Some Photos

4 cents a day.

Today was our last day in Gitarama.

My experience going home to home through the countryside gave me a whole new perspective on poverty.

For instance, we went into one 2 room, adobe brick house. They have 7 people in their family and their monthly income is 5,000 Rwandan Francs or $8.92 a month. That's 29 cents a day. FOR 7 PEOPLE! 4 cents a day per person! Can you imagine what they would do if their crops failed? How in the world could you feed 7 people with 29 cents a day?

Or the family of 6 that has no land, makes less than a dollar a month repairing plastic shoes, only eats once a day and can't pay school fees so their kids work instead of going to school.

Or the family of 10 that has 8 kids in primary school, only eats one meal a day and doesn't even have the resources to boil their water before drinking it.

I was laying in my "bed" feeling a bit overwhelmed on Wednesday night. It was right after dinner and I had eaten a rather large meal (by my standards at least). I sat there thinking how full I was. How I had wished I had eaten less. And then I thought about some of the kids I met that day. Albertine, Eric, Pololine, etc. They would probably do anything to go to bed with a full stomach. Many of them eat at noon and that's it for the day. Some rice and beans to last the entire day. Who am I to wish I had less?

This is Eric.

Eric again.

Cutie.

Pololine loved Audrey's water bottle.

Audrey and one of the households.

How do you shake hands with a killer?

As you know, tons of Hutus killed tons of Tutsis during the genocide here. It’s something like 1.5 million people that played a role in the genocide. So when they had to figure out what to do with all these prisoners they decided that work camps would benefit both the country and the prisoners. So they built work camps all over Rwanda and those who have admitted to killing Tutsis are allowed to leave prison to do manual labor for a few years in order to shorten their sentence. It’s been working extremely well and helped reconciliation.

After a day full of interviews in the small town of Kibaga (pronounced chibaga), Audrey and I were standing on the road with a ton of the local kids waiting for our bus. We had seen one of the camps on our drive to Kibaga and had been told that all the prisoners work around the area and wear navy blue uniforms. Sure enough about 50 men in navy blue uniforms strolled past us. A couple of the first ones braved it and ventured over to shake our hands. I’ve actually been curious about what I’d do if I met one of the killers. Or how they would look and act.

Well I found out today as I greeted about 40 men convicted of killing...

They smile, I smile, I say maraho, and they ask Amakuru? Etc. And we shake hands politely (politely means you put your left hand on your right forearm while shaking). I would have thought that I’d have all this hatred toward them. Yeah hatred is obviously not a Godly feeling, but it’s okay to hate killers’ right? I hate them when I read about their actions so why should it be different when I meet them? I’m not sure what made it different but I had zero hatred in me. I felt pure pity. That they were tempted into something as horrible as murder. And that they had to live under the knowledge that they ended a life - maybe it was a child, a woman, ten women.

But they were so human. I would have thought there would be something about them that screamed “KILLER.” But there wasn’t anything. They were just human. Very human.

I guess this a little example of how God sees me. He's able to look at me with all my ugliness and with all my problems and with everything that I've ever done wrong. Yet he doesn't hate me. If I were Him I'd be pretty pissed at how bad I've messed up. But He isn't. He looks me in the eye, smiles and asks me how I am.

Delayed Field Work

I'd have to say that I'm a people watcher. I like to see how people work, especially in situations where I can see how culture influences actions.
We were told to meet at 7:45am to leave for the field. So, at 7:45 all 15 of us show up. But there's a problem. Nobody from the Food for the Hungry office here in Gitarama had the print out of questions for the survey. Problem. But you'd think there would be an easy solution, like print them, right? Wrong. The printer is out of ink. Oh but wait, the questions aren't done yet anyway. So 5 Rwandan staff members watch one man's computer screen. Not helping. Just watching. (by now it's been about 9). Okay so the questions are done. Now let's take them to the print store. Oh wait. They're in the wrong format to print. Fix that. Get them to the print store. But not so easy. More problems. Okay finally they are printed. It's now 3 hours after we planned to depart. Anyhow, we got out. It all worked. And Africa will always be Africa and Africa time will never equal American time.

Eventually we got to our field site which is wayyy off the main road. As soon as we arrived we caught the attention of everyone (it's an extremely small village where they are not used to white people). So we began the interview process. As the day progressed more and more people came to watch. By our last interview we probably had 40 people pushing their way to the front to watch the process. It was quite fun. And I got to hold some fabulously cute children. Have I mentioned how much I love the kids here??

Tomorrow we will do more interviews and visit them in their homes. I'll get some pictures to put up here.

Gitarama Field Study

So I'm pretty sure I saw a dead guy today. We were driving and I saw like 50 people standing around on the side of the road and a man on the ground. And sure enough, he looked pretty dead. Rather sobering. We were in a bus so obviously we just kept going and I'm pretty sure only the two of us in the front seat saw it. Weird.

We got to the city of Gitarama today. We're here to do some field research. We'll be going house to house through one of the poorest sectors of the area and asking them some questions about life. The point is to gather some info like, do their kids go to school? If not, why? What is the most common sickness in the house? How much money does the family bring in? Do they clean their water? etc. etc. It's so Food for the Hungry knows the needs of the community and can better help. We'll be here till Friday.

We're living at the FH office (on a whole lot of mattresses). Tonight we found a no bake recipe, went to a market, made delicious cookies anddd had a dance party in the kitchen. Now we're watching How I met Your Mother. Productive if you ask me.