Spirit in Action
Holistic Development Mission in Rwanda - Debby Thomas
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Regular listeners of my Northern Spirit Radio programs may have noticed several weeks in February and March filled by reruns of previous programs. And this was because I was traveling for three and a half weeks in Rwanda, Africa with a Quaker group called the Friendly Folk Dancers. While doing that folk dance ministry of international peace and joy, I, of course, took the opportunity to meet the folks in Rwanda and to get to know their stories. Among the wonderful folks I met there are Debbie and David Thomas, and therefore children. The Thomas family has been in Rwanda for about ten years now, supported by the Evangelical Friends mission. Evangelical friends are a distinct branch of Quakerism. In some respects, quite different from my own branch of silent unprogrammed or non-pastoral friends. But I found God's light shining quite brightly through their work. Many listeners may know about Rwanda primarily in the aftermath of the genocide of about 800,000 people there in 1994, portrayed in movies like Hotel Rwanda. In my weeks, I experienced a much different portrait of Rwanda with a strong heart for peace, reconciliation, and healing. I visit today with Debbie Thomas about her work as a Quaker missionary in Rwanda for the past ten years. Debbie has found herself more and more called to address the roots of poverty and of holistic development, things like sustainable energy and agriculture and empowerment of the poor, all under God's guidance. I sat down with Debbie shortly before my return to the USA in early March. Debbie, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thanks. I'm glad to be here. Tell them all about where here is. Well, we're here in Kigali, Rwanda, Africa, and this is where I've lived and worked for the last ten years. You know, that doesn't really fully fill in the colors of your experience. What would you describe your current work here as being? My husband and I are missionaries with the Evangelical Friends Church of Rwanda and we do all kinds of various sinusundary things, a lot of them involving, for me, especially, development, holistic development, working with leaders, training, that kind of thing. Holistic development, what does that mean? Well, as you're aware, here in Rwanda, there's a lot of poverty. Very, very difficult, hard crushing poverty. And as a Christian and as a church, we believe that reaching out to the poor is something we ought to do. But reaching out was something that can really make a difference in their lives, making a difference in every part of their lives, and so that we don't just want to reach out to them spiritually. We want to reach out to them in such a way that they are helped spiritually and they're helped physically and they're helped economically and they're helped socially. Our goal is really to see transformed communities, to see whole communities transforming from the poverty and the difficulties that they're in now into much more what God intended for his people. You said you're here as missionaries with the Evangelical Friends Church of Rwanda. I don't suppose that's what you grew up in. Where did you grow up, religiously, and how did you end up here? I was born in Los Angeles, but I grew up in Newburgh, Oregon. I went to a small Friends Church in Newburgh, Oregon, and I'm a part of Northwest Yearly Meeting. Tell me about this development work you did. We're sitting here in your home, here in Kigali, and as we look out we can see various trees and plants and all kinds of stuff that I think is going to be really valuable to the Rwandan people. How did you get into this? Because I don't think you were an agriculturalist, an agronomic expert or something. How did you get into this? You don't even look old enough to be able to know all the stuff that I'm sure you do know. Well, about four years ago there was kind of a change in the economic climate here in Rwanda and poverty really deepened. Things were getting more and more expensive. Food was more expensive, fuel was more expensive, and a lot of people just weren't able to eat regularly and some people weren't hardly able to eat at all. We had friends who were coming to us and telling us this, and of course we were very concerned, but we just felt so helpless. What can one person do in a country of 8 million when the economic situation is already so difficult and is getting more difficult? My husband had the idea that we could just spend an hour every morning praying just about the problems of poverty and just asking God to show us what could we do that would really make a difference. Show us something because certainly we felt like certainly God has ideas, had to help the poor, certainly God wants to help the poor, and we want to, but we just don't know how, we just feel overwhelmed. And so we just began a period of time where every day we would spend time praying about poverty and slowly God would reveal to us one thing that we could do. Like, for example, the first thing was solar cooking, and I had never really heard of solar cooking before. I wasn't really very sure what it was. Is that because they don't have any sun up there in Oregon? Maybe that's why. So I started doing some internet research and just started finding out about solar cookers and just found out all kinds of very interesting information and then started narrowing it down to what could really work in Rwanda. And because at that time I'd already lived in Rwanda for six years, I had a pretty good idea of what could work here and what couldn't. So I got it to where I could make a solar cooker for about $2 out of cardboard and tin foil and homemade glue and it worked. It cooked food in the sun, it didn't use any fuel, and that was kind of the kickoff. And the Lord just kept bringing one thing after another, and as I was faithful to follow through and obedient, doing the research, finding out what these things were, putting them into practice, teaching the people that I could teach, passing on the information, then God would bring something else. So there was a lot of fuel efficient cooking in the very beginning, especially because our prayer was instigated by a fuel crisis, and we were praying specifically about the fuel problem. And then it started moving into more nutritional aspects with the morninga tree. And the morninga tree is a tree that has leaves that are very nutritious and the leaves can be eaten like spinach and they have all the vitamins that people need, they have a lot of calcium and a little bit of protein. They help with a lot of stomach problems, they help to kill stomach worms, and there's actually a lot of information about the morninga tree online that tells how it's used in these kinds of contexts. So after the morninga tree, the Lord started showing us how we could become more involved in agriculture. 