.......in a Stable

My visit to Rwanda back in February 2011 was to visit Sr Mary and to see what she and her colleagues had been able to do following the Rwanda genocide.
They had concentrated on the things they knew best, Health and Education and had started completely empty handed in 1995. No money and no income but huge courage.

The early work with children helped by the community managed to get a small primary school started and that is what I saw. The buildings were begged and borrowed and some looked more like stables for animals than class rooms for children.

HUGS was able to fund a design study and costing exercise in June 2011 and the plans appealed to a major Dutch charity who funded the first four class rooms of a new school. HUGS and the imagination of a key donor and trustee raised about £20,000 to pay for two more rooms.

Today December 22nd we heard that a Spanish charity has decided to help and their donation will pay for a further 3 classes making 9 in total.

This really is fantastic news. It will all help to give a really top quality education to the children. It will probably finish the primary level project and then we start thinking about the secondary accommodation. Tomorrow's President of Rwanda is at school today.

Lots of good things start in a stable and we never know where they will end

Best wishes for Christmas to all our readers

Peter, Denise, Joanna, Chris, Bob, Charlotte and Matt

Rwanda and other things

Many thanks to Slater Heelis who are sponsoring the Annual Newsletter this year. We felt that many of our supporters would prefer a hard copy but if you are happy to have an electronic one please let us know and we can save the huge postage cost. We will be sending them out after Christmas.

CHRISTMAS IN UGANDA  has now been translated into German and is being sold near Munich by Gerhard and his friends. But you can of course get a copy from Denise Ead or me or download it from Amazon Books. There is a link on this Blog.

Our Student Maurice is studying at Kigali University and here is what he says about things which are sone thought from a group of students.

my friends are carrying different courses at the university, some are carrying Agriculture, Business studies and other courses, and after their studies at the University they hope that they would utilize apply their acquired skills from the university to create and innovate their own new small businesses instead of moving up seeking for jobs from others.

We know America and Europe as continents made up of some countries that have strong economies with the highest gross domestic product and developed infrastructure, politically strong with good democracy and strong military capacity, and always aim at helping other countries in other continents like Africa to move out from poverty through different programs and aid.

We know micro finance projects as financial services and programs intended to lift low income individuals and micro entrepreneurs out of poverty, and are important because they provide financial services like the provision of soft loans, teaching how to save, insurance and training which also contribute to the development.

If they would bet a huge amount of money to create job what we think would be the best way to spend it is to invest through micro finance projects specifically in sectors like agriculture since about 80% of Rwandans depend on agriculture, and we think by the introduction of methods like agricultural mechanization, application of fertilization, irrigation where necessary and other methods to develop agriculture, we think would increase the output and lead to development while giving jobs many.

The health care system is somehow developing since the health centers have increased to the extent that each sector in Rwanda has its own, there is the medical insurance called “mutuelle de santé” which is for all Rwandans, and is paid periodically every year by every  family, and this has reduced the number of people who used to die at home, and through different programs people are encouraged to fight killer diseases like malaria by providing mosquito nets and also are taught how to fight AIDS.

DRC is not very near is about 100km from the campus, and our beliefs about this issue of rebels called M23 in DRC, only that we know that it was formed out of misunderstandings and failure of the DRC government to fulfill the agreements made on 23^rd march 2009, with think Rwanda doesn’t help M23 because we think no interest would in helping the rebel group to fight the neighboring country.  (DRC is known as Congo.)