Friday July 9th
“Do NOT venture out of Bujumbura,” the Canadian Embassy warning reads. Burundi is awarded a 5 on a 6 point scale, a “6” being do NOT travel places such as Sudan and Afghanistan. “Avoid Kayenga especially,” the warning reads.
So looking right and left for both rebels and corrupt armed militia, we take a mini van to the very heart of Kayenga. This is the “slum” where Kat, the American volunteer, has a clinic. Children mobbed us: beautiful, high energy, chocolate skinned kids with threads hanging off their shoulders – yet so excited to see Westerners. We’re evidently the rich here. It’s disturbing to come face to face with poverty in the shape of these children, jarring to find ourselves in the middle of a street used as a living space with an open sewer running along the side.
Muzugu!” they shout and clamor to see the photo I take of them. Twenty midget fingers try to touch my camera screen and I jerk it away in jest. They pose and dance around us in absolute glee. The African delight of living is intoxicating. Poverty does not necessarily bring depression.
The Woman’s Friendship Center where Kat works is run on funds donated by American Quakers. It is impressive as it is thoughtful. A mixture of health care, trauma treatment and micro financing for women equates to a superb balance of ideas that seem to be working. We tour the facilities: clean yet small. The staff is terribly dedicated and prove what a balanced program can do to empower the lives of women in this country. Anna and I help with the wall building, carefully checking each brick for “poisonous “ spiders. Then a large lunch of beans and rice. Some donated funds will definitely go here.
Kat is right. We must look at the BIG picture. If we keep throwing money at problems, keep investing in ideas that are proven to fail, and continue to feed our egos by focusing on the need to reach their goals.
Complaining eases my frustration for a while, much in the same way that chocolate can help a bad mood, But then it wear off. Seeking to understand achieves far more than stamping my feet. The children here have very different early years to those in Canada. There’s little stimulation here and now, rather than helping tomorrow by starting to educate our Burundi children, we will continue to create the same problems that those before us have faced. Most people of Burundi want to get there one day. People CAN change. If we love them, work with them and invest our time to help them develop skills, connections, ideas and inspiration they when young: few toys, no concerted effort to read, play or spend time with the very young. Babies spend their first year strapped to a mother’s back. Three year olds play in the dust and squeal in excitement when a Mazungu appears in their field of vision. Their young lives look, to me, boring and monotonous. No wonder they stare vacantly in class, or play obsessively with a worn out balloon.
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