95% of Rwandans are farmers and they're subsistence farmers, and a lot of the reason for poverty is because they can't get the food they need off the land. So the Lord helped me to recognize that if I'm not involved in agriculture, I'm not really going to have a big impact on the poor. So I started more research and I was given a small field to start working with, and I just started putting things into practice and seeing what worked and what didn't work. This kind of work that I've been doing has drawn just attention from different places here and there. And so people will come and visit here all the time. Sometimes it's for wandans, students, or pastors. I have a lot of visitors that come by that say they heard about what I'm doing from here or there. When people come, some people are interested in being trained. They say, "Oh, I like this. This is very nice. I'd like to try it." And so we've done a number of trainings. We've done a training for an NGO, for food for the hungry, trained some of their trainers. So we try in every instance we can to pass on the information, the things that God has put into our hands, the purpose we have them is to pass them on to others. But at the same time as I was doing this for about two years, I was recognizing these things help, but I was also becoming more and more aware of how complex poverty is. And how, as we try and tackle poverty, it's not just going to be a farming technique that's going to help people get out of poverty, or a tree, or a way to save rainwater. Those things can all help, but in reality, poverty is much bigger than any of those problems. And so I started deeper research into the whole area of development and into the whole area of just the theory of poverty, and where does poverty come from, and what is poverty, and what actually causes poverty. And I've done, of course, at Fuller Seminary on transformational development. And it really talks about how complex poverty is and how we need to have a holistic approach, that it needs to be an approach that recognizes the whole gamut of problems that people have and the whole gamut of reasons that they have those problems, ranging from bad weather and loss of crops, to war, to injustice, all kinds of different things that can cause poverty, and just recognizing that if you don't take the whole picture interview and deal with the whole altogether, you're never really going to crack that poverty open and change it. And so once I started learning that, then my mind started going to, okay, I have a lot of different tools as far as the farming and the tree, and I know how to find out information now about development stuff. Whatever God puts in my path that I need to figure out, I trust that I can find the information and figure it out and help other people to do it. And what I was really needing at that point was more a model or an approach of how can we do transformational development in whole communities? How can we see whole communities begin to be transformed? So I was playing around with a lot of ideas when I heard about this conference that was going to happen in Uganda. This conference was put on by Missions Moving Mountains. It's called Discipleship for Development, and they enter into a community and make a five-year commitment to this community, and it's just this whole process of really helping the community to recognize its own problems and discuss its own problems and recognize its strengths and use their strengths to solve their problems. But it's really a process of developing people. It's not developing projects for them. It's more developing the people themselves so that they are able to meet their needs or find out how they can meet their needs. And so I went to Uganda for two weeks with three Rwandan pastors to this seminar, and I was just amazed because we got to go to some transforming communities, and they have 90 transforming communities in this area where they've been working. And I've just never seen anything like that in Africa before. There was really true life transformation on all levels. Right, Dan, people washing their hands and building proper kinds of toilets to having cows and using the fertilizer and becoming better farmers to planting trees and to being disciples and having small groups in their home and doing Bible study, and every area of life in these communities was in this process of transformation, and you could just see how these communities were very different from the surrounding communities that hadn't had this kind of transformation. And when I saw that, I knew these people were on to something. They've got something going for them. And these three pastors and myself have decided that we're going to start doing whole community transformational development here in Rwanda, and we're starting very small in just a few days. We're going to start our first training, and we're training 35 people, and we're going to split up into teams, and we're going to go to four different communities. With the purpose of seeing transformation happen on all levels in the community, but also with the purpose of recognizing we have so much to learn, and just really looking for God to be working in these communities. And so I'm really excited right now. I feel like a lot of these different things are coming together for me, and soon we're going to be able to be working in communities and seeing this kind of thing happen. With the hope that these 35 people who are trained and are working in communities will soon become experts in this area and will soon be able to build their own teams. How is that different from what they've done traditionally or what they've done beforehand? What kind of change are we actually talking about that enables these other holistic developments? The way Brant Myers describes it in his book Walking with the Poor, he says poverty is basically caused by having a broken relationship with God, which causes us to have a broken relationship with ourselves. We don't have a proper self-image of ourselves, and it also causes us to have broken relationships with those around us in our immediate community, and many times broken relationships with people outside of our communities. And the poverty that we're seeing here is so crushing that they can't see a way forward anymore. They don't know anymore that it oughtn't to be like it is. They're just in a survival mode, and they just don't know how to get out. They don't even know how to think about getting. They're not even thinking about getting out. It's just, that's the way it is. The approach that's used so often is a community worker goes into a community, assesses the needs, plans projects, and carries out these projects in the community. Projects don't change people. If the project is a well, that's great. For a short period of time, people have water. But when the equipment and everything goes broken, what happens? Nothing. It sits there. Year after year after year, and this happens all over Africa all the time. If it's a road, great. For a few years, there's a road. It's going to get old. It's going to need prepared, and pretty soon it'll be right back to where it started. If the people themselves are never given the opportunity to be in right relationship with God, to be in right relationship with themselves, to understand their own self-value, to understand their own responsibility, and if they're never given the opportunity to mend those relationships with others, they'll never be able to move out of the poverty that they're in. I read a case study just the other day that happened in Kenya, and it was this very poor slum in Nairobi, just a very, very poor slum in Nairobi. And some people came into the slum, and