2012 Trip: Rwanda/ Muhanga/ Evariste and his family share their food with us

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The  brick making volunteers were invited inside to have a late lunch, provided by Evariste and his wife (pictured by the doorway) to thank us for our help.  Lunch was cassava (a root vegetable) and beans.

Like most families in rural Rwanda, Evarist and his wife barely have enough food to feed themselves but they made sure that we were looked after. Brenda and previous volunteer teams have experienced this extraordinary generosity time and time again when visiting families in Rwanda and Tanzania.

Costa and members of another volunteer group -  
Groundwork Opportunities.

The family are part of a supportive HIV/AIDS co-operative set up by the NGO Costa is involved with, the Terimbere Rwanda Organization. TRO provides counselling and covers medical expenses for the family. AIDS is particularly prevalent in Rwanda as men infected with AIDS used rape as a deliberate weapon of war in the 1994 genocide.

We were joined by other members of the HIV/AIDS cooperative. Note the Ironman Penticton donated shirts!

Erin and Evariste's daughter Pamela

Pamela, who was three months old at this time, is not HIV positive.  

I believe that this must be due to the medication that prevents mother to child transmission

 (PMTCT)  but I will find out for sure and update the blog.

Acting as interpreter, Costa told us Evariste's story and explained the benefits of the HIV/AIDS support group. They have a pig co-operative, and thanks to your donations we were able to contribute to it on previous trips.  

Costa spoke to one of the group, an emaciated woman named Epiphany, asking for her permission to tell us her story. Epiphany was widowed and turned to prostitution in order to earn money to feed her children. She felt great guilt at knowingly passing on the infection, but having lost two of her children she did not want the remaining three to starve. Costa told us that Epiphany had been to many counselling sessions before she talked about her actions but once she did she was able to begin to heal mentally and in spirit, and the opportunity to be a part of the pig co-operative meant that she no longer had to resort to prostitution. 

It was at this point that Brenda told Costa that we were passing on donations of US$300 for the pig co-op. Costa turned to one of the older ladies and spoke to her, she clapped her hands and cried out, as did the rest of the group. Costa turned to us and said that this lady was in very poor health and was exhausted from having to walk to the market each day to sell homemade beer for little or no profit, and he had just told her "No more market. Now you can stay and help look after the new pigs."

I cried.

2012 Trip: Rwanda/ Muhanga/ Making bricks for Evariste's home

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Costa

Brenda met Costa on the first One Person trip (2008). His parents fled a Tutsis' massacre in 1959 and Costa was brought up in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. His wife, Bernadette, saw her parents and siblings killed in the 1994 genocide and survived by hiding in the ceiling of a neighbor’s home. Costa was a member of the Rebel Resistance Army that helped to overthrow the Hutu regime and he has been imprisoned three times. He documents his extraordinary life in his book The Work That Brings Peace In Me.

Costa is committed to healing himself, his family and his homeland, he travels the world promoting peace and reconciliation, and has visited with us in British Columbia. He now lives and studies in Maine, USA.

Costa is part of TRO (Terimbere Rwanda Organization, formally known as GO Rwanda.) the organization that received our first shipping container. TRO works in the Muhunga region to implement a genocide reconciliation project, which supports genocide survivors through community reconciliation and rehabilitation programs. Perpetrators also undergo rehabilitation and receive counselling before they are paired with a survivor to build homes for vulnerable families.

In a previous visit Brenda and a team of volunteers had helped to make bricks for one house, and now our team had the opportunity to do the same.

Brenda, One Person President and co-founder

Rwanda is called The Land of a Thousand Hills, and I'm sure that we hiked most of them on this trip!
Mary wrote about the brick making day in her blog on Planet Ranger:

"Today we hopped back on a bus to Muhanga and then walked down the side of a mountain to a house where we were invited to make mud bricks to help the family that needed them. Since we are volunteers we made around 150 bricks for free, the family was very thankful because when they pay someone to make the bricks it costs 25 RWF per brick. 150 bricks isn’t a lot, and when I roughly counted the bricks of the houses around us, I figured that we probably only made enough bricks for a quarter of a quarter of the walls. But helping the family save around 3750 RWF was a good feeling since they could now use that money to buy a goat or something else for the house.

