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Introduction: Eileen Babbit describes a project that brought together Tutsi and Hutu women in Rwanda.


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Rebuilding Relationships in Rwanda
Eileen Babbit
Assistant Professor of International Politics, Fletcher School of Law, Tufts University
Interviewed by
Julian Portilla
2003

One of the wonderful projects in Rwanda was a women's project between Hutu and Tutsi women and the women themselves actually launched the project with the help of a local priest, against a lot of both spoken and unspoken resentment in their respective communities. Not only because it was a mixed project but because it was women this is a very patriarchal culture and the women were very much going against a lot of the norms of their villages as well as of the country. But incredible women, just amazing and very clear what it was that they wanted to do and they've now formed a network, this is in southwestern Rwanda, they've now formed a network of something like 4,800 women scattered around many villages and towns.

Not all of whom have contact with each other all the time but are part of sort of this larger web and they're amazing. They're really, really amazing and that was largely their own initiative they get a lot of sustenance not so much psychosocial, but spiritual. They're very much it's very much a religious sort of prayer group as well as an organization for social support.

 
When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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