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Richard Osler

Hi All, Richard Osler is a friend I met up at Camp Barnabas a few years ago. He is a brilliant poet. Recently he traveled to Africa on a "Vision" trip with Canadian Food for the Hungry and Docs Heal Africa. Upon his return he created the following document -- a combination of prose and poetry that manages to put words to wordless things. These words, if we will let them, will enlarge our vision to see things both horrific and beautiful. He has graciously granted me permission to print his piece here. If you would like to read more of his poetry, send him an email at osler@shaw.ca The "Eighteen Years of War" piece in particular is stunning ... but be forewarned, there are strong and disturbing images and realities contained herein. In the Flicker – African Reflections Richard Osler – March 2006 In the book “Heart of Darkness” the narrator refers to Africa in terms of “in the flicker”. In my recent two week Vision trip there with Canadian Food for the Hungry International and Docs Heal Africa that image haunts me still. The flickers of light in darkness. The flickers of hope that refuse to succumb to the dark horrors that are the everyday for so many on that continent. I witnessed, and heard about, so much hope. I saw, and heard about, so much horror. Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize Laureate who was an eye witness to the Jewish Holocaust in World War Two, is quoted as saying” “Even our shouts and blasphemies in the face of such evil are forms of prayer.” I did a lot of this kind of praying when I visited three war-effected areas of Africa in February. Even now it is difficult to describe the anger and helplessness I felt in Northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda (see map of Africa page 8) when faced with facts like these: At a rate of about 6 people per minute as many as one million people were killed in 1994’s one hundred day blood-bath known as the Rwandan genocide. Even worse, possibly another million perished in the aftermath through reprisal and other killings both in Rwanda and neighbouring countries where up to two million Rwandans refugees sought safety after the war. While members of the Tutsi tribe were the main victims during the genocide countless numbers of the Hutu tribe also died during, but especially after, the genocide. Words can hardly begin to describe the reality of those horrific days. Here is my response to this tragedy written after a visit to the Genocide Memorial in Kigali. On The Line Outside, the museum is sheer white. Inside, the rooms are barely lit. The one deep inside contains V shaped alcoves. Thin silver wire, like clothes lines, is strung across the walls, in rows a foot apart, floor to ceiling, clips attached to the wire and to the clips, the pictures. Machete dead, windshield dead, dog dead, crucifix dead, panga dead, masu dead, uncle dead, brick dead, chain dead. There are walls and walls of them. Snaps of loved ones. I almost touch. A guard comes and turns one over to show the date. Died April 7th, 1994. Then a door opens somewhere, a draft comes, the portraits move, more life than one man near by can bear – surrounded by all these faces of the dead. Machete dead, gun dead, stick dead, crowbar dead, in-law dead, spade dead, hammer dead, board dead, rock dead, rape dead. The man weeps, and later, leaves. Then another comes out of shadows needing to talk. There is no space for strangers here. Suddenly in this place of Abel we have known each other since Cain. Here the living, too, must hang together, clipped by necessary grief, on lines of our own. Machette dead, teacher dead, neighbour dead, knife dead, latrine dead, fist dead, foot dead, tire dead, grenade dead, bumper dead, pipe dead. We speak in whispers. Why? There is no waking these, twelve years dead. “You saw the man who left?” he asks. “Yes.” I reply. “ He is my driver. Almost all his family died. Their pictures are over there.” Speech dies in me. He takes my hand and we walk to see what so many other hands have touched. Machette dead, burial dead, godfather dead, pit dead, bulldozer dead. spear dead, hoe dead, priest dead, club dead, bullet dead, friend dead. He shows me. A man younger than me, becomes a father, another a brother and a woman, a sister. Nothing moves. The room is silent. The pictures hang heavy on their lines. Faces I was never meant to see. Machette dead, pastor dead, bow and arrow dead, rope dead, dead - dead. As horrific as the genocide was in Rwanda twelve years ago similar horrors, but in even greater numbers, have been occurring right next door in DRC, an African country greatly impacted by the Rwandan genocide. Rwanda was a major player in the DRC civil war from 1997 to 2003 and to this day armed remnants of Rwandan refuges, who flooded into DRC after the genocide, continue to fight in the forest of eastern Congo. It is estimated that at least four million people have died because of the conflict in DRC since 1997 (above and beyond expected mortality rates for the country). Although armed conflict is now restricted to its eastern territories (where up to 16 separate rebel or armed groups are still active), at least 1,200 people a day continue to die from war and its allies of disease and malnutrition. In addition, the rate of infant mortality and death by disease is among the highest on the planet. And sexual violence through rape, especially in the eastern territories, is widespread. The UN claims that DRC remains the worst humanitarian crisis experienced in the world since World War Two. In Northern Uganda more than 1.6 million people remain stranded in desperate conditions in so-called IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps where they have been relocated for “safety” because of a 18 year old conflict in the area that has caused at least 25,000 children to be abducted and forced to join the rebel forces in the area. Lack of water and disease is killing thousands of people in these camps every week. I visited one of these camps at a place called Padibe (pa/DEE/bay) and witnessed a devastating fire that over a period of at least three days