Inside the `perimetre cellulaire': (Amah Assiama's work in Rwanda).

Ever since leaving Ivory Coast to study abroad in 1984, Amah Assiama had dreamed of returning to Africa. So when she attended a conference in Caux in 1994, she took her chance to apply to a number of Geneva-based international organizations.

Shortly after returning to her work as a corporate lawyer in Montreal, Canada, she received a phone call from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). `They wanted to send me to Rwanda for three months. It was 6am, and I said yes, without thinking. When I put the phone down, I realized what I'd done--it was September and the genocide had only ended in July. But I didn't know who to call back to say I'd changed my mind!'

Her misgivings only grew when she reached Rwanda. `There were bullet holes in the walls of the airport, there were bullet holes in the road signs, there were burnt-out, abandoned cars in the streets.' Her colleagues, veterans of Cambodia, Myanmar and other crisis spots, laughed at her fear of insects, her anxieties about the food and water, and her desire to shower twice a day. `They thought I wouldn't last.'

In spite of this, by the time the first two months were over, Assiama had become enthusiastic about her work. `When people came to us you could see the fear. You'd end with five children hanging onto you.' She found there were things she could do to help--whether taking the details of a woman's missing child or husband and passing them on to those who could trace them, obtaining the materials to build a roof, or even giving a police station a pad and pen so they could write down the names of the people they arrested.

In the end, Assiama stayed three years in Rwanda, and then another three in Ethiopia. She is now UNHCR's Deputy Representative in Burundi.

`I learnt a lot in Rwanda,' she says. `Academic degrees do not teach you how to cry with people, find someone a blanket, help to bury a child, help someone get to the hospital to die, build a house. It's an honour to take part in nation building, to help people pick themselves up.'

This summer, Assiama brought two people from Burundi to Caux for the citizens' dialogue between people from the Great Lakes region. `On one level it seems nuts, to say "800,000 people have been killed, let's go to Caux, maybe it's possible to rebuild." But I'm capable of believing in the miraculous.' And the exchanges, some between former enemies, had been `fantastic' she said.

She sees in her life since 1994 the evidence that `Somebody is working'. `In Burundi, the mobile phones are not very powerful. You get an announcement, "You have moved out of the perimetre cellulaire (the range of the cellular phone)." One step in the right direction can re-establish that. That's what I believe about trying to listen to God--it's about placing yourself in the perimetre cellulaire.'

Assiama has returned to Rwanda since her tour of duty there, to find formerly deserted roads bustling with life or blocked by traffic jams, children back at school, houses being built. `Life has returned,' she says. `People laugh. We used to think that Rwandans didn't laugh.'