That night we met with our partner Pierre. He was nervous about the training. He had seen our training plan and didn’t think it would work. He told us that Burundians are shy, reserved people who would be uncomfortable sharing their values and participating in the other training exercises we had designed. I was also feeling nervous and Mehdi confided that he had felt like taking the next flight back to France.

We all woke up very early the next day, ready to begin. I was feeling like I always did on the morning of a trial: anxious, stressed and vaguely unwell. I wondered if people would show up. What kind of solutions could we offer people who have suffered the kind of social upheaval that Burundi experienced? Would the training address the major needs to overhaul a system in need of much attention and fixing?
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The training was to begin on Tuesday, May 20th and we went to court on Monday to get a glimpse of the legal system to prepare for the session. The courthouse had seen better days. Many of the windows were broken and litter was strewn about. Inside the building people were milling about in the halls lethargically. Only one courtroom was conducting business that morning.Inside the courtroom three judges sat on their dais. Unlike the common law system, in civil systems there are no juries, just a panel of judges who function as fact finders and arbiters.

There weren’t any court reporters, computers or clerks to update the files. The court dockets were stacked in a large pile on the bench. I could tell right away that getting justice in Burundi would be a painstaking, inefficient and labor-intensive process.

The courtroom, which would only be handling civil matters that day, was filled to capacity with citizens who would be appearing before the judges that day. In an American courthouse, you would see lawyers everywhere. In fact, there would be more lawyers than clients waiting in the halls. This was not the case in Burundi. Only two attorneys were present that day, excluding Mehdi and me. We later learned that there are only about 90 lawyers for the entire country. Of these lawyers, only a tiny percentage practice criminal law and all of them are concentrated in the capital of Bujumbura.

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After Marlon vigorously searched through IBJ’s resumes, we found a French criminal defender who was interested in IBJ’s work. We called him and within a week we were meeting our trainer. Mehdi Benbouzid, a French criminal defender with extensive experience training lawyers, students and police, has an invested interest in Africa and a commitment to human rights. He also had the necessary amount of francophone civil law expertise, as he had a Law degree and a Masters in Law from Université Jean Moulin in Lyon. He had been actively practicing as a criminal defender for twelve years, all the while teaching and lecturing on criminal law. He had lectured on war crimes and crimes against human rights. He had recently completed work with the International Red Cross in Syria and Jordan as a field coordinator/team leader, interviewing suspected terrorists held in Jordan and providing human rights assessments in Syria. He was perfect.

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IBJ began planning the Burundi training program in earnest in February of 2008. It was my responsibility to adapt our work in China and Vietnam to this training. I was being assisted by a young Zimbabwean attorney, Marlon Zakeyo. Marlon had worked as an intern for IBJ for two years, during which time he had been building relationships with legal organizations in Africa.

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I arrived at International Bridges to Justice in November of 2007 to fill the role of Deputy Director. Prior to working at IBJ, I was a public defender in San Francisco for twenty-two years. I had met the founder of IBJ, Karen Tse, in 1992 when we were colleagues in the SFPD office. After gaining experience as a defender, Karen moved on to a career as an international human rights attorney. She founded IBJ in 2001.When I began working at IBJ, the organization had already developed an expertise in training attorneys and developing systemic solutions to implementing criminal laws in Asia. Preparatory work had already been completed to expand IBJ’s programs into Burundi and Rwanda, and one of my first assignments was to organize the first training of defenders, judges, police, prosecutors and members of civil society in Burundi. Contemporaneously, IBJ had plans to follow up work in Rwanda by launching a rights awareness campaign in that country.

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