The bricks are literally made out of dirt and water. They start by pouring water onto the dirt and then they use their feet to squish the water around, making the ground wet enough for them to throw it into a square mold for the bricks. The men making the mud held tools that looked like bent shovels to pound into the ground to break up the mud, roots, grass and rocks from each other. Then they rolled up the mud into a medium sized ball and passed it to the person next to them who then passed it to a few more people before it ended up into the concrete molds where Brenda and another man squished it around to make a perfect square brick with no air holes.

 It was a great experience but I know that the people there were just doing it so we would be happy...and I know that they could have done it ten times faster than the silly mzungu’s did." 

Evariste, the house owner, digs and prepares the mud. Brenda and One Person Director and co-founder Sheena work with  Evariste and his family and neighbours.

   

Mary, One Person member and volunteer since our inception in 2007



Everyone helped to haul water!  Luckily the stream was only a few hundred yards down the hill...

Evariste Nsengiyumva moved to Muhanga in 1996 from the then dangerous Congolese border. It took him eleven years to acquire his own land and he has finally saved enough money to begin building his family home.

We were joined after a while by Bart, founder of the U.S organization, Groundwork Opportunities and his team of volunteers, so we were able to get two lines of bricks going! Groundwork

Opportunities raised funds to help us get our Muhanga shipping container out of customs storage when it was held for far longer than expected. 

 Rendering the walls with a sand mixture





The house was about three quarters finished. Families pay to have bricks made and build as they go - sometimes it may take years to build a small house.

As usual - we had an audience.  Erin shows the children their photograph.  

Erin helped teach in out Train The Teachers week in Tanzania on this trip. Her school, Holy Cross, in Penticton, B.C. donated books to St. Timothy's school in Moshi, Tanzania in 2011 (Bart had asked One Person to make a donation there in return for their raising extra funds to help get the shipping container out of storage) so she travelled to St. Timothy's to meet the staff and children. Holy Cross is giving the school long-term support. 

The house from the back

And the front

The government encourages people to not build the traditional small grass-thatched huts (Nyakasi) but to build larger homes with tin or tiled roofs.

 In 2006 (as a World Vision Volunteer) Brenda met this brother and sister who were orphaned after the genocide. They live in a remote area in a traditional grass hut. They told Brenda that in the rainy season, which lasts three months, they had to try and sleep standing up as the roof leaked and the dirt floor became a muddy pool.

It was very satisfying to take part in the brick making and work side by side with the villagers. Costa had been delayed returning from a trip so we were only at the village for part of a day, rather than the three days we had planned, so our contribution may not have made a massive difference to the progress of the walls in the house but by going back year after year and helping to build other houses in the community we are showing our commitment to our long-term involvement with Muhanga. 

2012 Trip Overview: Rwanda / Genocide Sites (disturbing content)

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We visited Kigali, Rwanda at the beginning of our trip as we give support to the nearby community of Muhanga.

Kigali was the epicentre of the 1994 genocide, which saw the slaughter of up to a million men, women and children over the span of 100 days. Further details can be found at  here at the United Human Rights Council website.  In short it was the genocidal mass slaughter of the Rwandan Tutsis by the Rwandan Hutus.

Rwanda has over 200 official genocide memorial sites but we were very aware that thousands of bodies would have been laying on and around the paths and roads that we travelled each day. I had read the books and watched the movies and documentaries about the Rwandan genocide, and a group of us were fortunate enough to see Lieutenant-General  Romeo Dallaire speak in Kelowna, B.C. a few years ago, but it is impossible to be fully prepared to see the realities and aftermath of such an event.

Kigali Memorial Centre

There are eleven mass graves in the grounds, eight of which were filled in the months after the genocide before the memorial centre was built. The final three mass graves were built afterwards, and during the 100 days of Remembrance in 2004, many people took the opportunity to bury their loved ones at the site. 250,000, around a quarter of the victims are buried here. The crypts are three meters deep and are filled floor to ceiling with coffins, some of which hold the scant remains of up to 50 people.

As perpetrators confess to their crimes the whereabouts of bodies are still being revealed (swamps, toilet pits) so more graves will be built.

Inside the centre visitors learn about the build up to the genocide, including the multiple 'practise runs' and the shocking failure of the international community to intervene. The killings are also documented with harrowing photographs and descriptions. Survivors tell their stories on video - relating how their brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers or children were killed. Many of the survivors were mutilated or victims of rape.