destroyed as many as half of the huts housing 41,000 people there. When I climbed up to an empty water tower there to witness the devastation first-hand I gasped and recoiled when I saw the extent of the damage. That evening I wrote this poem: Slow Burn Nothing will stop the slow burn. Rain has lost its way among the cries crowding empty heaven. Nothing will come to earth, this burning earth. Babies burrow into blankets of warm ash. Impossible mathematics. Naught from nought is not what I was ever taught it would be - something less than nothing. This poem reflects the despair I felt that day. Yet somehow below me, when I looked out over Padibe from the water tower, life went on in the dust and the smoke. Children played, mothers cooked meals in swept-out shells of burned out huts and already bundles of new thatch were ready for reconstruction. Padibe that day represented so clearly the twisted threads of hope that weaves in and out of the threads of horror and despair that make up the tattered cloth of Africa in 2006. I saw those hopeful threads in many places: In Kitgum, south of Padibe, I sat under a tree in a new CFHI centre, run by Canadian Janet Shaver and her team, that will provide shelter and education for young mothers and their children directly affected by the war. There I listened to a young mother called Beatrice tell the story of her horrific eight year ordeal with the rebels. Abducted at 14, kept almost constantly on the move and given to a rebel soldier who fathered her two children, she escaped in 2003 and is doing everything in her power to be educated, look after her children and create a life that will provide a hopeful future for her family. In spite of the obstacles still in her way that young woman’s fierce determination to make a new and better life reduced me to tears. And prompted the thoughts that form this poem: Eighteen Years of War – Northern Uganda When the words come they will come like dust; they will come like fire; they will come like smoke; they will come like charred ruins; they will come like lost lives; they will choke you like the smoke. When the words come they will be the names of children stolen by the wind. In Goma, DRC, in the eastern territories near the border with Rwanda I walked through an orphanage rebuilt on a bed of lava that destroyed most of the city after nearby Mount Nyiragongo erupted in 2002. Soon I was mobbed by many of the 60 children living there who had been orphaned by war and disease, then rescued by the husband and wife team of Mama Jean and her husband Prosper. I watched the smiling faces of two brothers who sang and danced for us. One had a scar on his forehead from a machete wound incurred during an attack on his village that killed his parents and left him for dead. I saw a baby , just a few months old, called Baraka or “Blessing” and her mother Chantel, 16. Chantel was captured by six rebel soldiers and kept in the bush with them for six years. She escaped, pregnant. She is being taught to read and write and to sew. When she is ready she will be sent back to her village to restart her life with new skills In Goma I also visited the hospital run by Docs Heal Africa. Most of it was destroyed by the 2002 eruption. It has been rebuilt with new state-of-the-art operating theatres. Under the leadership of Dr. Jo Lusi, a black Congolese man and his white UK-born wife Lynn, Docs has become a center for hope and change. Through its sponsorship, innovative programs have been developed and run by the community including Choose Life, an innovative AIDS program which provides counseling, education and even loan programs for AIDS widows; Living Stones which is developing and teaching new agricultural practices; Heal My People which provides counseling and care for rape victims; and the Nehemiah Initiative which is seeding all these program in almost twenty rural villages. At the DOCS hospital I walked into a ward of women who had recovered from fistula operations that repaired vaginal ripping from brutal rapes. (DOCS has performed thousands of these operations.) The women were singing and dancing; Dr. Jo Lusi joined in. Later, one of the women , Yoeri Walongera, told her story. “I was taken by force,” she said. “Forced to do whatever the soldiers wanted.” But she added “We were lucky that we could come to DOCS for help. Now we are beautiful again.” All these women who arrived as outcasts and virtual pariahs, now armed with new reading and vocational skills were soon going to go back into their villages as a force for change. In a small office near the Docs hospital I listened to a group of religious leaders describing their successful four-year Choose Life program. Remarkably, ten faith communities in Goma joined forces to sponsor this program to provide a unified approach to this devastating disease. They believe that their program has dropped the incidence of AIDS in Goma to 5% or at least half the national average. One of those leaders, Kataka Tsongo, is the local Imam who explained how through this initiative he was able, for the first time, to sit and share food with his Christian brothers and sisters. At Rutaka, a small village in the hills of Rwanda I saw a tall woman proudly receive recognition with others in her community for their volunteer work with Food for the Hungry International in educational and development programs. Only later was I told that she and her husband were the only Tutsi survivors of the genocide in this area. Their children were all murdered. Yet there she was, a fully integrated member of that community, a community that had betrayed her as it witnessed, and was responsible for, the deaths of her friends and family. She and her husband had the courage and hope to start a new family. They now have four children – the eldest was born less than a year after the genocide. On a trip to Masisi, north of Goma, an area just recently cleared of hostile troops , I witnessed the jubilant official opening of a half way home for victims of sexual violence. On that trip I heard the story of Noella Katembo who is a leader in a number of DOCS community initiatives. Three years earlier her husband was killed in front of their