The Women are the Key

A well-known fact in community development circles is that if you want to enter a community, you introduce yourself to the leader, most often a man. But if you want to learn how the community functions and tap into its life force, then make time to listen to the women.

The key to transformation is found among the women. When my husband, Claude, and I began our work in Burundi, I didn’t yet fully grasp this fundamental truth. In 2009, our fledgling development organization began work in the gentle green mountains of Matara, a rural commune about eleven miles from the capital city. Working with community leaders, we identified and invited thirty Batwa families to move to a new plot of land that would become theirs. On a hot June day, the men arrived from other provinces with little more than a single sack of essentials—all they owned, really. They surveyed the land and all the work that would need to be done to make it home and to bring about food security for their families sooner rather than later.

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