings, physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing, and rich relationships. Between 2000 and 2015, through Amahoro International we catered to the physical and spiritual needs of hundreds of HIV/Aids orphans in Burundi and Burkina Faso, fostered relationships between Africa and the industrialized world and built bridges between various communities in view of long-lasting reconciliation.

            In 2015, after violent repression on peaceful demonstrators in the streets of Bujumbura by an increasingly brutal Burundian government, more than 400,000 young people fled Burundi and became refugees in neighboring countries. Amongst them were many of the orphans we had supported in previous years. We literally followed the Holy Spirit leading us to Uganda and built up a refugee community called “Amahoro Life Center” (ALC) in Bombo, a small Ugandan town 20 miles north of the capital Kampala. To this day, young Burundians who experienced persecution and significant hardship in refugee camps can find shelter in a loving community and experience a fresh start. They benefit from an academic education, learn vocational skills, receive a Christian foundation in getting to know Jesus and learn to actively pursue peace and reconciliation. Reconciliation happens not just between the refugees and the local community they are embedded in, but mostly amongst the refugees themselves, as former ethnic identities become irrelevant within this new social context.

            It is in this physical context that we are learning that peacebuilding, justice, and reconciliation can never be just spiritual values. They must be worked and walked out moment by moment in real life and real time. We cannot talk about peace, we cannot pray about peace, we cannot preach about peace only. Lasting Amahoro must manifest itself within the community and in the hearts of every member. It must be transformative; it must be lived in everyday situations. It must be real.

            Over the course of the last seven years at Amahoro Life Center, we dealt with an onslaught of conflicts: frustrations of mentally and emotionally wounded refugees, conflicts within the local leadership, jealousies, work related disagreements and misunderstandings about the very core of our mission, to name but a few. Still, taking the example of Jesus and directed by the Holy Spirit, we valued relationships over rules, kept listening and talking even when the chances of reconciliation were slim. We valued grace over being right. We discovered that the Anabaptist principle of restorative justice and active peacebuilding rendered better results within an active context of reconciliation efforts than punitive measures and the application of unbendable rules. Yes, regulations and structures are necessary to provide boundaries within the context of an organization, but relationships ought to be valued on a higher level than laws.

            Now, after 7 years of active ministry amongst a steady stream of refugees passing through our mission, we see the fruit of the Holy Spirit through our work: we see Transformation! Lives of many refugees have been changed. They have been transformed from a state of hopelessness to a place of hope, joy, peace and economic empowerment. Individually and collectively, they are experiencing the fulfillment of their calling. As one refugee expressed it in vivid terms: “In the refugee camp, my dreams were dead, my vision blurred, and my daily focus was on mere survival. Then Amahoro International allowed me to come to ALC and find rest and peace within my soul. Now I started dreaming again and can fathom a future of peace and prosperity which will allow me to give back the blessings I have received to my fellow refugees, enabling them to also dream again.”

            We resonate with the Anabaptist concept of “Peacebuilders” as it relates to conflict resolution: “Peacebuilders seek to correct injustice and eliminate causes of violence….by addressing inequalities, showing compassion, and implementing programs of restorative justice that transforms enemies into friends” (p. 143, Anabaptist essentials by Palmer Becker). Thus, Amahoro International is a restorative, peace building mission operating in Africa in the tradition of Anabaptist values, expressing the nature and character of Jesus Christ.

            It was an important milestone within our Christian journey to encounter and to embrace the Anabaptist theology of reconciliation and peacebuilding centered around the person of Jesus Christ.  In sorts this was the missing piece, confirming our desire to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and carry out His missional and formational work by the empowering of the Holy Spirit.

James 3:18: And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

George Makinto

Los Angeles, September 12th, 2022

Amahoro International A Model of Peace Building Mission in an Anabaptist Perspective

Amahoro International

A Model of Peace Building Mission in an Anabaptist Perspective

By George Makinto September 12, 2022

            “Faith without action is dead”! The book of James is uncompromising in its bluntness. There cannot be a claim of religious belief in a purely spiritual expression without a physical deed attached to it, may it be in a swift response to an immediate need, or in a life-long calling led by a spiritual desire to please God.