they looked at it, and they said, "You know what? We're going to make a difference here." And they built roads, put street lights in, put water in, put electricity. Everything these people needed, right? So everybody still had their little plot of land where they had their little squatter place, but now everything was perfect for them. All they had to do was improve their housing and live in this perfect world. Within a few months, you know, some middle-class people came in and said, "Wow, this is a really nice place you've got here. Can I buy your piece of land?" And they bought it, and where did these people go? They moved to the next slum over, which was just as bad or worse than the one they came from. You see, no real development happened. Roads, water, electricity, that's what we always hear about when we talk about education, health care, agricultural skills. We always talk about these things with development. It's really the people that need the opportunity to have God work in their hearts and work in their lives and mend these relationships, and they themselves need to become aware that they have the power to change their world. And if they are going to build a road, you know, when it needs maintenance, they can maintain it. If they decide they're going to get a well, and they go find somebody who can help them do a well, and they're involved in doing the well, and they know how it works, and they care about it, if it gets broken, they're going to fix it. It's, first of all, developing the people, and the people will develop the world they live in. I really admire the work you're doing here. When I first heard some of the words that you talked about, the psycho-cave people have to change the way they think about relationships and so on. One of the sarcastic thoughts that jumped into my mind is, we have to indoctrinate them with the Protestant work ethic. Is that part of it? I mean, is there something really positive about this thing that some of us denigrate the Protestant work ethic? Is there some change like that that's part of this process? Well, what I saw in Uganda, when I went to these transforming communities, and I saw what was happening, one community we went and visited, they said before this group came in to help us, this discipleship for development group, they said there was a bar on one end of the town and a bar on the other end. And what the men did all day is they sat at the bars and they drank. And they described all the other kinds of poverty that there was too. So there was definitely that sense of laziness, hopelessness with the men, you know, and sitting at the bars. They said, "Now, you can't find alcohol in this town." They said, "Nobody has time for it. Nobody wants it. We have plans. We have work to do. We have so much work to do." And it was a very joyful, it wasn't a, "Oh, we have work to do." You know, it was this joyful. We know what we're about. We have goals. We have plans. We have fields to plant and we have things to make and we're busy. And so I definitely saw that happening and I don't think it was necessarily just the... We can't just necessarily say all of our values in America. You know, they've made us a rich nation. So we just need we're one instead of kind of Americans. Obviously, that's not what you're saying with the Protestant work ethic. But I think that the Protestant work ethic did begin in the Bible. I think that God is very clear with us that He has given us work to do and that He created us to work. He did not create us to sit at bars all day. And I think that as God enters, as God is working in a community, as God's Word enters a community, as God's Word begins to transform people's hearts and minds. Yes, definitely. There are physical changes that happen, like working hard. Like really caring more about each other. Like recognizing that when there's conflict, there are certain ways that we need to go about resolving conflict. And that staying with conflict isn't okay, but there are ways to resolve it. I think there's a lot of things that the Word of God can bring into communities that can change the way people think about their world. And really, the physical world people live in is shaped by their worldview, how they see their world. And if they really truly believe that work is bad and that we don't want to do work and work as a curse, that's going to shape how they live. And if they believe that work is good and God has given us work, and God makes us prosperous and God is with us as we're working and gives us work to do, that shapes their reality. And so a lot of the work of development is actually that worldview changed, and not making Rwandans have a Western worldview, not at all, but that changed from the traditional Rwandan worldview to the biblical worldview. What does this mean about, you can talk about it from two ends, begging on one end, and charity, where here I'm going to give you what you need. How does that fit into what you're talking about? Again, when I visited these communities in Uganda, we had a time in one community where a lot of the leaders who had been involved in this process came together, and they fed us lunch, and they just had some things they wanted to tell us. They knew we were students, we were going to be doing transformational development, and they felt like they had some messages for us. And one message that they had for us, they did a skit about a man who was given a fish. At that place where he was given the fish, he went there every day waiting for somebody to go and give him another fish, and it just kept not happening. And every day he'd return home to his wife, empty-handed, and then there was another man who met a person who taught him how to fish. And once he learned how to fish, he would go and actually fish every day and bring his wife home fish every day, and she was very happy. And as simple as that skit was, you know, the message came across loud and clear, and these people actually just told us in plain, straight-out words, they said you cannot go into a community and just give them things, it's not fair, it's not right. Even though that's probably what they expect of you because that's what everybody does, even though that's what they think they want, it's not what they really are going to want in the end, because it doesn't respect them as people for one, and it doesn't really help them. You're not really helping them, you're helping them in the moment, you can go away and feel happy, but it's not really helping them. And so what they told us is they said if you really love people, if you really care, you'll stay with them, you'll walk with them, you'll work with them through these things and you'll teach them, and you're in it for the long haul, but you will not just hand them something. And they said, you know, if you came and gave us a kilogram of sugar, well, that's great, we'd be happy for a day or two, and then it'd be gone, and then where are we at? We're at the same place where we started, how did you help? So they really challenge us to say if you care about people, if you care about poverty, help, and help in a way that makes a difference. Don't just hand people things. You're listening to a Spirit in Action interview with Debbie Thomas, missionary in Rwanda, Africa, with the Evangelical Friends Church. