Visit to Butare’s Bishop

On our way, we paid a quick visit to each diocese’s bishop. These visits helped me a lot to understand today’s setup of communities. The bishop basically serves as the ‘tribe leader’. Much more than being just concerned about church matters, the bishops spoke of community and poverty issues with such wisdom and insight. They are definitely the people most in touch with reality. People come to them for advice, guidance and help out of spiritual and physical poverty. I can now understand why RDIS and Tearfund choose to work through the local churches. Church leaders know the people and their circumstances better than any NGO could ever dream of and it has been proven time and again that addressing just the people’s physical needs is not enough to get them out of the poverty cycle. Their needs as a person need to be addressed as a whole. Also, what differentiate the churches’ approach is that it looks at a community as a whole, in stead of just focussing on the people with the greatest need.

Butare’s bishop sat in a small office with a small window with a few beams streaming through. In our world, we would have had the light on for sure, but here, when daylight shines with enough light to see (no matter how little) energy is conserved (I’m just worried about their poor eyes, working in this poor lighting). The bishop gave us a quick overview of his involvement in the community: coffee plantations, bee hives, literacy and functional accountancy education, environment management, fighting HIV AIDS and Malaria, land development and more. These are some of the issues they just can’t ignore.