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Culturally resonant metaphors can highlight local skills and knowledges and strengthen connections to community, culture and history in ways that can sustain us in difficult times. In this video, Annonciata Niyibizi Muhayimana shows how collective narrative practices like the Tree of Life and Team of Life can be adapted to celebrate local cultures. Annonciata introduces the Ingata Yúbuzima, the Ingata of Life, a Rwandan metaphor based on the handmade rings used to carry things on one’s head. The ingata is a treasured item in everyday use, offering protection to those carrying a heavy load. It can be used with assistance and when help is not available. Annonciata shows how she elicited the knowledge of the mothers she worked with about making, using and caring for ingata, and how this local knowledge became the basis for rich metaphors about values, skills, hopes and connection. Individual ingatas were created as a record of what the women wanted to protect, and a giant collective ingata wove their stories together. Ingata Yúbuzima offers a resonant image of protection formed from everyday materials that enables people to skilfully bear weight without being hurt by it. This video is an extract from a presentation that was part of Annonciata’s completion of the Master of Narrative Therapy and Community Work at The University of Melbourne. 

Key words: Rwanda; Tree of Life; metaphor; mothers; collective narrative practice