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet of Northern Spirit Radio, and we're talking to Debbie about, among other things, the work of holistic development, bringing nurture to both the spirit and body of the people of Rwanda. Debbie Thomas has been a Quaker missionary in Rwanda for the past ten years and is constantly finding new and exciting ways to do God's work in that country. Check my northern spirit radio.org website for videos that she and her husband, David, sent back with me about their work, about dancing in Rwandan churches, and about a safari they took into the wilds of Rwanda. Back now to my interview with Debbie Thomas in early March. Debbie, I want to ask you more about the spiritual aspects, the religious aspects, the foundation on which this work is proceeding. But I also want to talk about some of the specific techniques and such that you are advancing. I had a tour yesterday out amongst your fields here, and I saw some pretty wonderful things, and I want you to talk about some of the details. Let's start with the meringa tree, and why that's such a wonderful thing, and I'll admit right here that last night I had some meringa powder as part of my supper served at this house. So I'm really pleased with the experience. I feel super powered today. Tell us about the meringa tree and the meringa powder and what you're doing with that and how you're advancing that to the world. And some of the magical properties of the twigs bark, what you said yesterday was very rich. Well, the meringa tree is a tree that has been in India for a very long time. That's where it originated. It's been fairly recently that some scientists have begun doing some studies on this tree. Mostly because Indians, they claim all kinds of properties. They claim that this tree, they call it the miracle tree and that it has all kinds of great qualities. So some scientists said, well, let's check this out and see if it's really true or not. And they did some scientific research, and it's just been amazing to see this research that's been coming out. Basically, the leaves of the tree are edible and can be eaten raw like spinach. However, they have quite a strong flavor, and so we especially encourage people if they're going to eat them raw to mix them in with other greens or with beans or with other vegetables. But what we've found, this has also come through the scientific research, is that the leaves can be dried as long as they're not dried in direct sunlight. And they keep almost all of their vitamin content. And then, of course, they can be kept for a long period of time. Once they're dried, we grind them into a powder. So it's a very fine powder, kind of like flour, except it's green. And that powder, two heaping teaspoons of that powder, has almost all the vitamins that an adult needs in a day. And it's mainly a large quantity of the vitamins, has about 50% of the calcium an adult needs in a day, and it has a small amount of protein. It also helps with different kinds of intestinal difficulties that people get here. It also kills some stomach worms. What we find in Rwanda, one of the main problems with poverty is that people don't eat properly. And the reason is that they really just try and get those starches in. They try and fill their stomachs and get their starches in, which is totally understandable. All their money and all their energy and all their time goes to getting these starches, but then they end up getting no vitamins. And there's all kinds of side effects to that, but some of the side effects are just a real sense of exhaustion. Like almost all the time, just really not having energy. And you can imagine being a farmer, hoeing your fields by hand, how exhausting that work is, and how much energy you would need. And then just feeling that exhaustion from not having your body, not having what it needs. Another thing is that students really don't study well in school. Their brains don't function properly when they don't have the vitamins they need. A doctor friend of mine told me he had a patient the other day who said, "My daughter, when she goes to draw water, she gets to the water in place. Down on the ground in sleeps." And then she wakes up, she gets the water, she comes, brings it home, and then she lays down in sleeps. You know, "What do you think is wrong with my daughter?" And he said, "What does she eat? Well, she eats sweet potatoes for lunch, and she eats sweet potatoes for dinner, and sweet potatoes for lunch, and sweet potatoes, no greens, no variation, nothing." The child was suffering from vitamin malnutrition. So, of course, we gave him morning of powder. But my hope would be that the morning of powder could become, because these trees grow really well here. You've seen the trees, they're healthy, and they're growing very well. And my hope would be that the morning of powder could become available to people wherever they are. And so we're going at it from a number of different aspects. One aspect is we're teaching farmers how to plant trees. We're teaching groups of people how to start morning of tree nurseries, so they can sell them in their neighborhood. The government's been putting information about morningo on the radio, so many people are aware of it. We're also hoping to start a business. And we're hoping to start a business, we're in the process, of producing massive quantities of the morning of powder and packaging them very nicely, but in small packages, and making sure that they are distributed into all the local markets, even the ones that are very far from beaten paths. And our goal is to be able to have it be priced in such a way that poor people can afford it. I don't know if we'll ever have it be priced in such a way that poor people can afford it every day, but that they can afford it often, especially when they're feeling particularly weak. So that would be our goal. But the other goal this business is it's not just to be a business and just to offer this product to the poor, but really recognizing that God asks us to enter into society and God asks us to be a part of what's happening in a country. And being business people gives us another opening into this country, into the culture, and it gives us a whole other opening into different people that we would never come in contact with. And we are hoping to have a kingdom impact on the country just by having this business and operating our business in every way that we possibly can in a way that would please God. So that is the morning of tree. When you say that we are starting this business or you're getting ready to do that, who is the we here and what kind of business model are we talking about? My business partner is called Chris Page and he's from Great Britain. He's a missionary who was called by God to come to Rwanda to start kingdom businesses. All he does is he starts businesses that he believes can have a kingdom impact in this country. He has all kinds of amazing businesses. One of them, he helps youth make cards that get sold in Europe and the United States and he has 80 employees. They have Bible studies in the morning and they teach them all different kinds of life skills that they just don't have and really making a difference in those kids lives. Chris has on his heart to be starting kingdom