Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities – Burundi

Bujumbura, Burundi
In partnership with the African Great Lakes Initiative

HROC-Burundi was founded in 2002 to respond to the tremendous need for trauma healing and reconciliation in Burundi. The country was beginning to emerge from a twelve-year civil war that had torn communities apart along ethnic lines, traumatized citizens on all sides and left Burundi one of the poorest countries on the world. HROC developed a uniquely effective trauma-healing workshop curriculum that brings people together at community level across ethnic and other divisions to learn about trauma, to process their inner wounds and to promote reconciliation. Their workshops help participants develop working relationships and even friendships with diverse people, including with former enemies and alleged or real perpetrators of violence.

HROC’s work is based on the following set of principles:

There is something good in every person. This is a radical notion in communities where most members have witnessed neighbors and even family members committing gruesome acts of violence.
Each person and society has the inner good and wisdom to heal, which should be sought and shared with others. It is through this effort that trust can begin to be restored.
Both victims and perpetrators of violence experience trauma and its after-effects.
Healing from trauma and building peace between groups are deeply connected. It is not possible to do one without the other. Violence is experienced at both a personal and community level. Therefore, efforts to heal and rebuild the country must also happen simultaneously at both the individual and community level.

HROC's current projects and activities include:

Working with a group of its workshop participants, including primarily ex-combatants, to construct bio-sand water filters. The objectives of this project are to decrease discrimination of ex-combatants, to train ex-combatants and other members of the community in a skill that will lead to income generation, and to increase the accessibility of clean water and knowledge of water sanitation in the wider community.

The goat exchange project: The participants are paired with a member of another ethnic group and they care for a pregnant goat together. When the goat gives birth one partner keeps the mother and the other takes the kid. Everyone is then partnered again and the project continues to multiply.

For more information on HORC and thier programs visit their website at http://aglifpt.org/about.htm