There is a room with glass cases holding skulls and bones and another displaying the clothes the victims were wearing when they died and the blood stained possessions they were carrying.

The Children's Room was distressing to view, there are treasured family photographs of cute children from 2 months to around ten years old with notices giving their names and the names of their best friends, their favourite foods, toys and activities, what they wanted to be when they grew up - followed by a description of their violent manner of death.

The images and descriptions are graphic and harrowing - and rightly so.

The haunting beauty of the large stained-glass Windows of Hope depicting the genocide and a stairway out of it, the circle of  carved wooden figures representing people before, during and after the genocide and the pretty Rose Garden add poignancy and emphasise the overall theme of the centre -  hope for the future.  And the hope that visitors will bear witness and help to ensure that the world will never again stand by and allow such events to take place.

It was strange to go back outside into the well kept gardens and grounds and look out at the beautiful hills of Rwanda and try and reconcile them with the atrocities that took place here.

Nyamata Church

Through Brenda's (One Person President and co-founder) numerous visits to Rwanda we have friends in and around Kigali and one of these, Franklin, took us to visit a memorial site in his home town of Nyamata. During the atrocities many people fled to churches for safety but this only made it easier for the perpetrators to slaughter the victims en masse. Inside, you can see the bullet holes and blood stains on the walls and roof and a tide mark of blood on the altar cloth. Over 4 days 10,000 people were killed in and around the church.

Throughout the genocide many women were raped and/or sexually mutilated. Rape is a tool of war. It is designed to terrorise a population, break up families, destroy communities, prevent the births of an ethnic group and to spread HIV/AIDS. Nyamata church has become emblamatic of the use of sexual brutalisation against women in the genocide.

Franklin showed us the church and took us into the basement which is lined with skulls, many bearing the now familiar gash from a machete. Back outside in the grounds we stepped down into a catacomb containing more skulls and bones, including the remains of some of Franklin's family.

As in the Kigali Memorial the graves and building are draped with the mourning colours of purple and white and there is a banner, which translated reads,  “If you really knew me, and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me.”

Murambi Technical School Memorial Site

We drove for miles along a deeply rutted red earth road to reach the next Memorial site, which sits on the ridge of a high hill. Again the lush banana and eucalyptus trees and the astounding views contrasted starkly with the physical evidence of the atrocities carried out by neighbour against neighbour.

Many thousands of Tutsis were lured to the 'safety' of the Murambi Technical School by the authorities and then slaughtered. After the massacre bulldozers dug out mass graves where the bodies were disposed of without ceremony or prayer. The unfinished school later became barracks for French soldiers.

This memorial also documents the cycle of anti-Tutsi violence and discrimination and gave a frightening account of how the genocide was planned and carried out by the authorities. In counterbalance there are the personal stories of the people who risked death and endured injury to save lives at the Murambi killing site.

The guide (as at the other sites, the guides are genocide survivors) then led us to a barrack that had tables filled, not with bones, but with bodies that had been exhumed and had undergone natural mummification from the heat of decomposition in the soil. The bodies had then been preserved with lime, and on the twisted white coated bodies you could see tufts of hair, fingernails and their facial expressions. The bodies were piled on top of each other, men women and children. The smell of the white lime stays with me still.

And the next room was filled with bodies and the next, block after block of mummified men, women and children. A mother with a child in her arms. A couple embracing. A woman with her arms held up in protection with the lower limb of one arm hacked off.

The people of Rwanda are working on justice and recovery, peace and reconciliation, and reminding the world of the worse-case-scenario so that it will not happen again.

Although it has. The on-going conflict in Darfur, Sudan was declared a genocide by United States Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2004

2012 Trip / Tanzania/ Kahama / Faraja Orphanage

 Sheena is a One Person co-founder and Director. She is a teacher at the Summerland Montessori School (B.C. Canada) which supports the Faraja Orphanage.   

Most Tanzanian orphanages are not the traditional institutionalised facilities that most of us are familiar with.  Orphans tend to be absorbed into extended families or are taken in by neighbours. The extra child/children put a huge strain on the families who take them in, so the children spend time at an orphanage each day to receive care and food. 

