Servant Leadership in Rwanda

"Some coercive power is overt and brutal. Some is covert and manipulative. The former is open and acknowledged; the latter is insidious and hard to detect."

"One must be close to both the bitterness and goodness of life to be fully human. The servant must be fully human. "

Quotes from "The Servant as Leader", 1970 Edition, Robert Greenleaf.

I have some time on my return from a trip to Rwandan at the Addis Ababa Ethopia Airport, so decided to write a quick blog about some of my experiences on a trip to Rwanda. One of the dominating events during the visit was the impact that the 1994 Genocide has had on the people of the Country. I suppose that since over 1,000,000 people out of a country of 8,000,000 was killed during the roughly 100 day period, it would dominate the lifes of most people.

When I had some free time during the trip, I have been working my way through Greenleaf's essay. What I have experienced during the visit was the raw, vibrant form of servant leadership that exists in the people of the country. This natural form of leadership likely blossoms here because of the experiences of bitterness and goodness that the people their have experienced.

The people who exemplify servant leadership -- whether it be the two brothers Patrice and John Leduex who are active in teaching farming, running a handcraft cooperative for handicapped children, or working as interpretors for our group; the Nyange Parish Priests Father Safari and John Baptist and their assitant Noel who work with the parish where over 2000 of the the former parishoners were bulldozed to death under the orders of the church's former parish to help their parishioners continue with life; the Headmaster of a baptist secondary school Raymond, who came up to me during a candlelight vigil to remember the victoms of the Nyange area and began to explain to me in english what the memries of the survivors were; or from John Paul our guide who watched his own parents and family members killed during the Genocide, and took in two orphan children as his own at the age of 15 -- get it not from books or theory, but from living it.

I believe that is what Robert Greenleaf meant when he wrote, "Moral priciples do not emerge from theory, but from testing and experience. Theories are later built to encase and explain the working principles."

I hope to write more on the priciples I have learned during the trip in some future posts. In the mean time find some time to experience both the goodness and the bitterness of life.

p.s. Please forgive my spelling and grammer errors. The internet connection is slow here and my time is limited, so just a quick and dirty unedited post.