Entry 7 - Centre Dushishoze and Sonrise Orphanage

Creator, thank you for emotional sobriety. Thank you for Reverend Ruth, and the tears you put in my eyes when she stood up to welcome us to lunch. Thank you for helping me realize I needed to ask her to enter the church with me, and that when I did ask, she understood my need and began to walk me there immediately. Thank you for all the tears on the way, and for how I curled up like a baby and sobbed at the altar, the tears I had been flirting with for days finally consummating. Thank you for the way she laid her hands on me so softly. Thank you for the intercessory prayer for perpetrators, and the reminder that not only they, but I, can make a fresh choice, a better decision, any moment of any day. I can start my day, my very life, over with a simple decision to do so. Thank you for the freedom that came after, including the ability to leave the orphanage and say as I passed its threshold, “Okay, Ashley, give them to God. They are God’s. You are not meant to carry them yourself. They are God’s.”

And thank you for the resonance this has with similar moments in India, leaving children in brothels, the discernment I needed a quiet, holy place with someone stronger in faith than I in that moment to simply be there with me as I grieved, and the absolute certainly that you give me that there are gifts on the other side.

Dushishoze….say that 3 times fast! Meaning “Think about it” in Kinyarwandan, Dushishoze comprises 4 youth centres nationwide where kids may access free medically accurate reproductive health information, services and products such as voluntary HIV/AIDS testing with rapid results) and counseling (and appropriate referrals if they are +…I saw a positive test while I was there) and birth control, as well as activities that improve them socially and economically, with an emphasis on employability. The centers are full service, and I believe this holistic, integrated model is the best and most cost effective way to reach vulnerable youth for total poverty reduction; it is the way forward.

For us at PSI, based on what we are used to, it looks a little expensive per young person educated and protected from a health perspective per year; we are used to an investment of 10 bucks per kid/year. With Dushishoze, though, and the bigger “basket” of services offered, the price per child is a bit more, but my gosh, is it worth it. We are grateful currently to have funding from the CDC (center for disease control), and if that is not a strong statement about the efficacy of using social, cultural, and economic activities to reach the at-risk in order to protect their health, what is!

Looking at the old fashioned ledger in which kids who come to the centre sign in, many cited “games” as their reason for coming, but just as many came for counseling, and HIV test, and for skills learning sessions. The 4 centers country-wide have tested no fewer than 25,000 Rwandans, a huge number in a country with the social disruption it has experienced.

Used to be, aunties and uncles where the folks in a family who educated young people about their sexuality. The complete collapse of family systems, however, in 1994 has left an entire generation, going into a second, in complete ignorance about their bodies. The average Rwandan woman has 6.3 babies, and they start young. No one has any sex education at all. It’s absolutely tragic. The centres have replaced traditional cultural practices that were wiped out.

The counseling, all confidential, (done by a code number to each young person, and kept by their assigned counselor) is always done by the same staff member to create rapport, consistency, and safety for the child. The counselors, whom I always find so endearing and marvelous around the world, are the most caring, precious, tender hearted people; they themselves typically come from a world of pain, yet they have transcended their own hardship, become educated, and returned to their communities to serve. It is a truly beautiful thing. (Remember “brain drain” has been a serious complication here, through massacre, disease death, and refugees and having educated people serve is very important.)

The offices were simple and unadorned except for reproductive organ models and some posters with positive statements about delay of sexual debut, abstinence, partner reduction, correct and consistent condom use, and respect for oneself and one’s partners. I wish they had more cheerful teen age stuff to spread on the walls. In fact, now that I recall the centre, it is totally bare. A few rooms, really. It’s the humans and what they do that make it happy and desirable.

The activities are so cool. There is a weekly call in radio show called “Abajene,” a rally cry for youth, which is hosted by a young idol we have empowered with medically accurate information. For kids without electricity and phones (so many!) our Cinemobile does tours to rural parts of the country gussied up with a audio/visual kit in order to attract kids, give them “infotainment,” and let them use the provided cell phone to call in their teen age dilemmas and inquiries. On site, there is dance, singing, games, recreational pursuits, a football pitch, and job skill training. Within these “services” kids learn everything from personal hygiene, prevention and treatment seeking behaviors (how/when/why to go to a medical clinic), and let us not forget, they have a chance to simply be kids, to play, to run, to forget, for a few precious moments, all their burdens and cares, the back breaking chores that await them at home, and how they will probably be going to bed hungry. Again.

