by Lesley Crosson
Dorothee Nshimimana lay on an operating table in the delivery room of a Nairobi, Kenya, hospital listening to doctors discuss her probable death and the steps they would take to deliver the baby she was carrying. It would be her second child.
"They were speaking in English," she said. "They must have thought I couldn’t understand what they were saying because I am from Burundi and our language is French."
But Ms. Nshimimana, a professor of Swahili and English, who lives in the Burundian capital of Bujumbura, understood every word.
Her heart and her faith told her what to do. Amid the chatter of the doctors and the clatter of sophisticated medical equipment, she drew upon the little strength she had left and appealed to God.
"I said, God, what are you going to do? You know me. Please do what you can. And after praying those words, I got so much energy. I pushed hard, and the baby came."
That was in 1996. Today, Ms. Nshimimana is president of the 60-women strong United Methodist Women unit in the Bujumbura District of the East African nation of Burundi. The women are determined to raise money to establish a project to assist children orphaned and women widowed by war. The ministry is already operating with whatever money the women can raise among themselves.
Ms. Nshimimana is living testament to the fact that the women have embarked on what amounts to a faith walk, funded in large part by sheer determination and their belief that they have been called out into the community to fulfill God’s mission.
Ms. Nshimimana described her life-threatening delivery during a recent meeting of members of The United Methodist Church in Burundi with representatives of the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries. The meeting was held in Bujambara because fighting along the road to the city of Gitega, where the majority of the church’s projects are located, made it too dangerous to travel there.
She recalled the doctors’ reaction:
"They thought it was a miracle. They said, ‘What is this?’ This is a miracle.’"
There was wonder, jubilation and thanksgiving in the delivery room that day as she overcame soaring blood pressure and complications from diabetes. Even after the delivery Ms. Nshimimana’s thoughts stayed with God.
"When the baby came, I prayed my thanks to God and I asked what can I do to really thank you for this?"
She resolved to do something in return. The answer came to her when she and her husband, Charles Itangishaka, returned home to Burundi.
"I said to my husband, let us find an orphan who is a girl who has no mother or even a father to care for her, and let us do for her what adoptive parents would have done for our child if I had died."
The civil war in Burundi between the minority Tutsi government and the majority Hutu population has killed thousands of people over the last six years. The most visible casualties of the fighting are the thousands of widows and orphans left to make a way for themselves in a devastated economy.
There are 300 widows in the church in Ms. Nshimimana’s parish alone. Add to that the hundreds of children orphaned by war, and a picture of the enormous need for women like Dorothee Nshimimana to care for them emerges.
She and her husband adopted a 3-year-old girl, Elizabeth Kwizero, from an organization that said the little girl had been found in the bush after her parents were killed. The child, like so many children orphaned by the war, was traumatized.
"She was silent, not speaking, screaming in the night, urinating on the floor and jumping all over everything," Ms. Nshimimana said. "She would say, ‘They are coming to kill me! I’m dying,’ then she would scream, over and over again. I just hugged her, and carried her."
Ms. Nshimimana’s other children were too young to be understanding as Elizabeth acted out her trauma.
"They said to me, ‘Why did you bring her here?’ I didn’t want them to say take her away, so I just told them, this is my baby and I love her."
Within two years, the love, the patience and a place in a family that cared was reflected in signs of healing for Elizabeth.
"One day she said, ‘Mama, Mama,’" Ms. Nahimimana said. "Then she said ‘Ala, Ala’, trying to speak my son’s name."
As she got older, Elizabeth, now 6 and attending primary school, began to ask why her name was different from her brother and sister’s -- a sign she had made the adoptive family her own. Ms. Nshimimana said she and her husband have decided to change Elizabeth’s name so she will share the same last name as her siblings. There are now four children, including Elizabeth, in the family. The youngest, Leon Joel, was born in the past year.
Elizabeth’s story, repeated in households throughout Burundi, is part of what fuels the determination of Ms. Nshiminana and the United Methodist Women in Bujumbura to expand their ministry to widows and children victimized by war. Since the 1993 crisis in Burundi, the women have directed a major portion of their efforts to easing the trauma and healing the wounds of war.
"We find mothers to adopt and care for the orphans with love, and medicine if they need it," Ms. Nshimimana said. "But it is not enough. We must do more for orphans by putting them with families in the church who can see to their needs and their schooling. We must be able to make home visits to see what other assistance they need."
The challenge is not lack of spirit but lack of funds when so many families are struggling just to survive. Despite the shortage of funds, the women continue, with uncommon clarity of vision and purpose, to make plans for a trauma center for war widows and children who have lost fathers, mothers or entire families. They regularly donate what they can to the center and are seeking funding beyond their own resources.
"Expanding the ministry is a mandate that United Methodist Women must fulfill," Ms. Nshimimana said.
As they work toward that goal, cries of anguish continue to reverberate throughout the war-scarred country. But in some places, those cries are punctuated by the laughter of children being nurtured back to wholeness by people like Dorothee Nshimimana and the United Methodist Women of Bujumbura.
Lesley Crosson is director of public relations for the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries.