6/17/15
Back in Kigali now, we had our first day visiting the Mother and Child Development Center (MCDC) Project, along with our partners Chantal and Hope and their volunteer, Olivier. Two of three vocational skills taught at the center are hair dressing and manicuring. Since my visit last spring, MCDC has opened a hair salon (called hair saloon here) where training program graduates and trainees can work in a rotation. It is set up as a cooperative and the savings will be used to open more salons. Some of the women do not work there, but instead do house calls. Other women continue to work as street vendors in the market and use their new skills to make extra on the side.
We heard testimonials from four women, including Vestine, who told us that her income has increased by 10.00 per week, since she began doing hair in both the salon and in house calls. Marie Claire also told us that the MCDC Daycare Program is providing a great education for her kids and has changed their behavior. The ladies sent us off with a song and we headed out to visit four beneficiaries in their homes.
The strength of the human spirit never ceases to amaze me when I come to Africa. All four ladies whose homes we visited were living in extreme poverty conditions. Being poor in the city somehow seems much more cruel than in the country where one can grow some food. Our first stop was at the home of Florence, who said she cannot stop smiling because she can’t believe her good luck and opportunity for a better future in connecting with MCDC. She makes sometimes more and sometimes less than 1.00 per day selling produce and she lives with her young son in a small room/shanty behind a pile of junk that was given to her by the head of the village (that word is also used within the city) out of empathy for her level of desperation. To see her smile and hear her speak of hope and gratitude for the future stability she foresees she will have after finishing the training program was humbling. She gave us each a banana, although she has almost nothing herself. It would be considered an insult to not accept it, but it made me feel terrible to take from her.
The second home visit was to the home of a beautiful woman named Fortunate. She explained to us how she used MCDC’s revolving funds program to take a loan that she invested into her business selling grains in the market. She was able to increase her income by almost double and used some of her profits to buy chairs for her house where everyone previously had to sit on the hard dirt floor. There are currently 60 women using the revolving fund and the payback has been very good.
The third home visit was to the home of Assumpta, mother of 3 with a 2 month old baby. She doesn’t have a husband or a man that is helping her out at all and she is not able to work at the salon or even in homes doing hair, because she is taking care of the new baby and her house is quite far from the center. For that same reason, she is unable to get her kids to the daycare center either. For money, she fetches water for other people who pay her the equivalent of about 1 cent and it requires her to walk very far up and down a long hill to do so. She cried when telling us her story and Chantal, Hope and I cried too. Her story was really heart breaking. We each gave her some money in celebration of her baby, which is customary, but we realized that we have to put together a direct support fund for these women in dire circumstances to help them get through until they are able to begin seeing the profit from their trainings and/or are able to work post babies.
The last home visit was to the home of Diane, mother of 4 with a 2 week old baby. She expressed how happy she is that her two older kids are still able to attend the Daycare Program at MCDC, even though she is not able to work at the salon at the moment. The father of her first child is suffering from mental illness and is living in the streets. The father of her other three kids is not living with her, is HIV positive (she is not) and rarely is able to help her financially. Her mother refuses to take her in and is not emotionally supportive in any way either. We also gave her the baby gifts. She is another case that we feel needs the additional direct support until her baby is old enough that she can go back to work.
One irony is that the neighborhood where both Assumpta and Diane live is in a rustic valley on the outside of town. Perched on the hills above them are brand new beautiful homes. It seems like a cruel joke that this is what they see when they look up from their very basic houses.
Tomorrow, we will continue our visit with our partners at MCDC. It is going to be a very interesting day!