children by bandits in their house while she was recovering in hospital from giving birth to a daughter. A year later her house burned down. Her son Richard who never talked about his father’s death afterwards had just recently asked to know everything he could about his father. He told his mother he wanted to put flowers on the grave and to tell his Dad that the family was doing fine. She was not sure that was a good idea. Based on that story I wrote this poem. Now I Am Eight (For Richard and Noella Katembo) My father came home and the men came too, to rob him. But there was no money so he died there in front of me and my sister. My mother was not home. She had given birth the day before. I was five then. Now I’m eight. I have told my mother I am ready to put flowers on the grave. She says “no” it will make me the next to die. But I know there are many ways to die in Africa. A few weeks after I wrote this Nouella took Richard, his brother Charly and younger sisters Odette and Sammy, to visit her husband’s grave. Richard told everybody there that when he is older he wants to be a construction engineer just like his father. Hope and horror. These are the threads I hold from this trip. This trip will haunt me for a lifetime but something I read on the side of an old holiday trailer in Kitgum, Northern Uganda will sustain me. The trailer was located at complex run by Childcare International, founded by an Australian woman, affectionately known as Auntie Irene, in 1991. Childcare runs many programs for the people of Kitgum but most important runs a school and vocational institute for 4,000 students. In the early days when Auntie Irene started Childcare under constant threat of violence and failure she wrote this passage in black letters on the side of her white trailer: “I am satisfied with my present life and what I have. For God himself promises ‘I will not in anyway fail you, or in any degree leave you helpless, or forsake you or relax my hold on you’ Thus I am encouraged and I will confidently say ‘The lord is my helper. I will not fear or be alarmed. What can men do to me?’ “ When faced in Africa with the living reality of the worst of what humans can do to each other, it is difficult to know what to make out of such a bold statement of faith. But it is this faith which sustains the hope of Auntie Irene, Dr. Jo and Lynn Lusi and countless others I met with Fhi, Childcare and DOCs Heal Africa doing so much to keep the lights alive in the flicker of Africa. I am challenged by them to do no less. After I wrote down Auntie Irene’s words I came around a corner to see hundreds of brightly dressed students being fed porridge out of enormous vats. It could have been any schoolyard full of the noise of excited and laughing children. But not likely a schoolyard in a place like Kitgum, Northen Uganda, where the lack of food, water and security is the rule. Where death, rape and abduction have been commonplace. Here, alight in those faces, resounding in that laugher, was proof enough of the power of a hope and faith that trumps horror. Bono, the well-known singer and humanitarian stated at a recent prayer breakfast in Washington D.C. that “Africa is burning.” I witnessed the literal and figurative truth of this. But there are lights flickering and shining from a different kind of fire. From a fire of hope and resilience that is hard for us in the West to understand or imagine. How else can I explain the laughing children and Beatrice at Kitgum, and Chantel, Richard and Nouella in Goma. Other faces of hope join these ones as I look back. Such as little Zawadie and Marie. Zawadie is a seven year old rape victim I met at Docs. When ever I saw her at the hospital she had an infectious smile and had to be encouraged not to dance with us! She was recovering from her fistula operation. Marie, a Tutsi survivor of the genocide, is a manager with FHI who now works with children. “So they can become peace-makers,” she says. She also runs her own school at night for adults orphaned by the genocide. On my last day in Goma, standing on the thick layer of brimstone that engulfed that city in 2002 , I saw plants and flowers growing out of the lava rock into the light. Slowly, imperceptibly, breaking it down. If the lava is an image of death and destruction so evident in Africa then the hopeful faces still so bright in my mind are the redoubtable shoots of hope. I witnessed them - growing against the odds out of the seemingly impenetrable horror of their circumstances. This is the hope I hold. Shoots and lights. This is what sustains me against the current backdrop of a shadowed continent. These shoots are the lights “in the flicker”. I hope and I pray they will turn into a blaze of good that will never go out. posted: 05.10.2006 | 18:49:51 | post number: 40

A Baseball Miracle

OK, there are a million things I am tardy/deliquent in posting about. Our life-changing, soul-stretching trip to Mexico. The completion of my new album. My recent trip to Minneapolis to interview one of my heroes, Garrison Keillor. All of things are blog-worthy. I, evidently, am not. But here's what I have to write about tonight. I just came home -- frozen solid, mind you -- from my son Ben's baseball game. We're talking 8 and 9 year olds -- 11 per side -- in their first season of actual pitching. These are very, very, very long games. Tonight, a young man from the other team (the Phillies) had to call a time-out while at bat. We couldn't figure out what the problem was until he walked to the fence, waved his mom over, and handed her a tooth. Nothing like getting a double and a date with the tooth fairy on the same at-bat! There is something really beautiful about little boys and girls playing baseball. Some of them are so intense (future athletes), some of them are entirely clued out (future musicans). They all love spits and slapping their gloves and hollering "Like you can!" I love the random sliders (my Ben chief among them) who risk life and the skin on their limbs to slide into second without a fielder in sight. We won, by the way. But no-one on our side lost a tooth. Maybe next time ... posted: 05.10.2006 | 16:01:27 | post number: 39