"Going to the chapel, and we're going to get married" at Aspire!

Just before Christmas, 19 Aspire brides & their grooms said “I do” in a service coordinated by Aspire staff.  The marriages are a profound step forward for the women in protecting themselves and their families, and preparing for the future.

Aspire, the year-long educational training program that Network for Africa supports in Rwanda, teaches its students about their legal rights, including marital rights.  Many Rwandan women have “traditional marriages” in which they live with their partners, but these informal arrangements are not legally recognized. This means that a woman and her children are vulnerable to the whims of the man. Since the marriage is not recognized by the government, the woman is unable to benefit from Rwanda’s progressive laws that empower and protect women in the event of divorce or a partner’s death.  Without legalizing her marriage, a woman in Rwanda has little recourse in claiming spousal or child support if her partner leaves her, and she may even lose any money or property that she brought into the relationship. 

In other words, she is powerless and at the whim of her partner.

If her partner dies, a woman may have difficulty ensuring that she and their children can keep his possessions, including the land and house where the family had been living.

Aspire has learnt that in order to empower women and strengthen families, men must be included in the discussion and learning process, too.  To that end, Aspire brought in two Rwandan organizations for training seminars.  HAGURUKA is an organization that educates people on their legal rights, particularly women and children’s rights, and on marital law. It also provides pro bono legal services for women and children.  RWAMREC, the Rwanda Men’s Resource Center, is committed to creating more healthy attitudes towards women in personal relationships and society, including putting an end to gender-based violence.

In addition to making a financial grant to Aspire to enable it to host the mass wedding, RWAMREC returned to hold further discussions with the newly married men, as well as more than 20 other husbands or partners of Aspire beneficiaries.  RWAMREC talked about different types of gender-based violence, its consequences, and how to prevent them.  They encouraged the men to change their personal behaviour for the good of their families and for the whole community, not only by ending violence, but also generally treating women and children with respect.

The men responded very enthusiastically and have shown an interest in attending other seminars, in addition to requesting literacy lessons.  One of the seminar participants was an elected village leader who has since been talking positively in the community about the RWAMREC/Aspire course, alerting local leaders to the training.  It is through the education and support of such leaders that communities begin to change and women and children are given the respect they deserve.

This is one of the many ways in which Aspire is making a profound difference in Kigali.  Present at the wedding were six village leaders, a district representative, and two Kigali City officials. The day’s events were covered by local radio and two local newspapers.  Since the wedding many more Aspire women and their partners have expressed the desire to legalize their marriages – a wonderful achievement that will lead to long-term change.

Aspire Wedding Day 2011

 

Read more about:

RWAMREC

RWAMREC’s distinctive and innovative mission focuses on mobilizing Rwandan men to support women’s leadership; to contribute to the eradication of men’s violence against women; and to serve as role models for the promotion of positive masculine behaviors. Building alliances and partnership with women organizations to promote women’s rights and interests is central.

HAGURUKA

(The website is in French.  Try the Babel Fish website translation service if needed.)

The Slow Food revolution: retro food is feeding Africa & saving the environment

At first glance the scale of the poverty, disease and environmental issues affecting Africa can seem overwhelming. Yet, often the solutions aren’t that complicated. For instance, by rediscovering traditional methods of producing food, people have begun to grow local varieties in a more sustainable way. It’s good for the environment, and it provides abundant nutritious food - that’s the key to the success of the worldwide Slow Food movement.

Network for Africa works with Slow Food in northern Uganda, where 22 years of war disrupted a once proud and prosperous agricultural community. Farmers were forced to abandon their fields for decades, living in squalid refugee camps. Gradually, the traditional knowledge passed down to each generation through practical experience was lost.

In Patongo, a rural community in northern Uganda, we will be celebrating Terra Madre Day on December 10th, along with hundreds of other Slow Food groups across the globe.

Terra Madre Day is  an opportunity to involve the community in learning about  the importance of safeguarding food biodiversity, at the same time as bringing taste education to adults and children, and connecting local producers with consumers.

Around the world Terra Madre Day will feature celebratory picnics, dinners, film screenings and concerts. The events aim to raise the profile of healthy and fairly-produced food, with excursions to visit Terra Madre producers, food tastings, campaigns and petitions on related issues and gatherings of local producers, cooks, youth and others.

PATONGO’S TERRA MADRE DAY

''Carama Wit Cam Acoli' ('Celebration of a variety of Acoli dishes')

Our partners in Patongo will be celebrating Terra Madre day by inviting elders, cultural and traditional leaders and local people to a community food party. The event is a chance to show people the importance of local, traditional crops, rediscovering valuable agricultural practices.

A group of women volunteers, some from our projects (the Ribbe Aye Teko women’s group and the Patongo Counselling Community Outreach Centre), will use traditional recipes using local produce  for the whole community to taste.

Girls, boys and men will be encouraged to watch and learn how to cook the Slow Food way. They will also learn about the benefits to the environment and to their personal well-being from growing local seeds and crop varieties, eating local food and using traditional recipes and methods. Awards will be given to the women who produce the most delicious dishes. 