            Before becoming Christians, both Mukarabe and I were actively involved in secular struggles for social justice and peace initiatives. Mukarabe herself had to flee her native Burundi during the 1993 genocide in her country. After finding a job as Liaison Officer for the United Nations World Food Program following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she was personally confronted with the choice for forgiveness, reconciliation and peace building within the historical construct of the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis both in Burundi and in Rwanda. I, Makinto, was actively involved in struggles against social injustice, first as a student during the 1970’s and 80’s in the fight against Apartheid in South Africa, and later as an international musician, accompanying world-famous South African singer Miriam Makeba around the world.  I learned invaluable lessons from her artistic advocacy for racial and social justice whenever she raised her powerful voice.

            Once we became disciples of Christ in 2000, we quickly grasped an essential element in our Christian walk: our allegiance to Jesus, our gratitude for His sacrificial love, demonstrated by His death on the cross, led us to emulate Him in ever increasing measure. The bible was clear: “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 12:14) So, we started reflecting on the works Jesus did while walking this earth. Searching the Gospels, we found that Jesus was invested in multiple activities: teaching His disciples, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, dining with sinners, performing miracles and revealing to His people through deeds, that He was God incarnate sent to change people’s perspective and to turn their hearts back to Him. We learned that compassion is a physical expression rather than just a well-meaning prayer. Works are not a means to get saved but an expression of active devotion by the disciple for the savior, benefitting the people He loves.

            In the early 2000s, we began our Christian journey at a charismatic Pentecostal church in New York. We learned about the power of the Holy Ghost and his transformational work within us.  We witnessed healings, casting out of demons, and eagerly learned to speak in tongues. Charismatic worship was spectacular, but our hearts were longing for more tangible outcomes.

            Several years later, we were enrolled in the Center for Anabaptist leadership in Los Angeles California, under the inspiring leadership of Jeff Wright.   We learned about Anabaptist history and Jesus centered theology that had laid the spiritual foundation for Mennonites, Brethren, Amish, and other Anabaptist denominations. The refusal to bear arms or to use violence to resolve conflicts resonated with my own experience in Germany in 1983. I refused the draft to the German military and became a conscientious objector. Subsequently I enrolled in a civil service working on an emergency station in a hospital in Heidelberg. Equally, the quintessence of Mukarabe’s mother’s educational message to her children matched Jesus’ teaching found in the Sermon on the mount: ‘Love your enemies, bless those who curse you and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your father in heaven” (Matt.5:44-45).

            We took Jesus’ teaching to heart and were energized by the power of the Holy Spirit in us. Out of our own history of suffering injustice flowed our calling: Caring for the orphans, the widows, the fatherless and the downtrodden, raising our voice for those who couldn’t speak for themselves, and other motivational activities.

            In 2000, our non-profit organization Amahoro International was born. “Amahoro” is a word in Mukarabe’s native language Kirundi that translates into the English word “peace” but is better rendered by the Hebrew word “Shalom”. Similarly, “Amahoro” conveys individual and communal greetings and blessings, physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing, and rich relationships. Between 2000 and 2015, through Amahoro International we catered to the physical and spiritual needs of hundreds of HIV/Aids orphans in Burundi and Burkina Faso, fostered relationships between Africa and the industrialized world and built bridges between various communities in view of long-lasting reconciliation.

