The Kibeti Experience

How does one describe our experience in rural DRC? To be fêted on our arrival in Kinshasa at the Jatukik offices, to take 3 days to get to Kibeti on terrible roads and then to be welcomed by singing women glammed up in their wax prints when we finally got there was so moving.

Our 6 weeks in deeply rural DRC was just incredible.  (No internet or cell phone contact in all that time, which is why no activity on the blog.  Sorry that made some of you worry.)  Kibeti is in fact an eco-village, a group of 13 villages centred around Kikonga, which is where we stayed. Participants came from almost all of the 13 villages, some walking 2 hours from their homes to take part. The programme was a huge success and our hard work paid off. We started with 6 groups of women (3 groups of young girls from 12 to 18 years, 2 groups of school-leavers, wives/mothers-in-waiting and young mothers and 1 group of senior women). In the first week we ran 2 sessions a day for 6 days, but we found that was too much, so consolidated some of the groups and reduced our commitment to 4 groups for 2 sessions a week each. In our normal lives, this would be a pretty cruisy schedule, but in Kibeti there is no electricity, no running water and no processed anything, so our spare time was taken up with stripping spinach, shucking peanuts, cranking the fire for cooking, washing ourselves and our clothes in the river a couple of km's away and preparing our sessions with the women.

Our first 10 days in Kibeti were spent getting to know the community, our translator and the leadership group who would take charge of the logistics of getting everyone in the correct groups and assist with facilitation during the sessions. Our programme ran for 4 1/2 weeks. In the first week we considered questions about life and choices and in the following 3 1/2 weeks we discussed a seriess of topics common to most societies like wisdom, fear and courage, love, beauty, etc. Happily, the day we discussed work and service was Mandela Day, so we did our 67 minutes in our host community. The sessions were held in the Catholic Church in Kikonga and each session started and ended with drumming, singing and dancing, in true African style. It was such fun and we even knew a few tunes by the end too. On request, we taught the ladies an English tune. Would you believe the best we could come up with was “Row, row, row your boat”? But the concept of singing in rounds was new and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Parallel to the discussions, we had a sewing project on the go. Each woman got a piece of cloth to embroider and appliqué and in the last week Jen and I borrowed a sewing machine and stitched all of them together to make 7 separate works of art which we gave to the women to keep as a reminder of time spent together. The sewing project was a huge success, thanks to awesome donations from our friends and family back home. We have plenty left for our project in Cameroon and Ghana too. (A terrifying thought for Cameroon is that there is no sewing machine there, so we may end up doing all that stitching by hand!)

Although we did work quite hard to prepare ourselves for the programme, it didn't feel like a huge sacrifice and we got so much back in return. Hearing feedback from the women in the final week was humbling. This is a community that really is very far off the beaten track and not many foreigners visit. To have 2 South African women come and live in their community was pretty special. Of course, for us to be allowed to stay and participate in Kibeti life was such an honour too. The biggest compliment we got from the leaders was that they were impressed that we knew how to live like they do. (I'm not sure that's entirely accurate as I'm sure we made a few faux pas along the way and we certainly weren't able to carry our water on our heads (in fact, we outsourced that job!)) They have requested to be put in touch with the ladies we plan to work with in Cameroon and Ghana, which we think is an excellent idea. It would be wonderful to be able to create a network of ordinary rural women dotted around Africa. The power of the internet!

What I've just described doesn't really cover how it actually felt to be in Kibeti. When traversing Africa, one is seldom able to spend a decent length of time in a community unless one has something to contribute and one certainly rarely has much extended contact with other women, it being mainly men who are in the tourist economy and who run the villages. With this in mind, we prepared our programme so that we would be able to spend time with other African women talking about our respective lives. The ladies of Kibeti expressed such pleasure at being able to share ideas and experiences with each other as well as with us. That was a real bonus, as it seems the women from all 13 villages have never got together to meet like this before. We were taken into the community seemingly unconditionally, showered with gifts of fruit and vegetables which are in such short supply in the dry season and our time there was filled with such light, love and laughter. Of course it was sometimes frustrating to be stared at, even when bathing in the river, but that was a small price to pay for the joy we experienced while living there.

It was very sad to leave, especially as we were driving out and I looked back at Claudine's house to see her flying down the path for a last hug goodbye. Amazing how you can touch a person's life just by having the same name as her beloved late mother.

In 6 weeks, my French improved more than it had in 6 months at the Alliance and I even managed to give some of my farewell speech in Kikongo! Peggy still barks in South African, but even she has chilled out a bit and no longer gets quite so frantic when people come too close to her car, her house or her people. Unless you're a Kibeti pig or goat, of course!