businesses and I have on my heart development and we talk a lot because we have a lot of overlap. And when he started hearing about the Meninga, he started thinking business and of course I've been thinking of development and he said let's start a business and it can help poor people and it can help with some of the problems of development while at the same time having an impact on society and being sustainable because if it's a sustainable business, Meninga powder can be produced in a sustainable way. It's very likely that we can keep producing it for a very long time. Out the back here, you have a Meringa seed tree. You also have other trees growing up. I think you told me that the seed tree that you have there is less than three years old, so unlike regular fruit trees or something, this comes to maturity quite quickly. Can you, in one year, start eating the leaves? Is it that kind of thing? Within nine months of planting, if you've had good rains, then you can start eating leaves off the tree. Of course, you won't get a full harvest in nine months, but you start. By a year, the tree is producing flowers and beginning to produce seeds. Certainly by a year and a half, you'd be getting seeds and you'd be into full leaf harvest. The seeds of Meninga tree can be used to replant trees, but they can also be pressed for oil, and that oil that comes from the Meninga seed is the quality of extra virgin olive oil, so it's a very fine oil that is edible, but can also be used for base for soaps, cosmetics, perfumes, those kinds of things. It also has some medicinal qualities, but there's another compound that's in the seed cake. After you've pressed the oil out, that helps to clarify water. A lot of people that we work with are getting water from very questionable sources, and so they get very mucky, very muddy, dirty water, and when this happens, they don't really have a way of clarifying it, they just have to use it. This compound that's in the seed, the seeds can be ground up and put into the water, and it helps to clarify the water. There's also just all the little byproducts from the seeds as we harvest our leaf and as we do our pruning and those kinds of things, all those bits and pieces can be used, because the wood we use as firewood, all the other little branches we feed to the goats, we have goats, or you can also feed them to cattle, and those help the goats in the cattle to gain more weight, not have worms as often produced more milk. What we find with the morning of tree is there's no part of the tree that ends up going to waste. Every single part of the tree is useful. In fact, even the root, the morning of tree has one tuber root, it doesn't have a lot of roots that go in different directions, so it can be intercropped or alley-cropped into other regular crops. The root itself is also edible. It tastes a little bit like horseradish, so it's made into a hot sauce that can be used, but it also has all kinds of medicinal qualities. It really is a miracle tree, and the more I learn about the tree, the more I see it as God's expression of His love for the poor, that He would make a tree that grows in this climb, in these kinds of climates where the poor people live, that answers their need in so many places, not that the morning of tree is the answer to poverty, because it's not, but it is definitely one of the things that God has provided naturally that can help them a lot. There's some other things that you showed me in your fields here and around your goats that would represent change in agriculture as it's done here in Rwanda. Tell us a little bit more about farming God's way. We have tried a lot of agricultural methods here, especially trying to fit the method with Rwandan people and who they are and the tools that they have and the environment that they live in. So there's a lot of farming methods that we have eliminated that they just wouldn't work in Rwanda, but there have been quite a few that I felt would work. One that has really come to the top in the last couple years is called farming God's way, and it's a very fun mixture of learning about God and who God is at the same time as learning about how to take really good care of our soil and of our crops. Here in Africa, we tend to get very poor crops from our land. There's a number of reasons for that. We have torrential downpour rains, which carries off massive amounts of topsoil every year. The sun, when it comes out, even during the rainy season, is so intense that it just soaks up all the moisture in the ground very quickly and the crops dry out very quickly. The other thing is because there's not a lot, people don't have a lot of fertilizer, sometimes they have none, there's nothing going back into the soil. Another problem is when people clear their fields, for example, if they had corn in their fields and they're clearing the cornstalk, they'll put them all in a pile and burn them. So all the minerals and all the goodness from the cornstalk that could have been returned to the soil is forever finished and gone, and the soil is often left bare in between seasons, leaving it to the sun and to the rain. To do its work. All of these things combined make it so that here in Rwanda, as well as other places in Africa, we have very poor crops. This method of farming God's way is very different. It's a form of mulch farming. So all those cornstalk that were on the field, we just cut them and lay them right back down on the field, and we'll even bring other grasses and things so that the soil is completely covered. So then when we have these torrential downpours, the rain is hitting the grass, not the soil. They've done tests on it to see, and there is very, very, very little soil that is actually carried away on a field that is mulched as compared to a field next door that has no mulch on it. The other thing is, is that when that sun does come out in between the rains and the bare fields are almost immediately dry, the mulched fields keeps moist for quite a long time. And we've seen crops go through from two weeks to up to a month with no rain and have no loss on the crops because it was well mulched. The other thing is, we're very careful about how we plant our seeds, about the spacing of seeds, and in every, with every seed, there is a handful of fertilizer. And so we do use fertilizer, but we use it very carefully. We don't tell people to spread it out over their whole field, which would be very discouraging because nobody would really have enough fertilizer. Instead, every place where we have a seed, there's just enough fertilizer for that seed. And the mulch, as it rots over time, fertilizes the soil. So what they're finding throughout Africa, when this method is used, is that within three years, the soil has improved tremendously. The soil just improves every year, every year, and at three years, you basically have your peak soil that has a lot of fertilizer, all the top soil, all the healthy microbes, all the nutrients that are needed, and they just are getting bumper crops off of these fields. So we still use the hoe, we still use local fertilizer, whatever can be found, whether it's cow dung or whether it's goat or whether it's composted material. We use mulch that is found right there in the neighborhood that came from other crops or just grasses from