Rwandan adventure – child-headed families and the real meaning of ‘
dirt poor
In Rwanda due to the war and malaria, HIV/Aids and poor living conditions there are many orphans. This is especially true in the beautiful hilltop area of Shyira which we visited for three days.
The pastor took us to see two such families that are being supported by the church and by the missionary Thomas Schumann and his wife Annett. As it had been raining the pastor took us on a 20-minute drive in his truck most of the way. Last time I was here in 2007 I walked it, but it was then the dry season. When we got to a certain point along the very rocky and rutted road, passing many locals walking with their produce on their heads, their children, and with babies strapped to their backs, we got out and started to descend the steep hillside. Knowing how bad the descent would be I wore my trainers and Mike wore his comfy shoes.
We started the steep descent down a very narrow path negotiating rocks and rubble, with great difficulty. Then it started to rain. And then it became torrential. Up went the umbrellas, but when you are trying to balance from rock to rock, and walking in the squelchy footprint of the person in front, holding an umbrella is the least of your priorities. The energetic and tireless pastor, Anthony, 57, held my hand and guided me down the descent. He said: “Hold on to me I am strong.” But here they have to be. He has been a refugee in the Congo during the genocide and then when war broke out in the Congo his family escaped to Uganda where he lived in another refugee camp. An Italian man and then an Irishman eventually came to his rescue to sponsor him through education and university, to become an engineer. So this man knows what poverty and deprivation really is. He has lived it. And this shows in his care and consideration for the poorest of the poor in this very poor district.
Like a mountain goat he negotiated the steep and slippery paths, dressed in a smart suit that I was concerned about getting wet as he had a day’s work to do, but it did not seem to bother him. Then we reached a house and I thought ‘thank goodness’ we have reached the place. But, no, he walked right on by along another path and started descending again. By this time the rain was soaking the hem of my long pink linen skirt – as it is prudential to wear long skirts here, so as not to offend this conservative population. But my main consideration was not to slip and fall in the mud, bringing down the slim and lithe pastor with me! Mike was following with his assistant, and also struggling to keep a foothold in the slippery mud. I reckon we both needed crampons to keep our balance.
Eventually far, far, down the hillside we reached a battered wattle and daub ‘house’ with a rusty and holed corrugated iron roof, where once lived three boys. Due to money raised by the Shyira Trust (www.shyiratrust.org) a new house has been built for this ‘child-headed family’ of which there are many in Rwanda. The new houses are made locally of earth bricks baked in the sun, put together with mud and with a new corrugated roof and earth floor. Here live three boys, Celestine, 22, who is bringing up his two brothers aged 16 and 12. The house, which has no lighting, heating or water, has shutters over the small windows, and four small dark rooms. One they use as a sitting room which holds a small wooden low table and two benches, and opens onto the banana plantation. Another small room is used as a bedroom and holds a mattress donated by the Shyira Trust, where Celestine sleeps. The other two boys sleep on the earth floor. Another room is used for storing their cooking utensils and food that Celestine digs for on their small family patch of land whilst the two younger boys are sponsored to go to school. Each day they have to climb this steep hill in all weathers and walk the few miles to school. They use their old house for cooking as they do not want smoke to spoil their new dwelling.
Their father had died of disease before the war but their mother had been killed by insurgents in the 1994 genocide. When I asked what had happened to his parents through the pastor, who translated into Kinyarwrandan, Celestine originally said his mother had just died. The pastor asked him to tell the truth, and he admitted then she had been murdered. “They do not want to be seen as victims,” he said, “but I encourage them to tell the truth, so people know what happened.”
The boys had had a goat, also donated by the Trust, but they felt the yield too poor. Celestine, a little entrepreneur, sold the goat and eventually bought two pigs, a sow and boar, which live in tiny separate home-made wooden-staked pens on the hillside, stamping around in their own muck which is used as fertiliser, and you can hear them calling to each other, though apart. When they have piglets – six to eight in a litter – they take them to market and sell them to buy food. We gave them some soap we had collected from friends in the UK and wondered just how they survived in such desperate conditions.
