The Peace Basket
From the depths of despair, one woman uses her craft and the power of forgiveness to weave a new beginning in Rwanda.
I have come to this small village in Rwanda to see Pascasie Mukamunigo. It is not the first time I have met this tall, slender woman of regal bearing. Our initial encounter occurred, improbably enough, at a Macy's in Atlanta a year and a half ago, after a friend had asked for my help in planning the event that kicked off the store's sale of hand-crafted baskets made by Mukamunigo and other Rwandan women.
The events that brought us into each other's lives began much earlier, though, in 1994, when Mukamunigo bundled up baskets she had woven from papyrus and banana leaves and traveled to the Rwandan capital of Kigali, where she had hoped to sell her baskets to support her husband and six children. Mukamunigo, a Tutsi, arrived in the capital just as Hutu mobs began their attempted annihilation of the Tutsi population. As the killing began, she ran to a local church for cover, hiding for nearly four months, often crouched motionless for hours to evade capture and certain death. She had little to eat and few she could trust.
Finally, when the first foreigners, French forces, arrived in Rwanda to help, Mukamunigo hobbled home. She hoped beyond hope she'd find her family alive. Instead, her worst fears were realized. Her husband, along with three of her children, had been murdered. Mukamunigo's beloved oldest son had been killed by machete. Friends pointed out his killer. He was a neighbor.
"We Never Forget"
As we sit in her simple home, which is painted black with white trim, Mukamunigo serves us yogurt milk from a large yellow jug. She is clearly proud to have milk as well as a glass for each of her American guests. But it is not enough just to welcome us to her home. We also go to a nearby church, its doors locked. As we peek through a window we see row upon row of skulls laid out neatly on the pews. Mukamunigo nods at the skulls and says through a translator that it's important that we never forget. These are the skulls of her neighbors and countrymen, killed during the genocide.
Mukamunigo does not forget, but she has moved forward. With her husband dead and the country in economic despair, she owned little more than a simple mud hut at first. She continued to weave, organizing loose collectives, hoping to find a market bigger than impoverished Rwanda in which to sell her work.
In 2003, an extraordinary opportunity presented itself in the form of Willa Shalit, founder and CEO of Fair Winds Trading, and a delegation of American businesswomen who traveled to Rwanda at the invitation of the United Nations Development Fund for Women. Their objective was to help women in conflict zones develop businesses and achieve economic security.
"They had lost everything, and juxtaposed to that was the fact that the art these women were making was absolutely phenomenal," Shalit recalls. "It was elegant. It was dignified. It was finely crafted." Upon returning to the U.S., Shalit approached Macy's. In a true moment of serendipity, the senior Macy's executive she met had seen the film Hotel Rwanda the night before. Macy's agreed to carry the women's baskets in keeping with the "Trade Not Aid" concept at the core of Shalit's organization, which fights world poverty by linking artisans with global markets. "These women do not need handouts," she explains. "They need sustainable income."
Shalit, a close friend, had asked for my help as a marketing professional in coordinating the Macy's kickoff event, when Mukamunigo and I first met; but it was my desire to see this transformation of Rwanda in progress, and to accept Mukamunigo's personal invitation to visit her, that brought me to Africa. I have come here with a group from Macy's, which has sold these baskets in more than a dozen styles since 2005. More than 60,000 baskets have been sold to Macy's to date, made by more than 2,000 women employed in villages across Rwanda. Mukamunigo teaches men and women in her weaving group how to make baskets to Macy's specifications, which require tightly fitting lids and evenly woven patterns.
Today Mukamunigo is a respected village elder. She and her fellow weavers get paid as much as $28 for each basket, roughly one-third of the retail price of their baskets – an unprecedented amount of income for individual rural households. The average laborer in Rwanda, if a job can even be found, earns only 69 cents a day. Yet the average weaver can earn anywhere between $3 and $7 a day, depending on how fast she weaves. A weaver of Mukamunigo's ability can sustain a healthy living. Thanks to the money she's earned, in fact, Mukamunigo has remodeled her simple mud hut so it now resembles a compound. She has seven cows and land on which they can graze. It's all enough to support her three surviving children, as well as a number of orphans. Ten orphans live with her, and she provides help to at least 30 more children in her village. Mukamunigo's efforts with baskets even drew the attention of Bill Clinton in his recent book, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World (Knopf, 2007), in which he talks about Mukamunigo as a symbol of reconciliation in Rwanda.
"Peace Starts Here"
Mukamunigo is a master weaver, but the process of making baskets represents more than just entwining material into elegant shapes. She literally hopes to reweave her country's people. Though her standards for the baskets are high, her patience and willingness to work with people is nearly inexhaustible. Several years ago, as Mukamunigo started her weaving group, she noticed a man standing on the sidelines, curious and obviously hoping to join in. He was one of many in the village branded as a genocidaire, a person responsible for killing. In fact, he was the very man neighbors said had killed her eldest son.
Nevertheless, she invited him to join her group. Later, someone asked her, "How do you find the spiritual strength to do this?" Mukamunigo replied through a translator, "It's not spiritual strength; it's practicality. The peace has to start here."
Perhaps that is why Mukamunigo's signature baskets, with their cathedral shaped lids, are known in Rwanda as the "Peace Basket."
PINK POINTS! Danica Kombol, president of Spark and Co.,
donated her writing fee to Rwanda Gift for Life, which supports
women in Rwanda who were raped during the genocide
and are now living with AIDS. For more information, visit
rwandagiftforlife.org.
Mukamunigo and her fellow weavers get paid as much as $28 for each basket, roughly one-third of the retail price of their baskets – an unprecedented amount of income for individual rural households.