The day’s events also include introducing the community to five demonstration gardens supported by Network for Africa. People will be encouraged to  learn about the crops and techniques used, thereby encouraging local pride and interest in their heritage of sustainable and traditional agriculture.

Watch this space for updates and photos of the day of celebrations!

World AIDS Day - how Network for Africa is fighting AIDS

More than 33 million people worldwide are living with HIV. As we mark World AIDS Day, it is worth remembering the 25 million people who died as a result of the virus between 1981 and 2007.  That’s twice the population of London.

Countries in Africa have particularly suffered from HIV/AIDS. Uganda is an example. Until recently northern Uganda was gripped by a brutal conflict between the Lords’ Resistance Army and the Ugandan Defence Forces, lasting more than two decades.   The war decimated the healthcare system, and forced millions of people into extreme poverty, causing HIV to spread like wildfire, especially in the north.  During the war it was estimated that 11.9% of the population were HIV+ in northern Uganda – almost double the already high national average.

In Patongo, a small town in northern Uganda where Network for Africa works, the effects of AIDS are hard to avoid.  Young people in Patongo are especially at risk of contracting the virus, and the rates of infection show little sign of reducing.  People in the community are finding HIV diagnosis hard to cope with, often becoming depressed.  Many turn to alcohol, resulting in family conflict and even suicide.  The situation has become desperate for many.

But change can happen in Patongo.

Our network of Outreach Counsellors counsel and comfort vulnerable people who need HIV testing or who have already tested positive.  If people are reluctant to visit the health clinic for testing, our Outreach Counsellors visit them in their villages.  In some cases, their support has prevented suicide, and their involvement has strengthened community solidarity and reduced both the stigma and trauma associated with being diagnosed as HIV+. And most importantly, it encourages people to get tested, reassuring those who are HIV+ that they can live relatively normal lives.

Our Outreach Counsellors offer advice about hygiene so people can avoid opportunistic infections.  They can provide treated mosquito nets and training, and reduce the incidence of malaria, which debilitates people weakened by HIV.  They explain the importance of drinking clean water; they distribute condoms and talk about safe sex.

Our demonstration vegetable gardens will provide people with the skills and knowledge to grow the healthy food that is so badly needed by those taking anti-retroviral medication, and whose immune systems are depressed.  It can halt the negative cycle caused by lack of nourishment that leaves people too weak to cultivate crops.

These small interventions are chipping away at HIV’s stronghold in Patongo. People in Patongo, even those living with HIV, now have hope.

You can make a difference, too. Please consider giving to help support Network for Africa's projects. For example:

• £4 ($6.50) could pay for a treated mosquito net.
• £55 ($88) could pay for a bicycle for an Outreach Counsellor.
• £50 ($80) a month could pay for 100 people to have HIV counselling each month.

Please donate here.

Nursery keeps children safe, allows mothers to work

Rwanda is the first and only country in the world where women are in the majority in parliament. Women are leading the social and economic recovery from genocide through co-operatives and self-educating groups like Aspire, Network for Africa’s yearlong educational and training program. Yet lack of infrastructure limits development. For example, the genocide removed a generation of grandmothers and aunts who minded children while mothers worked. Without these familiar social networks, mothers often have no choice but to leave children at home while they go to work.  The children rarely eat until their mothers return.  Older daughters may be forced to stay home from school to watch their younger siblings, meaning that they fall behind in their schoolwork and may even have to drop out of school.  Even worse, predators are aware of children left home without supervision.  We were recently horrified to learn that a 6 year old girl, left alone during the day while her mother worked, was raped in her own home in a local neighborhood.

Aspire women do have an advantage in being able to bring their young children with them to lessons and training.  However, problems arise when toddlers are present, distracting their mothers from learning and working, while at the same time worrying the mothers that their children aren’t receiving the attention they need – a concern that working mothers all over the world can identify with.

A woman enrolled in Aspire, with her son

N4A is tackling this problem by building a workplace nursery and preschool.  At the Aspire nursery, younger children will be safe and provided with two nutritionally balanced meals a day, and will be given a step-up in life by enhancing their cognitive and social development.  In turn, mothers will be able to work uninterrupted, earning the funds necessary to feed and educate their children, thus breaking the cycle of poverty.  After the mothers graduate from the Aspire program and are making money in cooperatives, they can keep their children in the nursery for a reasonable fee, which will help the program be self-sustaining.

Construction of the nursery is currently underway on the Aspire campus.  

Catherine, a British volunteer who has served as the head teacher of a nursery school for over ten years, will be coming to Rwanda in Spring 2012 to train assistants; Aspire will hire a qualified Rwandan teacher who will work with Catherine in the training and will take over the school when she leaves.  Assistants will be chosen from young mothers who are enrolled in Aspire, who are taking English classes and show an interest in working with children.  The training they will have to complete will also make them qualified to gain employment at other nurseries in Rwanda in the future.  Additionally, Catherine will begin twice-weekly meetings to talk with the Aspire women about parenting skills.  Many of the Aspire women, themselves orphaned or widowed during the genocide, have expressed a desire for parenting classes, covering topics like nutrition and discipline alternatives to corporal punishment in the home.

