Telecentre

Telecentre: A “public place of access to the Internet and other digital technologies that help promote personal and social development” (www.telecentre.org).

Throughout Africa, Asia, and South America, telecentres serve as places for teaching, business development, business services, and internet hubs. Some specifically promote services for women. Some provide services for small-holding farmers. Others serve as clearinghouses for health care information. In every case, a telecentre is about leveraging ICT (information, communication, and technology) for the benefit of the community.

Thanks to a generous grant from Elmbrook Church (Brookfield, WI), Congo Initiative is in the process of researching local needs and telecentre models in preparation for developing a business plan. The goal is to establish an income-generating telecentre that also serves as a business incubator for UCBC graduates. The telecentre “will leverage graduates’ expertise and appropriate information, communication, and technology (ICT) services of UCBC and the Center for Professional Development and Vocational Training to benefit the community.” It will also “facilitate expansion of UCBC’s Economics Department to include entrepeneurship and business development education” (Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development Telecentre: Proposal, November, 2011).

At their core, telecentres serve the community and support community development initiatives. In addition to serving the community, we are looking to develop a telecentre that will provide employment for UCBC graduates or serve as a business incubator specifically for them. The telecentre will also be a vehicle to support some of CI-UCBC's own ICT needs here on campus. This could include supporting robust internet services or provide printing services (a desperate need, as 3 desktop printers are the tired workhorses for a faculty/staff of over 40 and a student body of 450+).

L-R: Wilfred, Victor, Guy

So, for the past 4 months, the team of Wilfred Mushagalusa (UCBC Applied Sciences teacher), Guy Komanda (UCBC Economics teacher), Victor Bangewa (UCBC IT Manager), and me have been reading, researching, and learning together. We’ve relied on information and contacts we’ve made through the Telecentre Foundation. These individuals have been very helpful. For example, Amparo Preethika M. De Asis, Capacity Building Manager of the Telecentre.org Foundation, put us in touch with telecentre experts in Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, and Rwanda. Ampy is in the Philippines. Rita Mijumbi Epodoi, from Uganda, has offered training assistance and advised on telecentres to visit in Uganda. Dean Mulozi, Regional Facilitator of the Southern Africa Telecentre Network (SATNET), has forwarded telecentre management training modules. Dean is in Zambia.  The Community Telecentre Cookbook for Africa: Recipes for Self-Sustainability (UNESCO, 2001) has provided a helpful framework for our work.

It’s great fun to work with Wilfred, Guy, and Victor. Even though each of these men has been on staff at UCBC for a year or less, each one has a deep commitment to CI and UCBC.

If passion had only one face, it would be Victor. Victor began at UCBC as a student 3 years ago. Eager to develop his IT skills, he made the difficult decision to move to Uganda for additional training. He returned to UCBC last year to assume responsibility for the computer network and labs, and gave up the potential to establish a successful business in Goma, the provincial capital 300 kms (and a long day's drive) to the south of Beni. Wilfred turned down a lucrative job offer in Kinshasa to teach at UCBC. As he tells it, it took 3 months of prayer to discern what God would have him do. Guy served as a temporary teacher at UCBC for more than a year before we were able to offer him a permanent position.

L-R: Victor, me, Guy, Wilfred

We are learning together, learning how to work together across our cultural experiences and styles and navigating the challenges of language. I’m the deficient one, of course, with an insufficient French vocabulary. Thankfully, Wilfred and Victor are fluent English speakers and Guy has solid competency in English. Wilfred and Victor have IT knowledge, of course, and some exposure to telecentres. Guy brings business planning and development knowledge. I have been reading about telecentres for a couple of years, but have never visited one. And, of course, Guy, Victor, and Wilfred understand the community context here in Beni.

There are two major activities on the immediate horizon. One is to visit well-established and successful telecentres in Rwanda and Uganda. The opportunity to see telecentres in action and talk to the managers will assist in our planning. The second activity is to have a series of public meetings here in Beni to determine the nature of the telecentre. The meetings are a combination data gathering, marketing, and relationship-building.

Thunderstorm

It's Sunday afternoon. A thunderstorm has just washed through Beni. The sounds of the neighborhood have sprung back to life. Motos roar along the roads. Roosters rename the day. Songbirds renew their chirping. From the surrounding compounds I hear the voices of women and children punctuated by the clanging of aluminum pans as they tend to cooking and washing.

I love the thunderstorms here. Swaths of black clouds gather from across the sky, and convene in ever-expanding battalions of black and grey. The clouds are giants of grace and power. The remind me of Tolkien’s Ents.

Then suddenly, the clouds break wide open and spill torrents of water that race across rooftops and roads.

