Meeting the Women of MCDC

6/12/14

For the past three years, Pilot Light has had a project that we call the Market Cooperative, which is a group of ladies who work in the market in Kigali, Rwanda. They share costs and give each other small loans to increase their incomes. We have recently partnered with the Women and Children Development Center (MCDC) in Kigali and now the Market Coop has been expanded in it’s scope and is called the MCDC Project. Being extremely poor in the city somehow seems much more unforgiving than being extremely poor in the countryside and the new program addresses the needs of women living in the city.

The project now aims to help empower women through learning skills to either replace or add on to the earnings they have working at market. Most of them work outside of the market without permits, which puts them at risk of being beaten and arrested and makes their children vulnerable in the streets.

The center offers them counseling in health issues, family issues, child counseling (some of the girls have been raped while their mothers are away at work) and economic counseling. The women are offered training in catering or hair and nails and tailoring is soon to be offered, as well. While at work in the market or during training hours, the center provides a safe, clean and nurturing place for the children of these women to play, eat, sleep and learn. This leaves the mother’s free to work and learn without worries of their children being harmed in the marketplace or at home alone.

The children of the center, in paper hats showing their name and a word in English with its picture, welcomed us with a song and clapping. Cute beyond words! Then a few women were kind enough to share some of their stories and experiences with us.

One of them was Betty, a beautiful young woman dressed smartly. Betty told us that her husband left her when she was pregnant with her second child. She had no money for rent or food and was working illegally outside of the market selling her goods. Just the week before our visit, she was arrested and imprisoned for a week. She pulled off her headdress to show us her head, freshly shaved in prison. She is hopeful now that being part of the catering program, she will be able to leave the streets for good. At the center, her kids now get a second meal each day, as she could only give them one meal before. She told us that she has gotten much from the counseling services and with a huge smile and much animation, she went on and on about how happy she is to be at the center with her children.

We also heard from a husky voiced, warm smiling woman that failed to give her name, but told us that she is a prostitute. The other mothers embraced her. She heard about the center and came for training in hairdressing and nails in the hopes of being able, as she put it, “to work during the day and not at night”. She is illiterate, but feels that her mindset has already changed and that she cannot work as a prostitute anymore.

The catering group fed everyone a delicious snack of meatballs, beignets and chapati. After completing the courses in skills training at the center, the women working in catering will be assisted in forming a cooperative, so they can move forward into earning a living from their newly found skills. There will also be support for those in the hairdressing program. The graduates will be expected to give back by volunteering their time at the center to help train a new group of women coming in. There are several things that Pilot Light is considering now, to be discussed in the coming week, such as giving small incomes to those who are unable to work during the training period and may otherwise not be able to provide for their kids, for example the young prostitute. We are also going to give more seed money to form new loan groups, which allows the women to be more independent. I look forward to meeting these same women when I come next year to see what great things they have accomplished!