            In 2015, after violent repression on peaceful demonstrators in the streets of Bujumbura by an increasingly brutal Burundian government, more than 400,000 young people fled Burundi and became refugees in neighboring countries. Amongst them were many of the orphans we had supported in previous years. We literally followed the Holy Spirit leading us to Uganda and built up a refugee community called “Amahoro Life Center” (ALC) in Bombo, a small Ugandan town 20 miles north of the capital Kampala. To this day, young Burundians who experienced persecution and significant hardship in refugee camps can find shelter in a loving community and experience a fresh start. They benefit from an academic education, learn vocational skills, receive a Christian foundation in getting to know Jesus and learn to actively pursue peace and reconciliation. Reconciliation happens not just between the refugees and the local community they are embedded in, but mostly amongst the refugees themselves, as former ethnic identities become irrelevant within this new social context.

            It is in this physical context that we are learning that peacebuilding, justice, and reconciliation can never be just spiritual values. They must be worked and walked out moment by moment in real life and real time. We cannot talk about peace, we cannot pray about peace, we cannot preach about peace only. Lasting Amahoro must manifest itself within the community and in the hearts of every member. It must be transformative; it must be lived in everyday situations. It must be real.

            Over the course of the last seven years at Amahoro Life Center, we dealt with an onslaught of conflicts: frustrations of mentally and emotionally wounded refugees, conflicts within the local leadership, jealousies, work related disagreements and misunderstandings about the very core of our mission, to name but a few. Still, taking the example of Jesus and directed by the Holy Spirit, we valued relationships over rules, kept listening and talking even when the chances of reconciliation were slim. We valued grace over being right. We discovered that the Anabaptist principle of restorative justice and active peacebuilding rendered better results within an active context of reconciliation efforts than punitive measures and the application of unbendable rules. Yes, regulations and structures are necessary to provide boundaries within the context of an organization, but relationships ought to be valued on a higher level than laws.

            Now, after 7 years of active ministry amongst a steady stream of refugees passing through our mission, we see the fruit of the Holy Spirit through our work: we see Transformation! Lives of many refugees have been changed. They have been transformed from a state of hopelessness to a place of hope, joy, peace and economic empowerment. Individually and collectively, they are experiencing the fulfillment of their calling. As one refugee expressed it in vivid terms: “In the refugee camp, my dreams were dead, my vision blurred, and my daily focus was on mere survival. Then Amahoro International allowed me to come to ALC and find rest and peace within my soul. Now I started dreaming again and can fathom a future of peace and prosperity which will allow me to give back the blessings I have received to my fellow refugees, enabling them to also dream again.”

            We resonate with the Anabaptist concept of “Peacebuilders” as it relates to conflict resolution: “Peacebuilders seek to correct injustice and eliminate causes of violence….by addressing inequalities, showing compassion, and implementing programs of restorative justice that transforms enemies into friends” (p. 143, Anabaptist essentials by Palmer Becker). Thus, Amahoro International is a restorative, peace building mission operating in Africa in the tradition of Anabaptist values, expressing the nature and character of Jesus Christ.

            It was an important milestone within our Christian journey to encounter and to embrace the Anabaptist theology of reconciliation and peacebuilding centered around the person of Jesus Christ.  In sorts this was the missing piece, confirming our desire to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and carry out His missional and formational work by the empowering of the Holy Spirit.

James 3:18: And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

George Makinto

Los Angeles, September 12th, 2022

Burundian refugees, endless victims of a forgotten crisis -By Armel Gilbert Bukeyeneza Le Monde

In the middle of the savannah, a jungle of houses. Hard huts and makeshift shelters draw as far as the eye can see one of the largest and oldest refugee camps in Uganda : Nakivale. A name that resonates with all the conflicts in this area.

With more than 100,000 exiles from Burundi , the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia and the two Sudans, the district of Isingiro in the south-west of the country , knows what a refugee is. Yet, under this term lie great disparities, many degrees in misery. And here as elsewhere, the worst off are the Burundians. Recently, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recalled that "the Burundian crisis is the most underfunded in the world".

