First Presbyterian Church in Bend received this hut from the Atwater people of Burundi.

The similarities surprised me. A marginalized people in a poor country appear to have much in common with the settlement history of the American West. Who knew?

In Burundi, land, or not having any, is paramount. Without it, there's nowhere to graze cows if you have them; nowhere to grow crops if you have seeds. And if you have seeds but no cows, then no fertilizer to bring those cassava plants to bloom. And anyone, anytime, can ask you to move. One of the Batwa villages we visited made their home next to the city dump but that was better than the cemetery they'd been living in first when the government moved them from the rain forests. No tilling of soil there and imagine the ostracism.

Our western expansion was all about land: better land, more land, my land. The desire for ownership of a sense of place has driven many a soul to buy a plot of ground and try to make a living from it. (Homestead, anyone?) Many early settlers in Eastern Oregon found that large tracts were needed to support a cow and calf. The farmers who came later discovered they might need to work away from their plot to earn cash when a crop failed to produce. Women often did the tilling while their husbands and sons broke horses or helped with branding on a spread some distance from their home plot. Batwa men and women, when they have ID cards, often clean houses far from their village; pick bananas and sell them. Most make a dollar a day. We learned of one tobacco plantation whose owner just fed and housed the Batwa for their work. No school and certainly no time for church. Slaves, really.

Then there's the natural resource to consider. Pioneer settlements grew up around water, rivers and streams. Eventually wells got dug hoping to find a way around the rivers contaminated by cattle or insects or even drought. In Burundi, where I spent 12 days in February listening to the stories of the Batwa people, water came from brown rivers (not those blue ones known here in the West), and water was carried up steep hillsides for washing, cooking, and drinking. We drank bottled water the entire time we were there. And at one village, when we danced and sang together we raised the red dust. Then at a signal not recognized by us foreigners, the singing stopped. Everyone moved back. A young man carrying a 5 gallon jug on his shoulder began pouring precious water to settle the dancing dust so that the "guests might not have dust on their feet" our interpreter said. Those 40 pounds of water he'd carried up a steep hill and he'd used it to settle dust for our feet. His gift of water was extravagant.

The care of orphans became a social need in the settlement of the west, too. Parents lost their lives on the Oregon Trail or after arrival to disease and Indian skirmishes and just plain strained relationships as people found they needed lots of what my Burundi friends call "American space" and when they didn't have it, fights broke out. The care and later education of orphans was a constant social challenge in the developing west.

For the Batwa, tending orphans is a constant, too. In part because of the genocide in years past but also now. At Ghombo, a village we visited, a grandmother looked for milk for an infant left behind when the child's mother died. Even the more advanced Burundians who have identity cards and work, often care for younger brothers and sisters, cousins, grandchildren, all orphaned from the genocide or the aides-HIV epidemic.

Then there is housing. The pioneers used what natural resources they could find. The sod houses on the plains are a testament to the ingenuity of our ancestors. In the Northwest or other timbered areas, chopping trees for log homes and later brick factories gave shelter and were marked in history. "The first brick factory in the Willamette Valley" got noted because it meant new kinds of sheltering options.

The Batwa of Burundi mostly live in thatched houses with walls made of dried flammable, eucalyptus leaves (from tall, skinny invasive trees that have killed off fruit-bearing native ones that provided shade, too). The thatch roofs don't always keep the rain out as it must also let out the smoke from cooking fires. We heard coughing everywhere. The more advanced villages had a brick kiln for clay bricks the villagers sell for a pittance at the side of the road. But that's a village that owns some land and they can use the clay to make the bricks.

Commerce, too, had similarities. Bartering when cash wasn't around. Or building a flour mill to grind wheat and also earning money by charging others to grind their wheat. That is a western story. We saw a cassava mill in one of the more advanced villages. And they had clay houses and even a school. For education too was important to the developing west as it is to the Batwa. But in Burundi, children need uniforms to attend school or be ostracized and beyond preschool years, they must also pay tuition. And that means precious money might need to go for food or their parents lament that they send a child to school hungry.

The plight of the Batwa, the indigenous people of Burundi (those in Uganda are considered extinct) is not unlike Native Americans in the 19th Century. Landless, seen as too marginalized to matter, not given the right to vote until the 20th Century. Many tribes once thriving in the Americas no longer exist. They're extinct. The privilege of citizenship was never made more real than to witness in this contemporary time a people without it.

This journey made me not only want to raise funds for the purchase of ID cards for the Batwa, but the people have eased into my heart with their hopeful spirit reminding me of an American history of development. They asked us for nothing, blamed no one for their plight and amazingly, they thanked us for our sacrifice in traveling so far. Our partner in African Road, an NGO in Portland, described our journey as a "ministry of presence." I came home celebrating their sense of community and the extravagance of grace we encountered and appreciating so much more the small things I take for granted.

Be sure to check out the cassava cake recipe after my schedule. Cassava is also popular in the Philippines but when you make this cake, please consider the Batwa and hold them in your hearts.