Teaching an English class

“Creation Care and the Common Good” began last week. It’s an English class for UCBC students who have completed the English curriculum. The purpose of the class is to help students “strengthen reading, writing, discourse, and critical thinking” within their disciplines. The course “looks at creation care and the common good from a Judeo-Christian perspective, and in the context of personal experience.” The class is intended to help students improve their English. It is also intended to provoke students’ thinking about the created world and the common good. If students wrestle with their assumptions, ideas, and beliefs about the created world and about the common good and leave the class with some new perspectives, questions, and ideas, then it will have succeeded.

The course objectives and outcomes are ambitious, for a class that meets 4 hours/week for 8 weeks. But there is considerable more focus in the course today then when I first began developing it back in April. And the course will look different next time, if there is a next time.

It’s good to be back in an English class. It’s been a long time. The teaching and facilitating I’ve been doing over the past several years has been in curriculum development, instruction, and assessment—professional development content for teachers here at UCBC. It was time to get back into the classroom, have my own experience as a teacher here at UCBC, and put my own advice and coaching into action.

There are 18 students in the class—good number. They are from the four faculties/disciplines here at UCBC: communications, economics, applied sciences, theology. There is a range of English ability among the students, and, most likely, a range of interest and academic ability. But that will be part of the fun (translate, challenge!).

Our first day focused on the syllabus—purpose, outcomes, evidence, assessment. Rather than talk through each section as a class, students read in pairs, helping each other understand and clarify. One of the questions was, “What do you mean ‘Judeo-Christian’?” This question was a reminder that my own assumptions, vocabulary, and perspectives will be challenged consistently during this time with students.

One of the assignments that the students have over the class is a set of 4 reflections, each based on a personal experience with the created world. Each reflection has two parts: (1) an experience, and (2) a written reflection. For the experience students are to sit alone and quietly in a natural setting to simply observe and experience that environment for 20 minutes. They are to be quiet—no cell phone, no music, no friends. Just sit and experience and observe. They may take notes or sketch, but not analyze or explain. For part 2, the written reflection, students are to take 30 minutes to write their reflections on that experience. They are to do that writing within 48 hours of the experience itself. Each of the 4 experiences is to have a specific focus: water, flora, fauna, night.

The assignment is intended to encourage students to see things from a different, new, or unfamiliar perspective. I’ve introduced the language of “lenses”—that we wear lenses to the world based on our personal experiences, culture, family. And this course is to challenge students to use different lenses to see the created world and consider what it means to serve the “common good.” Another purpose of the assignment is to provide content from which to address metacognitive practices—thinking about thinking. I suspect that students’ reflections will be of different types. I’m expecting some students to describe what they saw in factual terms, others to describe their thoughts during the experience, and others to write about what they did during the time. My hope is that there will be sufficient range of reflection types and foci to talk about metacognition and its role in facilitating our own learning.

We shall see…

By the way...a huge "thank you" to my sister, Ann Shaw. She's my instructional coach and researcher!

We have a cat

We have a cat at Tumaini House. We have a rooster. Each has a brief but specific job description.

            Cat: Catch rats and mice. Keep rodents out of the house.

            Rooster: Submit to the knife. You are dinner.

Dinner dares to enter the house

The rooster has been with us for about 5 days. He was a gift to Susan and Tim, current members of the household who served as missionaries here in Beni in 1980s. The rooster has managed to settle into life at Tumaini House. He circles the compound and checks out the bugs. He prefers roosting on the porch furniture at night to being shut into the outside storage shed—a 4’ square concrete closet that clangs shut with an iron door. I don’t blame him. He asserts his independence by marching into the house, but is quickly swooshed away when any of us discovers him. He’ll be welcome in the house tonight, though. In a pot. 

Hope she's up to the job!

The cat was a $5 purchase at the market on Friday. Yes, cats come for a price—about the same cost as a 1-lb wheel of cheese or 2 litres of gasoline. She’s really a kitten, probably weighs ¼ lb, and about as long as a pencil. We’ve named her Frieda—a strong-sounding, northern European name that we hope will inspire her to feistiness and fight.

I admit, I had been holding off getting a cat. Veterinary care here is limited. Only the fittest that can survive without human intervention make it in this part of the world. Unfortunately, rats are among the fittest. The current renting rodents have survived our attempts to trap them. So, after a hilarious skirmish between 4 adult humans and one 6” rat in my bedroom the other evening, I was glad to welcome a cat into the house. 

We do not lose heart

Most days I use Forward Movement's Forward Day by Day as a guide to my morning reading, prayer, and meditation time. Today I read the "wrong" day. Instead of reading Thursday, May 3, I read Tuesday, May 1. Must be this travel stuff (I'm currently in transit from US to DRC, with a day stay in Uganda). Wrong day. Right readings.

