Projects

Please note that VSO is in no way connected with or responsible for the content, comments and observations in this blog: these are solely my own in a personal capacity.

Hi there everyone! Dying of a chest infection (my friends and family know this is par for the course with me and the Klacid Paul Carson gave me before I left is doing the trick) but in good spirits overall. The English classes continue to drive me demented - ten people turned up today but no more than six of them were ever in the room at the same time as they kept on getting called out for meetings, phone calls and whatever. I just carried on regardless (words of a song? someone tell me please).

Anyway, as I said before, a number of people - colleagues, family and friends - have all said that they would be interested in supporting any projects that I might start off here in Rwanda. When I came out here I had various ideas of what I might do - buy cows for people, install water systems in schools, sponsor children to continue on to secondary school and whatever. Surprise, surprise, many of those ideas have changed since I came into contact with the reality of Rwanda. One thing is that whatever you do really needs to be a once-off: it is very difficult to set up an ongoing project and then arrange for it to continue when you leave. Second, Rwanda is INCREDIBLY bureaucratic - if you want to set up an actual organisation the obstacles are immense (and expensive).

Thirdly, there are some needs that are actually being reasonably well met by either the government or various ONGs (as I have now learned to call NGOs). There is a raft of provisions for genocide orphans (though tough luck if you are an orphans for any other reason). The whole HIV/AIDS area is - if anything - over resourced or, to be more accurate, overstaffed. there are actually HUNDREDS of separate (and mostly uncoordinated) HIV/AIDS projects going on here, most of them concentrated in the same areas, leaving other areas neglected. You can buy people cows if you want (hi Horst) and there are actually professional cow-buyers who will do it for a fee which is a lot less than they will rip a muzungu off for in the cattle market, but how many people actually have the land for a cow (Alfred: trust me: buy them a cow and they'll find it!). My friend Jane Keenan did organise this so that is one possibility (I think they are usually bought for widows with no means of support)).

Coming to Rwanda, obviously the genocide and its after-effects was uppermost in my mind. Today I finished reading Philip Gourevitch's book We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we Will Be Killed With Our Families which is possibly the best book I have read on Rwanda so far. One of the themes he talks about is the injustices - unavoidable injustices - that happen in times of crisis. I have been struck (as readers of my blog will know) at the number of innocent people who have ended up in prison while many guilty walk the streets free. For those of us who grew up with memories of Nicky Kelly, the Guilford and the Birmingham Six, cases like this really strike a chord (Alfred: he actually typed 'cord' originally - how embarrassing would THAT have been!!)

There are also aspects of Rwandan society that take a lot of getting used to. Everyone is AMAZED when I say I am not married and do not have any children, and I mean AMAZED. When you ask men if they are married, and they aren't, they immediately trot out a load of reasons why it hasn't happened yet, because they are really embarrassed if they are not. Family is all-important here and if you don't have it, you are completely bereft. Orphans are looked after by the extended family (or the state in the case of genocide orphans) but a single parent, an unmarried mother or women raped and made pregnant during the genocide lead very lonely and unsupported lives.

There is an amazing absence of art here, in all its forms. English is taught as grammar - the idea of creative writing is virtually foreign. There is a tradition of poetry and some writing from the 19th century but is barely exists today. Art and music are similarly neglected: there is only one Art Studio and Gallery in the whole country and these subjects are utterly neglected in the vast majority of schools.

So I would like your ideas on the following:

1. A while ago, a VSO volunteer, Marion Woolley and a Ugandan woman, Jasmine Rizik set up a Rwandan NGO called Tabara, an organisation dedicated to helping single parents in Rwanda (initially focussing on Kigali). The membership includes some single fathers (which is really amazing in a Rwandan context) and you can read more about their aims and objectives at this link: http://www.tabara.net/englishindex.html. You can also read an entertaining account of their first public meeting on Marion's blog at http://heathenblogging.blogspot.com/2008/09/tabara-public-meeting.html

2. Some of my regular blog readers will know the story of Déo Nuwayo, my regular moto driver. Before the genocide, he owned a taxi company and was a successful businessman. After the genocide he was denounced and put in prison for thirteen years. While he was in prison, everything he owned was taken. After thirteen years he came to trial and was immediately released - the courts said it was a case of mistaken identity (or malicious denunciation) and he was cleared of having taken any part whatsoever. When he was released, he received no compensation whatsoever and had lost his house, business, cars, his wife had died and he has four children to support.

Today he hires a motorbike each day for RWF5000 and tries to make enough to pay for that, pay for petrol and still earn enough to keep his family. His main hope is to be able to buy his own motorbike (which would cost RWF1.3m or about €2,000) but, at this rate it is going to take him a long time.

Sometimes calamity falls on someone from out of nowhere - maybe sometimes assistance can arrive the same way!!

(Alfred: needless to say, Ruairí has taken the precaution of talking to local police and others to verify that this story is actually true!)

youth. They hold creative writing competitions each year and the twenty winners (10 boys and 10 girls) are invited to the workshops held in Kibuye in Western Rwanda, on the shores of Lake Kivu. You can read more about the workshops and the organisation on http://www.vso.org.uk/kivu/ and also read some of the material on http://www.voicesfromrwanda.org/.

So those are my three ideas at the moment. What I am asking you (blog readers and email contacts, because I am sending this entry out by email also) is to tell me what you think of these ideas, and whether you would be interested in supporting any of them. If you are interested, I will be sending on details later about how exactly you can help, but I am just looking for feedback at the moment (roheithir@gmail.com or use the Comment button here (if it works!)