I love this approach, not just because it is holistic, but because it embodies the ideal of collaboration with other grassroots organizations. The local church is a great friend of ours in this area, and that represents a breakthrough PSI pioneered in Rwanda. After intensive negotiations, all 5 religious entities in Rwanda signed a “non aggression” pact, declaring they would not oppose sex education and pregnancy prevention for youth, and that they would support proven HIV prevention methods. The signers were the Catholic, Episcopalian, Protestant, 7th Day Adventists, and Muslim superiors and is thought to be unprecedented world wide. Hearing about how intense the dialogue was, and how it almost fell apart many times, it fantastic to know PSI persevered and was able to help religious leaders grasp that they must be obstacles to and contradict the use of family planning.

The football pitch is red earth surrounded by a bit of a fence and they boys playing had cobbled together matching colors to make teams. The real treasure was the ball, because elsewhere, balls are tiny counterfeits made of plastic bags tied together with string. Children ran about joyfully and my aching arms were at last filled with small ones to tote about with me, to shift from hip to hip, to load on my lap. In the way of the poor, they could crowd on my lap, up to 5 at a time, and never complain; they are used to being crammed into tight spaces and they each seemed to grateful for touch and nurturing. Maybe it was all the open windows and the mountain setting, but the children didn’t even smell so bad, except for that one fart!!!

“Baby” was a real favorite of mine. Chubby cheeked and wearing a dirty sea foam green polyester dress, she would stare ambiguously then reward me with an incandescent smile. She was wearing my necklace, which was a flower, and my sunglasses, upside down. I had to pee at one point and reckoned she probably needed to go, too, and she loved letting the sink water run over her little hands. She washed and washed, and I thought, Dushishoze in action!

Her mother is a sex worker who has been reached by Dushishoze. She and her peers have been “sensitized” (educated) as to their incredibly high risk for HIV, STI’s, and unintended pregnancy. They have been given income generating training to ease them out of sex work; as yet, though, they each need the money from one paid sex act a day to eek out a living. Baby had a pile of brothers and sisters…regulating fertility is an alarmingly urgent public health need in Rwanda. I can’t say it enough.

There is so much more to describe, but how can I fit it all in? Camilla, our HIV/AIDS coordinator, gave a mesmerizing presentation on sexuality in Rwanda. HIV sero prevalence is fairly low, but in rural parts the discordance between girls’ and boys’ infection rates is sickening: 5 to 1. Gender inequality in action. When boys approach girls for sex, it is believed a girl suggesting b/c or a condom means she is a sex worker, so girls are supposed to say “no” to prove they are good, leading to a dangerous double talk phenomenon whereby “no” actually means “yes.” So, she proceeds to have unprotected sex, and the cycle roils on and on. One small breakthrough was that 4 out of 10 pregnant teenagers were willing to admit to peer educators during interpersonal communication sessions that the pregnancy was “unwanted,” a critical shift in language in a post genocide country. (“Unplanned” has been the only acceptable word til these girls felt safe enough to be more honest.) Admitting to unwanted pregnancy leads to a great chance for behavior change communications regarding birth control. On set of sexual activities is very young, but they’re still reporting it as a older; PSI is the midst of a big quantitative survey via direct dialoguing with young people all over the country and I look forward to its results. We are an evidence based NGO and the local people who monitor and evaluate their communities, one house hold at a time, play a shining roll in informing programs that save lives and improve the world. I have the utmost respect for them and they get no glory at all.

As always, our time was too short and there was the uncomfortable emotional twist upon leaving in not having been able to sit with and honor each person’s story, from orphan to counselor to sex worker to teenager who is head of house hold. Oh, I cannot close yet, I must tell you about her.

She is 19, and with the job training we gave her, she works at a rural hotel. That’s the good news. The bad news she is the sole provider for her 8 siblings and niece (her younger sister’s baby!). She was 5 in ’94 when her parents were massacred. She earns 20,000 r francs a month, pays 12k for rent and 2k for her own santé mutuelle (only she has insurance in the family). They never have enough to eat and are not reached by any other NGO’s. They do not have mosquito nets or access to safe water, and none of the kids are going to school because she cannot afford to pay the school fees. In plain English, she has “fallen through the cracks,” not being pregnant or having her own baby under 5, she did not qualify for a free net. She stood before me stoically as she told her story, her face and eyes eventually softening.

