| Baskets from Rwanda's Gahaya Links cooperative.
The roots of Gahaya Links are the hands of the women of Rwanda - hands that weave, hands that hold children, hands that wiped away a thousand tears following the Genocide of 1994, and hands that now reach out in healing to help rebuild a nation.
When Janet Nkubana, co-founder, with her sister Joy Ndunguntse, of Gahaya Links, arrived from exile in the midst of the 1994 genocide and first imagined a community of creative healing, the streets of Kigali were barren, the wounds wide open, the country pitch-black at night with no electricity.
Gahaya Links was at the core of healing a troubled nation, lifting its women from the ruins left by the genocide. Gahaya Links brought together women and men from both sides of the conflict and led the formation of weaving cooperatives throughout their country - using a weaving tradition passed from mother to daughter for generations, a skill that most Rwandan women had... The women quite literally wove their communities back together...
Between 2003 - 2008, Gahaya Links connected more than 3,500 artisans in 40 cooperatives and associations all over Rwanda.
from the article Weaving Peace, by Willa Shalit, in Hand/Eye 10. |