In this instance a group of women from the Isegehe area formed a committee and put money together to form the orphanage, which they continue to fund and run. The orphanage pays for the children’s medical and schooling fees, and sends soap and other valued items back to the foster-family to help decrease the burden of an extra child/children.

  

EXCERPT FROM SHEENA'S ENTRY ON PLANET RANGER

"In previous years we have sent money to buy the orphanage meat goats and pay school fees, and we sent them supplies in the crate sent last year. Since I was meeting them in person, families from the school put together bags for each of the orphans and I brought some donated money and the money from our recycling program to help them. I have been carrying all of the stuff with me all this time, and I was excited to finally be able to deliver it.

Of course, getting there was not quick and easy. The ride we thought we arranged didn’t work out due to an uninsured vehicle and despite numerous calls to a variety of people, we were stuck for a little bit as to how to get out there. Eventually Joseph found us a taxi driver willing to take us out there (it is in a village outside of Kahama) and we set off, with our 32 gift bags loaded up in the trunk of the cab. We had been unable to make direct contact with the orphanage yet, so first we went to the World Vision office, where someone else jumped into the cab to direct us to the orphanage. Through channels we are still not certain of, Scholastica (who runs the orphanage with the help of other ladies in the community) had heard we were coming and was waiting for us.

When we arrived, we were very warmly welcomed, with lots of hugging and hand shaking and hand holding and hugging and laughing and more hand shaking and cries of “Welcome!” Once Brenda explained that I was the teacher from the book we sent them last year, I was re-welcomed and there was even more hugging and hand-shaking and an elderly woman was kicked out of her chair so I could sit there! There were orphanage kids and random neighbour kids there and some of them were really breaking my heart! All of the people I have met so far here are very clean and tidy (which I find hard what with all of the dust and lack of water pressure!), but quite a few of these kids were dirty, with torn clothing, and bellies protruding from malnutrition. One little guy, a year old or so, ate a handful of dirt.

I only had stuff for the Orphanage kids, so Brenda and Joseph went to get food for everyone from the store. Mary and I stayed and, with Scholastica’s son Isack translating, made conversation with the Faraja ladies. They were very surprised that Mary was only 17, comparing her to a girl there who was 17 and asking, “Why do you look so much bigger than her? What are you eating over there?!” When Brenda and Joseph came back, we fed all of the children some bananas and biscuits.

After that I handed out the gift bags and took pictures of all of the children. It was awesome! I brought pictures of the kids from my school to go with each bag and showed them to the children as they received their bags, explaining that that child sent the bag for them. It was chaotic and busy, but really great! Afterwards, we took more pictures and they all sang some songs for us. Then I discreetly gave Scholastica the money I had brought and after a lot more hugging and hand shaking and thank-you’s, we were off. I would have loved to have stayed longer, but our taxi driver was only willing to wait so long, so away we went! "

Thank you - from the children and youth in Kahama, Tanzania

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2012 Trip /Tanzania/ Kahama Hospital / Amani Group

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As an organization we strive to ensure that the support we provide leads to self-sustainability for the communities and organizations we have connected with and I am delighted to report that we are extremely successful in this, but being there confirmed that sometimes a quick-fix is also essential; and thanks to your donations we are able to offer both short and long-term solutions to families affected by poverty.

We visited with Philomena and Flora who run the Amani group, a social support group for children who attend a clinic at the Kahama Hospital for treatment of HIV/AIDS.

We always meet with staff, officials and organizations to ensure that we are providing what is actually needed and to monitor progress. The funds we raise allow us to ship donated items such as a TV and video recorder, toys and books, which make the waiting and treatments more bearable and will also encourage children and adults to attend for testing, education and treatment. We also ordered tables, chairs and shelves for the room – or clubhouse as the children call it!

We hope in the future to provide funding towards food for children who attend the clinic to receive antiretroviral (ARV) drugs as the highly-toxic medications cause severe side-effects if taken on an empty stomach. 

In keeping with our belief that one community can help another at all levels, the wonderful staff from the Summerland Ministry of Children & Family Development have created the Friends of Amani Group, and write to the children and send gifts and supplies in the shipping container!



We held a party for the children and their mothers/grandmothers/aunts.
Most of the children are from women headed households or are orphans.