around. There's not really any technology that people can't get a hold of that we're using. We're using all their own technology, but it's just this change of idea, and we care about every single plant because we believe that God cares about every single plant. God cares about every single seed, and as we're hoeing, as we're planting, we're praying, and we're asking God to be in this field with us, that His Spirit be with us as we're doing this, that His Spirit stay here in this field, in this place, because God cares about people, we know that, but God also cares about His creation. And He cares that His creation produces enough to feed His people, and we talk about hoeing with joy in our hearts and praying for our neighbors as we're hoeing those many hours that we're spending out in our field, that we're praying for our neighbors, that we're thinking of the people around us, that we're worshiping God and praising Him for what He's given us, that we're asking Him for the rain we need for our crops, 'cause He cares about our crops. And we return to every plant numerous times to weed, although we do a lot less weeding than the average person, because that mulch keeps a lot of the weeds away. In fact, by the third year, you don't do any weeding at all, but we return to each plant also to put that little extra bit of fertilizer as the plant is growing. We just really treat our plants as if God has given them to us, and what they find is that in Africa, the average harvest on a hectare, for example of corn, is a half a ton of corn per hectare. And with this method, I have a friend who planted this method the first time, and he got just over 3 tons per hectare of corn in his first planting, and it's only going up from there. And they have people who get 10 tons per hectare of corn from this planting method. I think there's a lot more that we could talk about. I saw the goats out there and how you use their droppings and how you're feeding them, stuff from the meringa tree. Are people willing to adopt this here in Rwanda? I find that it's much easier for people who have a higher education and more income to get excited about these things and adopt them quickly. However, that's not my goal. My goal is for the poor people to be able to adopt these, and it's much, much more difficult. They tend to be right on the edge of survival, having just barely enough to eat or not enough to eat. They're not real willing to take risks, and doing something new is kind of risky. And so I have to be creative as to how, basically, how I can prove to them that something is really worth their time and effort, and it's going to improve their lives and not destroy their lives. And so what I've done is I will take a small plot of land. Either I will do it myself or I'll find somebody who's a fast adopter, like a pastor or somebody who believes in this stuff, and we'll do a small plot of land and we'll do it farming God's way. We'll plant the same thing everybody else is planting, but we do it our way, and we don't even have to say anything, just do it. I have a pastor friend, Jonathan, you met him today at lunch, who planted a field, a big field, farming God's way. I went to visit his field, his corn was way over my head, and it was on this path. His field was on the right, his corn was way over my head, and all green and beautiful, just right to the left of this path, same soil, same rain, same sun, same seed. The corn was not even up to my waist, it was spindly, it was dried up, there was no harvest. Right there, when people start seeing that, they look at their corn and despair, they look at their neighbor's corn and go, "Wow, I think I want to know what he's doing, and all of a sudden you get a lot of interest." So, that's how I get most of my students, is they say, "I saw how your beans were growing, and I want my beans to look like that." And I said, "Well, I'd be happy to help you with that." They have to want it, it's not that I want it, and I'm trying to force it on them, it's never going to work. Debbie, missionary conjures a lot of different images for people. For some of us, we have fairly negative ideas, some of us think of missionaries coming to the United States, proclaiming that the people live there are savages and telling them they're wrong, they have to change and do it our way. Tell me about your journey to becoming a missionary here, did you just grow up wanting to come to Africa? I had never really considered being a missionary until I was 16 years old. On one very specific day at one very specific occasion, God called me to be a missionary. And I accepted that, and I said, "Yes, now that's what I want, because that's what God wants." And so, it's kind of been a journey from that day, I didn't really know what all that meant. I had kind of a foggy image of missionaries up on a pedestal somewhere, but slowly, God has just been showing me. Being a missionary is just being his child in a different place. And there's nothing magical about being a missionary. In fact, it's just downright hard a lot of times. Living and working in a different culture, really having to work hard at understanding exactly what's going on and how to be helpful. One thing that helped a lot when David and I became missionaries here in Rwanda, when we came here, we were pretty young. You know, maybe 24 and 25. And I think that helped a lot because we just weren't old enough to jump in there and think, you know, we know everything and we can do everything. We were feeling pretty tentative at that point. And since the beginning, God has helped us to recognize the people we work with are amazing people. He is working in them powerfully. Yes, God can use us too, alongside them, but God hasn't given us something He hasn't given them. And so it's been really good just throughout the years to recognize how much God uses our Rwandan brothers and sisters and how much He works in them and how our work is just a piece. You know, it's just one piece of the puzzle and the rest of the puzzle, you know, is Rwandans. When I can see it in that perspective, it's much easier to live as a missionary because you recognize, you know, it's not all about me doing things. And, you know, thousands of people being saved because of me, and it's just not the way it works. It's just not the way God created us. I just find, as the years go by, I just find more and more joy in working with Rwandans. And I see more and more in them. I just see so many gifts and abilities and strengths in them. And I just consider it a privilege to be able to work with them, even though I'm not from their culture, even though they have to put up with a lot with me when I don't understand, or when I get myself into a fix because I'm a mazungu, they let me in. They let me be a part of it. They let me be a part of what God's doing amongst them, and man, it's great. Can you give me a little bit more specific about the process? At 16, you hear the call. You're going to be a missionary. And somehow, you know, eight years later, you're in this place, and I think you arrived here somewhat three years after the genocide, and, you know, just somewhat less than a million people are slaughtered in this country. And I think you came with a couple kids. I mean, this seems counterintuitive. You know, if I had to plan it, I