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From Eden!

Today, we visited the Women for Women International Opportunity center in Kayonza--a beautiful district in the land of 1,000 hills.  (It was a beautiful drive with much to see and a wonderful breeze to enjoy).  The mission of the Center is to empower the poorest women in Rwanda by providing them classes on human rights as well as fostering specific skills. The women that are chosen to participate in the program are typically extremely poor and completely unable to support themselves or their families. In order to empower these women, the Center provides a 12-month education period during which women are provided with economic, artistic, agricultural, and practical education. Women are educated about farming, saving and finance, technology, and traditional crafts such as basket weaving, beading, and painting.
Upon our arrival, we were introduced to Joy, the managing director, who spoke to us about the goals and functionalities of the Center. These meetings that Shields arranges provide a strong foundation for us to understand what we are seeing wherever we go.  All of the hosts are incredibly knowledgeable.  Plus, they are so welcoming and kind.  After our session with Joy,  had the opportunity to meet some of the women who are current participants in the Center, and they kindly (and patiently!) taught us how they make traditional crafts. Many of us were even able to take the crafts that we started back to the hotel with us. After the crafting workshop, we attended part of a seminar about technology and electronic money transfer, and we then learned about the production of milk and yogurt. After lunch, we walked down to the Center's agricultural sector, which is composed of four hectares of sustainable, women-run farmland. The women working on the farms taught us about agricultural processes, crops, and gave us fresh carrots to taste. At the end of the visit, we went to the Center's gift shop, where we were able to purchase crafts made by women at the Center, in turn supporting the the women whom we met and learned from.

The Women for Women Opportunity center is truly a reflection of Rwanda's unique ability to empower individuals through togetherness, reconciliation, and education. Something that I believe is exceptionally important and often forgotten is that art can be used as a means of empowerment. During our initial discussion, I asked Joy if the art that the women at the Center are creating is solely commercial or used only for the purpose of economic empowerment. She responded by telling us that the women do primarily use their artwork to support their families and better their lives; however, they also use their work to explore their feelings and emotional conflicts (in the context of genocide, gender-based-violence, etc). Art can thus dually empower women, as a means of improvement of economic status, as well as a way to manifest feelings on a visual surface and to process and work around emotional conflicts. I am an artist, and art as a form of activism is a concept that plays an infinitely important role in both my artwork and in my life. Today, seeing art being used explicitly as a form of empowerment was unique, touching, and empowering in itself.