Projekt der Evangelisch - Lutherischen
Kirchgemeinde Ruhla (Thüringen)
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Projekt der Evangelisch - Lutherischen Kirchgemeinde Ruhla (Thüringen) |
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Brot & Bücher statt teure Werbung!
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 From our current project:
Another view of Rwanda
It all began with Mwalimu's article published on the World Wide Web by the University of Manchester newsletter (EENET, 2003). The latter was only sharing his experiences with disadvantaged school children, especially those with disabilities of the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. When we caught up with him, he admitted that the highlights of his story attracted a few readers worldwide, who kept him posted with a wide range of questions. Among them was this German "One World Group" that raised my attention only last week with their very first visit to Rwanda. It had kept a faithful correspondence with Mwalimu, asking for updates on the situation of his country, through which was established a close link with ASSIST Rwanda, the local organization founded by Rwandan orphans with lucrative activities in Kigali, Nyagatare and Ruhengeri.
It was of no surprise to Mwalimu when an article appeared in a German local tabloid "Thueringer Allgemeine" of 16th February 2007, depicting an exciting visit of the group to Rwanda lead by Rev. Gerhard Reuther. All that could be made of the article to a non-German language speaker that we happen to be, was a colorful photo of busy young people in Nyagatare ASSIST cottage industry underlined with the words: "Seifenküche" (soap kitchen). It may have meant something else in German, but from all evidences, the picture demonstrated how the young people have lucratively developed job-generating projects through self-help initiatives.
Little relationship might the German story have seemed to bridge with the British University-based newsletter, however suffice it for us to express our profound amazement of the extent to which our relationships has greatly been eased, irrespective of our cultures and socio-economic background. It so happen that we are quite close to one another whether we are on the other side of the channel, or portrayed as the distant first world or classified by the media as the country of genocide. All it takes perhaps is the human avidity to share with one another our values and experiences wherever we are, and that seems to be enough to bring us together. It took Mwalimu only a few lines on the net in which he willingly shared his challenging experiences in his school in Rwanda.
In case you live or travel beyond our borders sometimes, you are already familiar with the most disturbing questions we are often confronted with: "Are you a Hutus or Tutsi"?, "Are Rwandan still killing each other? How many hotels does the country have?" Any way, that is how the media has portrayed our sub region, and our country's 1990s has had its own tall on the outsider's view on our society. You will agree with me that the media can sometimes shape our minds, or rather, we are often attracted to the colorfully headlines and we are unable to look behind them. Where it is powerful, the impact is undoubtedly greater than where the majority of the people are deprived of access to written or aired communications.
Mwalimu's friends had not certainly been spared from this influence, and his correspondence might have offered them an opportunity to explore the country anew. When the German group was eventually seen off at Kanombe airport, a few realities were still alive in our conversations:
They were reportedly thrilled by the short audience with the State minister of labor and public service, who had willingly shared with them not only her break tea, but also some of her office's dreams for vulnerable young people. The humility with which the latter received us was the issue in point, for it was ironically correlated with the culture with which some of the families had received us in their homes. In the former, we perceived a woman like the few we had met in families visited, serving and sharing with visitors freely, but not less preoccupied with the challenging needs of the many disadvantaged Rwandan young people, as she openly expressed interest in the developments in ASSIST's job-creation initiatives. Perhaps the (possibly typically German) comment from one of the visitors might seem appropriately relevant, for it expressing his view of the country he had discovered anew: "All the centuries meet in Rwanda". He had observed with interest a mother operating an old stove in her humble Migina slums kitchen (in Remera), while her five year old daughter was operating an ultra-modern MPC gadget in the small seating room; he had walked the clean, peaceful evening streets of modern Kigali, after a stressful day in the Gisozi Memorial site that exposed the world's most recent primitive atrocities Rwandans had committed; he had visited the Butare HVP school where the deaf, the blind, the physically disabled freely shared the simple school benches with their able-bodied peers, with little concern of the international UNESCO inclusion standards set since the Salamanca statement of 1994, just like it was in the West many centuries ago; he had observed people working with traditional methods to make their ends meet in villages, while the ultra-modern German STRABAG was busy in the neighborhood construction works. In short, the observation that "all centuries meet in Rwanda" was also his "other view of Rwanda" where all indices of modernity and civilization are still actively experienced.Dr Evariste Karangwa
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