(Read also Uganda suspected of inflating the number of refugees)
"It's a crisis we do not hear about and pay little attention to," UNHCR photographer Helena Christensen, a model and UNHCR sympathizer, told IRIN from Mahama camp in Rwanda. -November. Yet, there are 366,000 Burundians scattered in the countries of the subregion (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and the DRC) since 1993 and the beginning of the conflict. Today, many of them are struggling with a daily food ration, the endless victims of a protracted crisis.

Masters and enslaved
In Nakivale, Burundians measure their forgetting every day, even if the first impression is misleading: it's like being in a village, with its stalls, bars, restaurants, parking that connects the camp with the nearest town, Mbarara.

One evening in November, in the valley stuck under the Kabazana neighborhood, largely populated by Burundians and Rwandans, songs are rising from a Catholic church, but they are not hymns. And for good reason, the church has been transformed into a school by Hope International School, which wants to learn to read and count to 130 small Burundians who could not afford a real school and arrive on an empty stomach in the morning.

"Education is very expensive here," says the teacher at Hope International School, standing in the rubble of the classrooms carried away by the latest weather: "As Burundians are the poorest of all refugees, we organized with the support of the Catholic Church to improvise classes and allow children to attend classes. We ask them for a very small sum, 13,000 Ugandan shillings per quarter [about 3 euros] , to meet the minimum requirements. But even that is complicated. There is no teaching material. We work in total precariousness. "

Besides Hope International School, there is the Islamic crèche and the primary schools of Congolese or Ethiopians. All are in the hands of private individuals who make teaching a business like any other. In Nakivale, business is king. There are the rich and the poor, the masters and the enslaved, like "these Banyamulenge [a Rwandophone group from eastern DRC] who have to do the dishes for the Somalis against a few coins," says a guide of the place.

In the case, Burundians inherited the wrong role. "The Ugandan government gave land to those who arrived a long time ago, at the beginning of the crisis. Rwandans, Somalis, Congolese and Eritreans had time to make their fortune in agriculture before Uganda changed its rules. Nowadays, we give only a small plot, just to build a small house. Burundians arrived at the wrong time, " said one of the Makerere University group established there to offer legal assistance.

Fear of infiltrators
In this difficult context, Zainabu, a widow, quickly made her choice: her two daughters and her son will not go to school. "To send a child would cost me at least 100,000 shillings. I can not find such a sum anywhere, " says the woman who lost some of her physical abilities during an attack in Bujumbura in 2015: bullets crushed her left leg, right hand and a breast. Determined to mount a small pancake business that she prepares herself to feed her three children, Zainabu also does not want to hear about the schools of the UNHCR, free. "There you do not even know that your child will come to class or go to school because there are so many people that teachers can not do personal monitoring," She laments.

A criticism elsewhere shared by Catherine Wiesner, regional coordinator of the UN agency, which recognizes that "schools in refugee camps in Uganda are overcrowded" : "This is true for refugees from Nakivale, but the situation is similar for all refugee groups in the country. In Kyangwali, we sometimes have 19 teachers for 4,000 students. UNHCR is working with the Ugandan government to build more schools and recruit more qualified teachers. " But the money is missing. UNHCR has so far received only 42 per cent of the $ 415 million needed (nearly € 370 million) for the one million refugees hosted by Uganda.

Forgotten, mowed, traumatized, Zainabu, who says she was injured by the government security services during the 2015 protests against the third term of President Pierre Nkurunziza, does not despair of returning to Burundi. Meanwhile, the security of the Nakivale camp worries her a little, there would be infiltrators. Zainabu is not calm, Eric either. He says: "I tried to go to Burundi to look for a travel document. And I was arrested there by someone in police uniform who had built a house in the camp and said he was a refugee. We do not know who is who here anymore. "

Beyond the poor conditions of life and the lack of attention, the infiltration is, according to several testimonies on the spot, one of the biggest threats which weigh on the heads of Burundians of Nakivale. This is all the more serious as their exile may last longer, because the dialogue supposed to end the crisis has just ended in a fishtail. The opposition came to the talks in Arusha, Tanzania. But she was alone.