Mary was the official photographer for the trip. Janeth is so excited to see her own picture!
Flora holding a camera donated by the Friends of Amani Group.
Read Mary's account of the trip

Erin chats with Lucas and Ibrahim as they sign a poster for the Friends of Amani Group

 

 Brenda loves to share stories with the women in the community.
Read Brenda's account of the trip

This is Jochim. His written and spoken English is excellent. Before he left he gave me the bracelet he had been wearing and said, "Please accept this little touch of Africa to remember me by." I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - so just grinned for the camera!

Fun with bubbles!

The children were delighted with the skipping ropes and soccer balls!

 

Further long-term support examples:

After discussions with the dedicated and resourceful Philomena and Flora we left US $200 to be used to create a women’s co-operative, where six or so of the mothers of the most vulnerable families will chose a project – poultry for example – and will work together to purchase and rear the chickens, which will provide both food and income for the families, who will eventually be able to donate a little money to the Amani Clinic and also pass on chickens to another group of mothers to create a second co-operative.

We have donated a sewing machine from the shipping container and will provide more so that the older youth can create sewing co-operatives. We hope in the future to provide funding for scholarships for school leavers to attend a nearby Sewing and Training Centre.

Short-term example: 

We discreetly gave 30,000 Tanzanian shillings (US $20) to one mother whose children were very sick; her husband had left and she was unable to earn even the less-than-a-dollar-a-day that most Tanzanian families survive on. We were able to help her through a month or so, and with your help we can work towards creating a strong community, which will come up with strategies and solutions to eliminate extreme poverty.

With so much fun and laughter it was sometimes hard to remember why we were there.
A bitter-sweet day.

Click here if you would like to volunteer here in the Okanagan B.C or offer support from elsewhere.

Click here if you would like to make an on-line donation or email us at info@theonepersonproject.org if you can save us the on-line fees and mail a cheque! 

2012 Trip / Kahama / Train the Teacher Pictures

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Our Train the Teacher week was extremely successful!  30 Primary teachers from schools in and around Kahama attended the five-day course.

Heike and participants. Some of the classes took place outside the Teacher Training Centre (TRC)

Heike spent months putting together eight sets of 30 books, pens, pencils, rulers, crayons etc. so that each teacher went away with resources to use in their otherwise empty classrooms. A major aspect of the week was that teachers were shown how to create their own resources.


Erin shows the participants how to use a calendar as a teaching tool

This seemingly simple activity is the perfect way for the Kahama teachers to build a system for teaching English and understanding of concepts to their primary school students; days of the week and months of the year songs were incorporated, children can practice counting in English and have an understanding of today/yesterday/tomorrow and by adding colours and shapes the children can learn about patterns.

Sheena demonstrates Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes for the Parts of the Body teaching theme

A fun class!

Heike, Sheena and Erin had a game plan before leaving but it very much depended on how many teachers actually attended and their level of understanding and speaking English. (Generally low.)  The first day went well and they were able to refine the structure for the rest of the week and present a series of activity based workshops where each unit built on the knowledge and skills of the one before to provide the participants with the tools (as well as the resources) to teach English in a way that will engage their students and ultimately lead to higher literacy levels for each community in our district. (Over time, with future Teach the Teacher Programs.)

Our donated books at the Kahama TRC.

There are 120 schools in the Kahama Region. The Tanzanian Government has provided 5 Teacher Resource Centres for the area. Funds do not stretch to stocking them - or the schools.

Thank you to all those who sponsored a teacher - teacher photos and sponsor names are on previous posts. We received more sponsors than teachers so the remaining funds were used to purchase supplies for the teachers - many thanks to Jan & Al, Carol & Tom, Philomena, Angela and Chris & Leah.

Contact us for further details or to donate educational supplies or if you would like to make a donation towards education in Kahama.
Donate on-line

Train the Teacher / Award Ceremony 3

Mary N. Sponsored by Krista

Leticia. Sponsored by Angela M

Laurent. Sponsored by Cheryl & Vern


 

Katunzi. Sponsored by Andrea




 

Kasoma. Sponsored by Gordon

Isack. Sponsored by Shelly

Herbert. Sponsored by Val

 

Halima. Sponsored by Tom

Ester. Sponsored by Cassandra

Martina. Sponsored by Pam & Michelle