I will follow up to see what more we can do to help her. And by the way, if your mind hasn’t gone there yet, this is exactly the type of girl who becomes exploited for transactional (I’ll give you a few liters if fuel if you give me your orifices) sex, cross generational (I am an older man and you must respect me and do what I say) sex, and full blown sex work. And, without Dushishoze, she’d be there already, I have no doubt.

Talking about programs like this is always tricky. They do remarkable things….remember the weekly call in show, nationwide, the 25k kids who’ve been tested, the one on one time that is holding the space a beloved auntie should be filling….but there is always in these desperately poor countries so much more, more, more that our programs can and should be doing. It all comes down to money. The Rwandan Government is literally doing everything it can, swimming as fast as it possibly can. Rich governments like ours, foundations, the private sector, wealthy individuals, we need to be doing more.

You can help support our programs like Dushishoze by clicking here.

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Sonrise is a special place. Built by an Anglican Priest to address the orphan crisis after the genocide, Sonrise pulls in the neediest orphans from all over the country. Parish priests are well established in their individual communities and recognize vulnerable children. They bring the most desperate cases to the orphanage where they can be fed, watered, immunized, educated, protect, loved, raised.

Interestingly, they call themselves a boarding school rather than an orphanage to help de stigmatize Rwanda’s orphans. Additionally, to help meet the cost of running the facility (which are fantastically low by our standards), they accept 200 students from “in tact” (which can still mean a non traditional nuclear family, 1994 touched everyone) who can pay for the child’s room, board, and education. In addition to covering a bit of their operating costs, this addresses the wider social concern of integrating orphans into the society of other children, rather than isolating them. They equalize all children regardless of their status by having policies of uniformity: the “rich” kids only bring 2 changes of clothes, so they don’t look fancier than the orphans (remember, Rwandans live on average live on .80 a day), and Sonrise supplies the bedding to keep it simple (no higher count sheets for the posh ones, so to speak). All the dorms are the same. There are 7 bunk beds with sweet, colorful sheets that would appeal to any child, and in the corners was a small plastic cubby for each child’s changes of clothes and their notebooks. That’s it.

But, the place is far from austere. Classes resume tomorrow, and the large dirt courtyard (someone who reads this, please pay to seed grass for them!!!) was pleasant mayhem. The kids were running, laughing, carousing, exploring, and looking for all the world as if they didn’t have a care in the world, except when it was time to pull wide eyes at the arrival of muzungu, white person! I could really get used to this greeting. It is truly something to be a constant source of amazement and joyous outbursts.

Tomorrow, the children begin their school year routine, waking up at 5:30 to make their beds, sweep the floors (they line the window sills with their little shoes, and to wash themselves. At 6:00 AM they have a hearty, healthy breakfast of cow’s milk, eggs, and something else, I forgot what! At 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM they have a fruit snack (banana and pineapple) and lunches and dinner are meat, potatoes, rice, and beans cooked with other vegtables, onion, and fish. Sonrise is very, very proud of the healthy, fresh food they provide, and rightfully so. Everything is made in an amazing and beautiful pre Industrial kitchen. Wood was burning under the hand made oven that bakes fresh bread (delicious, I had some) and the store room was a still life, piles of carrots, cabbages, and potatoes leaning in corners on rough canvas mats.

The children wear white shirts (the girls’ have peter pan collars) and blue pinafores or pants. And what do they do in these charming uniforms? Learn! They rank top 5 in the country each year in academic testing! They recently have tested as high as No. 1! Parliamentarians, ministers, business leaders, and the other elite of Rwanda jostle to send their children to be educated at this orphanage. They are building a secondary school and matriculating their children into it as they grow up. These are the only kids I have met who can speak some English and French, even the littlest.

Always thinking long term about the integrated education of the whole person, during the academic holidays the orphans go back to their home communities, as it is believed they do need to live to learn in a household and create relationships with their extended families and villages. I did ask about how the Diocese ensures that those households to which they go for a 2.5 months are safe for children, who by their very nature needy, vulnerable, and dependent, an orphan an example in the extreme, and the parish priests are responsible for bringing the child to live with him/her if the household is not suitable.

In spite of all they are able to do, this is a poor institution in a very, very poor country. They did not have a single malaria net and I noticed while studying their books that they were paying a lot for malaria care. Also, they buy firewood, which is expensive, and have to use labor to fetch (car, gas, time, etc) it as well as to boil water all day long to prevent diarrheal disease in the 600 kids and staff of 150.