The Eucharistic reading for May 1 was 2 Corinthians, 4:1-6. Verse 1 spoke to me, "Since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart."

I needed that verse this morning. Tomorrow I travel overland to Beni, DRC, to rejoin my Congolese colleagues in the on-the-ground work with Congo Initiative and Université Chrétienne Bilingue du Congo. Over the last few weeks that I've been home in the US, I've allowed fear and self-doubt to shape my expectations for these next three months. There is no denying it. The work of CI and UCBC is hard work. The vision, mission, and goals are audacious. The needs are overwhelming. The resources, at least by human standards, are meager. And my abilities are a broken umbrella in a sandstorm of possibilities. It is easy to lose heart.

"Since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart."

Then, during breakfast this morning, Chelsie Frank and I caught up. We talked about the time each of us had at home in April, and our hopes, goals, fears, anxieties, anticipations about being back in Beni. We acknowledged that among the many challenges is the tension between personality and reality (well, we didn't use those words). When one has a personality that sees a challenge, problem, or opportunity as an invitation to do something,  it is hard to live in a situation where challenges are far greater than any one person can do. But one of Congo's gifts is that she reminds me that I am insufficient, but that God is sufficient ("My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." 2 Cor. 12:9).

I was also reminded of a lesson I learned more than 20 years ago: When I acknowledge my weaknesses, I know the greatest strength. That strength is not mine. It is not my muscle, my intellect, my financial resources. It is the strength of a Higher Power manifested through other people, through situations, through creation. That's a lesson that I've reviewed and renewed many times over the years. It's a lesson that I've relearned in Congo

David Kasali often says that "God is using Congo." People may go to Congo to "serve," and "to do." But in reality, it is Congo that serves, teaches, molds, and shapes. It is certainly true for me. Congo teaches me. It reminds me that it doesn't matter that I am weak. I am insufficient. But God is sufficient. It is by God's mercy that I am privileged to be part of the work that is Congo Initiative. That is enough encouragement so that I "do not lose heart."

PS: While writing this, I had a Skype message from Joel Asiimwe, recent UCBC graduate: "We're eagerly waiting to see you back in your second home, the land of the blessed, Congo."

No, I do not lose heart.

A Lesson in Grace

This is not a lesson I’m proud of. But it’s true. And, as Frederich Buechner reminds us in Telling Secrets, we’d all do better as a faith community if we told the truth about ourselves. So, here’s a little truth-telling.

On Saturday I subbed in an English class. The part that I hate to admit: I was holding onto some resentments. Sure, I agreed to help out a colleague, but I wasn’t happy about it. No one’s fault but my own. (I've made my amends). I was also enjoying the Sweet-Tart of resentment at a couple of others colleagues. (The reason doesn't matter. What does is that I need to do Steps 4-10.)

Back to Saturday. The plans indicated that I would be free to do my own work after giving a quiz and talking through some information with the class. I only had an hour of responsibility. The students would self-manage their work for the remaining 3 hours of class.

Well, remember, “If you think you know the plans…”? J’oublie (I forget. A statement in French that I don't forget!).

The quiz took longer than planned. The mini-lecture took longer than planned. Students had more questions than time allowed. I had neglected to make photocopies of the day’s assignment on Friday. So, in the interim when students moved from the classroom to the library, urgently pleaded with the photocopier to comply with my needs. The power shut off in the middle of photocopying, lodging a piece of paper in mid-copy. After the power resumed, it was 10 minutes of trying to problem-solve before I waved the white flag, surrendered to machine, and ran down the hall to where students were trying to figure out my hasty explanations. Did I mention that I had been harboring resentments?

Students started crowding around me with questions about the assignment. And questions about assignments I didn’t know about. And questions about how to proceed with or without assigned partners. And questions about…

I so wanted to take the lid off the grudge sludge and dump it on the floor. But God intervened. Grace intervened. Lessons hard-learned over the last many years whispered truths, including one of the most difficult for me, “Be present. Be in the moment.” I saw the situation for what it was. Students trying to do their work. Students desiring to learn. The only person deserving of my irritation was me. My character defect, willfulness, was eager to lay claim to the moment. It was a decision-point: 


Decide to show grace or to be___ (multiple choice):

A. A_ _

B. B_ _ _ _ 

C. Creep

D. All the above

I don’t take credit for the decision to show grace. It was God, in God’s great mercy and grace. God gave grace to me, so that I, in turn, could show grace to the students. Thank you, Jesus.

The evening before I had listened to two podcasts of Rob Bell preaching at Mars Hill Church. The first was a teaching on Grace from November 6, 2011. The second was a teaching on I John 2, about Love, from May 30, 2011.

Find them. Listen to them. These are the kinds of messages that Christians should be known for—showing love and grace—not anti-abortion, homophobia, “family values,” and “protecting our borders."

