Are You Ready For the Roar?

Written a week ago – some posts just need a little resting before they’re posted. Also, internet connection helps.

Before the chocolate foam has disappeared down the drain after a post bush hair wash, evidence that my hair really did contain THAT much dirt, my mind is ‘writing’ far more quickly than I could begin to type. And so I let the ideas simmer and settle. We consume too many cups of tea (a luxury we go without in the bush) and enjoy a movie on a laptop with a story far less intense than any of the stories I have heard over the past few days – it has a girly “ahhhhhhh” ending, there are snowflakes, there is the clichéd camera swirl as the he and the she finally end up together after 120 minutes of ‘just missing’ one another. And I sleep on “the blog”.

Today, after a 3 and a half hour bus trip to Kigali to pick up the next team, nasal decongestants popped, an increased dose of vitamin C dropped and a pack of tissues at hand, I’m going to attempt to share the overwhelming joys of the past few days, though they are not separate from the heart-wrenching tales of too-long-a-war. This version might be a little raw, but I fear that not even in its rawest form, would I be able to do the journey we’re on with those we love in our bush village, justice.

A few weeks ago, we embarked on a journey of storytelling to bring healing, under the guidance of the incredible Dr. Sarah Whittaker-Howe (clinical psychologist and sheer awesomeness). In case you were wondering, storytelling for healing is a real thing. Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) is a way for those who have been severely traumatised and who possibly probably definitely are experiencing the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It’s a process whereby those traumatised, are assisted to verbalise the finest details of the trauma experienced. The sights. The sounds. The smells. The thoughts and feelings – some of which are so confused they’ve melted into a single ‘knowing’ and a scattered memory, simultaneously. The pounding of their heart. The fear that they too would die. The helplessness of seeing a loved-one shot. The sorrow in having to continue running alone. Through a slow process of specific questioning. Through an even slower process of asking the most difficult of questions. And through the slowest process of breaking the trauma into individual freeze frames, if you will, so as to have as much of the details, however gory they might be, verbalised. Through NET, these traumas are able to be processed in the brain, time-tagged and stored away in a more healthy way, thereby greatly reducing the PTSD symptoms – the nightmares, the flashbacks, the constant hypersensitivity, the persistent swimming around and swirling of bad memories in the mind etc.

One of youngest. We LOVE his playfulness!

Our heart is never to be the answer. As we seek the face of Jesus for strategy, our heart is simply to empower. To train up. To raise up. We choose to learn so that we can teach. We choose to try and fail and grow; improve and learn and grow and alter that which we’re taught so as to remain as culturally appropriate as possible without compromising the power of the resources and strategies at our fingertips. Our goal is always to empower the Congolese people that they would know that the solutions lie within them; the Hope of Glory dwells within them.

And so, a few weeks ago, we brought the Justice Rising-Iris team together for a conference in Goma. 5 internationals. 6 pastors. 18 teachers. 2 ground-keepers. 5 Leadership League leaders. 5 worshippers. 1 village chief. Two incredible days together where we dived into our core values and spent a large amount of time chatting about the power of storytelling. Telling the tales of past traumatic events goes against every cultural belief here. The accepted norm has been, “The only way to forget, is to be busy and move forward”. The lie believed is, “We were all there. We’ve all had the same experience. We all know what happened, we don’t need to talk about it.” This conspiracy of silence has, for too long, kept the traumatised imprisoned. But we’re chasing freedom and we’re chasing wholeness as we chase Jesus. And suddenly… And suddenly it happened, the light bulb moment that my teaching experience recognizes so quickly, the ‘eureka moment’ that had Archimedes doing a naked jig in his bathroom (You didn’t honestly think he stopped to robe himself before celebrating his discovery of displacement while in the bath tub, did you?)

“This is like a medicine which costs no money.” “This storytelling thing is a very good thing.” “We must begin to share.”

We closed the conference with a deep knowing that we were stepping into something far greater than we could begin to imagine and far beyond our control. We closed the conference with a deep knowing that those who had attended, some of whom had travelled on the backs of trucks for three days, would never be the same. And we are committed to walking this journey with them. Little did we know that we too, would never be the same.

The past few days have been marked by joyful tears and proud mama-hen moments and filled with growth as we’ve cried yes to this process of going into the darkest places of peoples memories, learning to ask questions I never dreamed I’d ever have to ask. What did the body look like? How much blood was there? Did you think that you were also going to die?

There is something incredibly powerful about sitting with a few of our Leadership League boys and hearing them talk about how they have started meeting weekly to share stories. There is something completely undoing about looking into the eyes of him who shares about the time his childhood friend, who been taken by the army, stood, gun cocked and ready to shoot… “The army changed him so quickly. I thought he was going to kill me.” My heart broke as I drew out the details of a son-in-law beheaded, and the tiny pieces floated like glitter to the floor as I came face to face with raw courage. Happy tears threatened to tipple over the brim as they comforted each other. Sympathised with their brothers. And sighed contentedly at the release that the process of verbalisation brought.

Similarly as we met with some of the village’s most influential leaders who shared how they too took all they had learned and have started to practice sharing with their families and those alongside whom they work closely. Sharing the power and freedom offered by telling the story in it’s rawest form. “As I have been talking to my wife, I am discovering things that she has experienced that I did not know of before.” “My daughter has been telling me the hurts she has experienced because of her husband.” Our leaders are dreaming about starting a Listening Room once they feel that they have received sufficient healing to be able to bear the rawness of another’s story. They’re owning it. And they’re hungry for more training.

Soooo hungry for Freedom!

The evening before we returned to the city, one of our beloved Leadership League boys shared his fear that one of the armies is regrouping (which translates: recruiting) and that he might be abducted, but we are not discouraged and we do not lose hope as our perspective is that of Heaven. And so we use the tools that He has placed in our belts and the strategies that He has given us for right now…  Chasing freedom from trauma, chasing wholeness, chasing life. It’s happening. A storytelling movement has begun and it’s going to be unstoppable!! And we continue to dream…