would have done it differently. But God had his ways, and he had his reasons. When I was 16, I was called, and so I was ready to enter into college, and God had called me to be a missionary and a teacher. So I entered into elementary education with an international studies minor. But just really, my heart was going to the mission field. And I didn't want to be slowed down by anything I didn't want to get caught up in anything. I'm like four years finished my degree. I'm out of here. So I wasn't even really all that interested in getting married. Because, of course, 16, you know, most of the guys I'd met at that time were pretty shallow, and I thought they'd just slow me down anyway. I certainly didn't want to have any school loans, because missionaries don't make that much. And a lot of times, missions boards won't take you on if you have loans. And so I was trying to get through college without getting hooked up with a guy, and without having any loans. So in my first week, I met David, my now husband, who is a missionary kid, and who is different than any person any guy I'd ever met. His heart was also very much to become a missionary. And so much so that he was also very tentative about it. We didn't want to get too involved, unless we were both going to the same place. Because we were both new, we were going somewhere. And miraculously, God helped me with paying for college. I went to a private Christian college that cost a lot of money. And yes, I worked my tail off, and I got a lot of scholarships. But God worked his tail off, too, to find all the money. I came out with no loans. David had very few loans. We worked four jobs between the two of us, our first year out of college, to pay off the rest of his loans so that we could go. So once God had put the call in our hearts, and he did it separately before we met, you know, we were just set on this track. The difficult part was where to go, and we really had our hearts set on India, and we wanted to go to India. So we were making preparations to go to India on our own to be students there for a while in seminary. This was our idea of our entrance into the mission field. And the missions organization, Evangelical Friends Mission, that we had contacted, we contacted them and said we're going to India. We just want to be under your umbrella. We're really not asking for much, but we want to work under you guys, eventually. And this is what we're doing. We want you to be aware. And they asked us to come to Rwanda. By that point, I found that I was pregnant with our first child. So we are, you know, maybe six months into our marriage and maybe, you know, three months into our pregnancy. And they asked us to go to Rwanda. And we were at that moment that genocide had just finished happening. So, you know, we've been seeing these images on television. We've been hearing the atrocities that had happened, and our answer was no. Absolutely not. We have no interest whatsoever. They were pretty persistent, and they kept praying. And the missionary couple who was here in Rwanda at that time was about ready to retire. And they were praying for a young couple who had come and take over the work so they could retire. The woman, her name's Doris Ferguson, she's really a prayer. I mean, when she starts praying for something, watch out. And so they were praying, and then the mission was praying, and they talked to us a couple more times about coming to Rwanda, and we just said no. Pretty soon we realized, you know, God wants us to at least ask him what he thinks. That doesn't mean we have to go. It doesn't mean we want to go. It doesn't mean we're even really thinking about it. But we got to the point where we could ask God, God, do you want us to go to Rwanda? And God was not quick in answering that question for us. Really, it was kind of a three, four-month process there of just kind of turmoil. You know, we don't really want to go, but we want to follow God, and we know we want to be missionaries. So God just tell us, and we'll move on with life, whichever direction it is. Eventually, God did make it clear that he wanted us to go to Rwanda. He really had to be very, very clear with us because we didn't have a lot of desire to come here. We had a lot of desire to be missionaries. But for Rwanda, we weren't really interested in jumping in too quick. One of the confirmations was when we became accepted as missionaries with the FM to go to Rwanda, we found out that we were going to have to raise our own support. And Dave and I were very, very unexcited about that. We just weren't excited about raising our own support. We just really had a piece that God was saying, listen, I'll raise your support. You go to churches, you share what's happening in your life. You share my call on your life and leave it at that. If I want people to support you, I'll let them know. And we thought, you know, this is good. We don't really want to push this thing too much anyway. If the funds don't show up, we don't go to Rwanda. We go somewhere nicer. You know, that'd be great. Within three months, every bit of our funding was there, and it's been solid for the last ten years. And there were definitely times when we got to Rwanda, and I had to look back at things like that to make sure that we were supposed to be here. Because when we got here, it was hard. It was a country that was still in turmoil. There was fighting. We were held at gunpoint in our home. We were robbed just ten days after we got here. By that time, I had my first baby, and my second one, actually, by the time I got here. Because we also went to language study. We had a year of language study and training in Europe. And that's where I had my son, who's our second born. So the first one was born before we left. The second one was born in language study. We got here, I had a two-year-old and a six-month-old. And we just came into this difficult situation. There were days when we didn't know if we'd lived through it, literally. And there were days when we just wanted to go home, like almost every day. And we'd just look back and we'd go, "Okay, why are we here? What are we doing? What is this all about? What's the purpose?" We didn't have any answers to those questions at that time, but we looked back and we saw what God did, and we knew we were supposed to be here. And there were some days my only comfort was if God's purpose is for me to die in Rwanda, if he wanted that, then so be it, because he's made it clear I'm supposed to be here. Those first years were really hard, and we certainly didn't see how God would ever use us. A language study was heart-wrenchingly hard. It, Kenya or Guanda, is rated, you know how they rate how difficult languages are. It shows up different in different scales, but it shows up somewhere around the 12th hardest language in the world. So this is not easy to do with two young children, and by the way, I got pregnant during that period of time, and I was extremely ill, trying to learn language, trying to adjust a culture, very unstable country. It was just a very, very difficult time, and we didn't see God working. We just didn't see it, but we just had to keep looking back and saying he wants us here, he wants us here. We don't know what this is about, we can't see the future, but we've just got to be