Anyway…a few things about grace that prepared me for Saturday (with thanks to Rob Bell):

Grace meets us in the moment when we are most terrified of being found out. Grace confronts us with who we truly are. It’s when we are afraid that our worst secrets, character defects, failures, doubts, hurts, perverse thoughts will be found out, that grace shows up.

Grace shines a light, not to embarrass us, but to say, “Yes, this is true. But now that you admit it, you own the fear, the secret, the failure. You seize its power. It no longer has power over you.” A friend one time reminded me, “Yes, you may not like what's going on. But it is a fact. And once you accept it, you will be able to deal with it and move forward.” And he was right.

Saturday I was afraid that my ugly side, my sick desire for the resentment Sweet-Tart, was going to expose itself. Grace showed up. Shined a mirror and a spotlight in my face. I was able to accept my nasty side and say, “No.”

Grace is a gift. It’s not something we earn. It is true gift. And part of what is so surprising is that the gift comes when we least “deserve” it. It comes when we’re so sure of our weakness and failure and deceit. It came on Saturday when I didn’t deserve it. I was not in a pretty place. But grace showed up.

When grace confronts us it also says, “You’re better than that.” It reminds us that we are made in God’s image. That, as the Hasidic tradition says, we each have a divine spark at our core. On Saturday grace reminded me that I was better than resentment and nastiness; better than A, B, and C. Not better in the sense of superiority, but that I could behave better. Made in the image of God, I had the opportunity to act better than my base instinct.

More profoundly, though, grace has shown up in dark places in my past—places where I have been ashamed. It has shone the light and invited me to step out and be free of the shame.

So, I haven’t said anything about the podcast on love. Maybe that’s for another entry. But, one of the daily readings Saturday morning, before I went to school, was I Corinthians 13:1-13. Thank you, God, for the booster shot I didn’t know I needed.

Nothing matters but love. Nothing. Absolutely NOTHING. Spiritual gifts. Prophesy. Knowledge. Faith. Actions. Self-sacrifice. Tithing. Giving gifts of any sort. Giving up of self. Nothing matters but love. Because love never ends. It is God. It is the Word. It is Jesus. It is Jesus living in us. Prophesies come to an end. Knowledge comes to an end. Actions come to an end. There is something eternal and cosmically connected. It is all love.

I listened to the Grace podcast again this morning. Bell plays the opening of the movie Tree of Life with the following narration:

The nuns taught us there are two ways through life. The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace. We have to choose which one to follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself and others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them, to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who ever lives the Way of Grace ever comes to a bad end.

Sounds a bit like I Corinthians 13, doesn’t it?

God, please don’t give up on me. Not yet. I need your grace. Today and always. Help me to live the Way of Grace, to be an instrument of your grace.


And here's another tidbit: Paul bookends each of his epistles (Romans through Philemon) with "Grace and peace to you," and "Grace be with you." I guess Paul thought grace was important.

Gifts

Congo gives me gifts daily. Well, it’s really God working through this place. But it’s in this raw, harsh, dusty place that God graces me with lessons and reminders of a great and extravagant love. God doesn’t give up on me. God, in His and Her infinite love and mercy, graces me, each day with gifts large and small: gentle lessons, saints here on earth, tiny beauties, whispers of joy. And grace.

A recent saints experience: The other day I was walking home from school through our neighborhood. The Beni version of congestion is a cacophony of motos, pedestrians, bicycles with heavy loads, and busy outlining the road. As I rounded the corner to our street, a moto with a woman passenger leaned into me as the driver attempted to outwit another moto speeding up behind. I tumbled over into a woman emptying a bucket of water, and the two motos landed, one of top of the other, against me. As the other taxi drivers parked at the corner dashed over, my first concern was for the drivers’ safety. I have seen a bit of the local street justice. No one was hurt. I was fine. The passenger appeared unfazed. In the melee it appeared that the other drivers were simply trying to assist. 


Out of the crowd emerged Mama Lillian, a sister to Mama Furaha and Mama Odette. She dashed up to me, clasped my arm with a look of concern. I assured her I was OK. No injuries. Just a minor tumble. She put her arm through mine and escorted me down the street to our house. Once inside the gate, she greeted her sisters with great voice and launched into an elaborate, animated, and highly energized retelling of the events, complete with a diagram of the action. How I wish I could have understood all that she said.

Mamas Odette (L), Lillian (C), and Furaha (R)

“So, why do you call this a saint experience”? you ask? Because it’s just one of many examples of how new friends and Congolese sisters and brothers daily appear in my life. Sure, I was fine. I didn’t need any comforting. But Lillian showed up, a kind and exuberant woman concerned for my well-being. Isn’t that what we all should be for each other?