Then when I thought we would be climbing back to the vehicle to return to the guesthouse to change into dry clothes before a delicious lunch at the missionaries’ house, the pastor said: ”Now we are going to visit another ‘child-headed family”. He started descending even further down the mountain and my heart sank. I thought, ‘we have seen how these children live and how the Trust is helping them, why do we need to see another, especially in view of the rain’. But I was wrong and what we came across brought home to me just how lucky we are in the UK, when after more difficult climbing down and down, stretching our legs across muddy rocks and riverlets, we came to home of Patricia, 23, who was bringing up five of her younger siblings, Anastasie 20, Ariane 18, Marceline 16, Erasian 14, Jean-Paul 11, as well as her own baby, Adeline, now four years old and in nursery school. They also had a new house paid for by the Trust, but still had only the four cramped rooms which housed all 7 of them.
Patricia’s father was murdered one year after the war and her mother had died in a refugee camp after the war through living in poor conditions. Patricia was about 12 when she lost her parents and the youngest child just two. After the death of her parents the local church looked after her, and she was one of the first to get a new house. I asked her what she felt, getting a new home. Her lovely brown eyes lit up as she said: “I was over-excited. I never dreamt of having a house like this. It was like a miracle. It is just beyond my explanation.” I looked around at the bumpy mud walls and sparse, roughly made furniture and felt truly humbled. How anyone could live like this and be so happy for what they had made me feel so guilty for the largesse we experience in the west. It is just a lottery where you are born, some of us are lucky, but so very many in this big wide world of ours are definitely not.
Whilst in Patricia’s house the rain became so torrential that we could not hear ourselves speak as the deluge pounded the iron roof. Just them Thomas, the missionary, where we were expected for lunch, phoned on my Rwandan mobile number. I handed it over to the pastor who explained that we were well down the hillside and sheltering from the rain, but we would be there shortly! Fat chance, I thought, we have to climb back up first.
When it eased we gave Patricia ‘a donation’ which the pastor told her to put towards a new cow. She had been given a cow to sustain the family but for some reason it died and she was slowly saving up for another. Also to help the church had given one of her sisters a job in the guesthouse to earn a little money, and had also given them clothes. As a young mother without a husband she was one of the girls we met in the Centre for Living Hope where the girls meet twice a week for prayer, study, and sewing instruction and a good lunch whilst their children are in nursery. She remembered us from our visit.
In all 22 children without parents are being helped by the church and the Shyira Trust. Eleven new houses had already been built with money raised by Formby St Lukes Church, Merseyside, and money is now available for two more, but there were still four other houses in a desperate state waiting for funding. These are just the worst of the buildings being replaced and there are many other child-headed families coping on their own.
The pastor took one route up to the rubble road and his truck, and we were taken by his assistant along a horizontal path which gradually started rising. This is better, I thought, though realised that a steeper climb would start at some point. And boy was it steep. The pastor’s friend held Mike’s hand to steady him, but still he kept sliding about in the mud, and Patricia, all of five foot something tall, held my hand, and in her flip flops, kept me steady as we squelched over the undulating steep path, just a foot wide, through the banana plantation and crops planted by the villagers for food. Here and there we passed houses buried in the vegetation. We were still climbing with much difficulty, my skirt hem by this time a soggy red-brown from the Rwandan mud. (Later my knuckles bled red raw trying to hand wash it out).
Just as I thought I was managing very well we were faced with a vertical climb over rock and rubble to the road. Then, looking up, I saw a gaggle of locals much amused at our puny efforts! Patricia had kicked off her flip flops and was climbing in bare feet like she was born to it, which of course she was. By this time my white trainers were totally caked in mud, later to be scraped and washed by a kind lady at the church guesthouse who saw us arrive back and took our shoes from us before we could protest. The pastor later said he encouraged the locals to help visitors to show them that they are welcome here.
When we reached top of the thigh-wrenching climb and walked back towards the truck which soon came, we learnt that the pastor’s vehicle had been stuck in the mud and he had had quite a job getting it free. We were taken straight to the missionaries’ house, all soggy and wet, and they gave us clean flip flops to wear and towels, flannels and soap to clean ourselves up. A delicious and very welcome meal was then presented – a veritable feast and just what we needed after such a soggy adventure.
Then a quick downhill walk to the guesthouse to collect my teaching materials and to meet the pastor who took us in his truck to the school for my afternoon session teaching the Francophone teachers English, which by comparison was a doddle. We were back in civilisation!
I WAS AWAKE FOR MY OPERATION!
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