obedient. So the call for us had to be double, triple, quadruple, sure, and God knew that because of how hard those first years were going to be. He knew we needed a very solid call to keep us here. And now, Debbie, you've been here more than ten years, is this for the rest of your life? You know, it seems to me that God shines his light on the path just before us a bit, and that's the way it's been for us here. What I can tell you right now is that I know that the work that God has for me now is here, and I can see that what he's given me now is going at least three to five years in the future. You know, I can't see us leaving here before then, but I don't know after that. David and I have talked about eventually, later on in life, doing some missionary training, especially for national missionaries. We really have a heart to see non-westerners going out to other countries as missionaries. For example, training Rwandans to become missionaries to other countries, seeing kind of the national churches growing up to be missionary sending themselves. And recognizing that when that happens, there's so many things that we as westerners have learned in missions through all these years, and so many mistakes we've already made, that if there could be training programs that could help people to get to the level where western missions has already gotten, learn all those lessons, at least then they could make their own mistakes and not repeat all the ones that we've made. So I can definitely see in the future that God would have a change for us at some point. I pray that it's not in the United States. I pray that God, if he were to make a move for us, that it would be in another country in Africa and Asia. We'd be interested in Asia too. I don't have any desire to live in the United States. The Lord just hasn't made my heart want that. And so I think that's not in my future. But I wouldn't be surprised if there was a change. And you know, if we stay here for a very long time, I'd be happy with that too. Why not the United States? Why don't you want to be in the United States? There's something about that that definitely is repelling you? You know, God, when he calls us, he makes our heart want what he has called us to. For my first probably four or five years here in Rwanda, I wanted to go home. I wanted to live in the United States. I would have almost been happy if there was some kind of a war that made us leave because it was so difficult. But God has really made this become my home. I love being here. I love the people. I love raising my children here. This is my life. You know, I don't want anything else. But I also recognize that the point in my life could come where the Lord could give me peace to live in America. But there just is, there's just no desire in me. Although it's hard a lot of times to be a missionary in dealing with different culture and being away from family and being away from the comforts of quote unquote home there in the States, that's what I want. God has just put that desire in my heart. He's put the desire in my heart to live outside the United States. And I just feel like what the skills that he's giving me, the insight he's giving me to fight poverty from a spiritual aspect, from a physical, a real transformational, what on earth good would that information be in the United States of America? And I really want to use everything he's putting in me and everything he's giving me. I want to use it to make a difference for his kingdom. I just want to be able to put to use all that he's put in me to help other people. Because I feel like God's put so much into me, he's given me so much to my life and I want to pass that on. And so all I can say is that he's just really given me a heart to live amongst the poor. He's given me a heart to live amongst the needy in a place where I can use the gifts and the skills that he's put in me. Absolutely last question coming up here. You're Quaker, I'm Quaker, they're Quaker here that you're working with. I'm part of unprogrammed friends meeting. You are part of what we refer to as program friends meeting in the States. Here are their programmed friends or pastoral friends. How does this work for you, similarity or differences? Are you at home in their worship? How's that compared to what you grew up with? I kind of struggle with the church thing. Church services are very long here and I have four children. And sitting through a church service for three to four hours, sometimes six or seven hours, I don't really particularly enjoy that. No. I love the singing, I love their enthusiasm. But there are definitely things in the church service that I go, "Huh, if I were to do it my way, I would certainly do it differently." I remember sharing with my director this one time this sense of guilt. Here I am a missionary and I'm really struggling with church. I'm not loving the church thing. And I was sharing this with my director just having this feeling of guilt and he said, "Now think about this for a minute." If you were really loving church, they would probably not be liking it that much. You don't come from the same culture, you don't like the same things, you don't worship in the same ways. You know, he said if they're doing church in such a way that they love it, that they are worshiping from their hearts. They're just reflecting back to God, worshiping him with who he has created them to be, then that's the way it ought to be. And there is a certain amount of shaping and there is a certain amount of structure and those kind of things that have been brought in. But one thing I love about the Rwandan friends church is that they really are free to worship in their way. And I've seen churches in Africa where dancing isn't allowed. Africans dance. If they're happy, they dance. There's just no other way about it. And it's not evil. They dance for God. They dance out of joy. That's just the way God made them. And they dance here and they clap and they sing and they're joyful and they write their own songs. And their services are forever long and it makes me crazy. But it's not about me. So I guess to answer your question, yeah, if I had my ideal church service for me and my children, it would look completely different than the church services here. And we often do feel tired. I feel like maybe we don't want to go again. We feel that way, but we recognize it's not all about making us happy. It's not all about us having our worship experience. It's about them having their worship experience. Well, you've got such a rich history here with your 10 plus years. I want to thank you so much, Debbie, for the work you're doing for the Rwandan people. For the inner work you've done to bring yourself in line with what God asks of you. It's inspirational to me. And I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. You're welcome. It's been a pleasure. That was a visit I had with Debbie Thomas, Missionary with the Evangelical Friends Church in Rwanda for the past 10 years. Please check my northern spirit radio.org site for videos from the Thomas family which they sent back to the USA with me. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern spirit radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit in action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. [MUSIC PLAYING]