Firewood to create safe water is a huge problem: it adds to deforestation, which creates erosion, which reduces topsoil for farming in an already hungry, subsistence land (it also creates greater catastrophe during natural disasters). It diminishes habitat and biodiversity. It is labor intensive and back breaking on people who need to be spending their energy and calories doing other things to catch a break, to get ahead of merely surviving. It leads to children receiving the chore of fetching wood, and it’s always the girl who gets the task, so the boys can go to school. It is amazing how nefarious this one thing is, firewood.

Today we presented each child (all 600!) with a bottle of Sur Eau. One tiny capful will safely purify 20 liters of water; a bottle will purify a child’s water supply for more than 6 months. No spending precious financial, labor, and environmental resources on boiling giants vats of water. We also gave each one a long lasted insecticide treated net, which will drastically reduce incidence of malaria. One kid I met yesterday had malaria 4 times last year alone; this is so important for all children.

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It is such a sweet place; I really enjoyed my time with the director, another gentle woman who held my hand. We spoke intimately and closely about all they do, and she carefully showed me each feature, each room, each staff member, all the bedrooms, toilets, classrooms (so precious, the long benches with built in desks, lovely dark faces lined up behind them so earnestly ready to learn), the ovens, the giant, beaten tin pots filled with supper, the vegetable store, the cows, everything! And I was delighted to see each thing. Rwanda, such a mixed state, land of incredible natural beauty, abject poverty, scars of genocide, and blooms of healing like Sonrise.

We closed in a big circle, holding hands in the dirt courtyard, singing “Jesus loves me” and saying the Lord’s Prayer. Earlier, I talked with them about what I do when I get scared (ask a friend if they can listen, get a hug from a safe person, write a letter to God, make a gratitude list), and after our prayers, I taught them how I do affirmations. I left Sonrise with a hundred or so kids chorusing in Kinyarwanda, “I am beautiful inside and out! I am precious! I am worthy! I am intelligent! I am creative! I was made on purpose for a purpose! I can do anything I set my mind to! The world is a better place because I am it!”

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We drove down the mountain with the valley below, traced by a wide meandering river. In the east was a wide rainbow, the magenta and violet were glowing. In the west, the sun was setting behind mountain after mountain and mountain. Everything was blue, even the air. It was so beautiful. I listened to Tibetan bowls, talked to my God, got some things figured out, and the peace I have lacked for days that came back to me today when I cried and let it all out, deepened.

Earlier this week I had been finding it impossible to wrap my mind around the state of our world. When I closed my eyes and saw skulls and femurs from the genocide memorials. When I tried to see something else, it was Zainab’s basketball court in Baghdad, converted to a gallows were 20 people a day are being murdered. When I attempted to shut that out, my mind went to Northern Ireland, and when I blotted that out, a thousand other armed conflicts with all their wreckage racked my soul. Torn genitals in Congo, brothels in Mumbai, sewage strewn slums everywhere. Why, why, why, why, why, why? I understood for the first time why “The Goddess of Nanking,” after personally saving thousands of terrified Chinese from Japanese tortures, promptly killed herself when she got back home to Kansas.

Driving down the spellbinding mountain and uninhibited once more in feeling my feelings, the answer came to me from a very soft place inside: self will. I have free will, as do all others, and when I am (and they are) in it, look out. I am (and we are) self will run riot. And that, multiplied by billions of people in and out (some more so than others) of self will, equals the state of the world, good and bad.

And so today I took the focus off all others and their heinous acts, and put it back on myself. I turned my will and my life over, once more, to a power greater than myself. So today, just for today, I get a reprieve from the dis-ease that lives in my head, that wants to convince me I am better than (or worse than) someone else. And just for today, I am not a genocidaire. I am not in a militia. I am not a rapist or a human trafficker. I don’t think that I, or anyone else, deserves to be punished, tortured, or murdered, for who they are, what they do, how they dress, whom they love, how they wash, how they worship, how they look, where they live. Because today I have no doubt that with enough self will run riot, I could have become one of these persons, done any of these things. But for the grace of God go I.

Others, I cannot change. Myself, with the help of my Higher Power, I can. I am grateful today I was given the wisdom to know the difference. It is a deep relief. In addition to relieving me of the obsession of wanting to understand the totality of everything (I hadn’t even seen I was being grandiose, so complete was the distortion), I can feel such gratitude that today I know what to do without needing to worry about why everything else was done. All I need to do is the next good, right, honest thing, whatever that might be.

For now, it happens to be to going bed. It really is as simple as that.

Thank you, Creator. Hy Hy, All my Relations.