$25 (£16) could pay for one month of nursery/preschool for a child.  This includes two meals a day, five days a week.  If you would like to donate, visit Network for Africa at http://network4africa.org/give.

                     
Women enrolled in Aspire, with their children

Ugandan newspaper highlights plight of child sex slaves as they return home - and how Network for Africa is helping

Nine-year-old Christine was on her way home from school when the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels abducted her in 1994. They marched her across valleys and forests, until she had no idea where she was. Her first “assignment” in the bush was to kill another abducted child, a boy who had been caught trying to escape. “I was forced to take a panga, cut off the boy’s head and hold it in my hand,” says Christine. The rebels awarded her to an officer as one of his wives. Everyday for ten years Christine wanted to return home to her village, but she feared what would happen if she was caught. She bore two children with the rebel officer before she got a chance to escape during a battle between the Ugandan army and the rebels. But even after she had returned home life was not easy: people often referred to her as ‘the mother of a rebel’s children’.

Sadly, Christine’s story is not unique in northern Uganda.  In September, Uganda’s leading newspaper, the Sunday Vision, published an article about the plight of “child mothers”: women and girls who were used by rebels as “wives” – a misleading word that really means sex slaves.  The UN estimates that between 1988 and 2004, about 10,000 young girls were kidnapped by the LRA, used as sex slaves, and subsequently bore rebels’ children.  Even if these child mothers manage to escape from the LRA, when they return home, they are often rejected, as Christine was, even by close family members.

Christine has found practical help and support at the Patongo Youth Centre.  The Centre offers skills training and mental health counseling to former child soldiers and young people who were abducted during the war.  The Centre’s counselors are being trained by Network for Africa’s team of psychotherapists, who have been holding lay counselor training seminars in Africa for the past five years.

Other women like Christine are also being helped by the Patongo Counseling Community Outreach project, Network for Africa’s team of local lay Outreach Counselors.  The counselors work in pairs – one woman and one man – making regular visits to 400 families in the Patongo area.  Equipped with bikes, they can travel quickly and reach more people.  In addition to providing much-needed counseling, including coping techniques for traumatized former child soldiers, the counselors offer advice to small village savings & loans groups.  The project is also working with Slow Food International, to teach local people to create sustainable vegetable gardens.

 Outreach counselors during a training session

The Sunday Vision points out that few charities work in rural Patongo and surrounding areas, leaving residents to fend for themselves amidst the ruins of a country that had been at war for 22 years. 

By providing psychosocial support as well as practical tools to grow food and earn an income, Network for Africa is offering a bridge to a better life for rural northern Ugandans who survived the war.

An outreach counselor receiving her certificate of training course completion

Surviving Ugandans become trauma counselors

(WOMENSENEWS)--Tragic events like terrorist attacks and natural disasters illustrate how strangers can come together selflessly and spontaneously, helping each other. For each moment of horror there is a corresponding act of beauty and kindness.

But what happens when the initial crisis is over, leaving people to adjust to a new reality? Around the world, it is often women who strive to make life as bearable as possible for those who survive.

A friend who worked in a Bosnia refugee camp told me, "The men rapidly fell apart, and the kids became silent; it was up to the women to get the family up every morning, feeding them and washing their clothes. If the women had let their feelings show, just for a moment, the whole edifice would have collapsed."

I interviewed a young mother in the West Bank's Ramallah who woke one day to find her apartment block encircled by tanks, their guns trained on her windows. "How could I explain it to my 7-year-old son? I baked him a cake shaped like a tank and used a chocolate bar as the gun. I had to normalize the situation for him."

In the case of northern Uganda it is hard to "normalize" the new reality. For 23 years unarmed civilians endured a war that shattered villages and families. Many who supported their families through unimaginable hardship now face a sense of anti-climax and depression. Anyone who has cared for someone during a terminal illness recognizes this feeling. Once the funeral is past, the bleakness of continuing life alone can be overwhelming.

Great Challenges

The challenges could not be greater than in northern Uganda. Thirty thousand children were forced to become soldiers, brutalized by the notoriously vicious Lord's Resistance Army. Kids were forced to kill or be killed.

As yesterday's Women's eNews story reported, girls were gang raped and bore children for the soldiers who abused them.

Thousands were abducted, often for years at a time, and at the height of the war nearly 2 million northern Ugandans were forced into refugee camps.

My charity, Network for Africa, works in a remote rural area called Patongo, a place without running water where people still die of easily preventable diseases. We are helping local women rebuild their devastated communities in this forgotten corner of Africa, setting up farming associations and training women in health, nutrition, women's empowerment, family planning and improving agricultural techniques.

But how can a woman concentrate on learning a skill and holding her family together when her surroundings provide triggers that daily plunge her into post-traumatic stress? Keeping calm and carrying on may have been an option during the war, but now unresolved trauma prevents people from starting over.

Network for Africa knows that shipping in experts cannot meet the massive need, nor is it culturally appropriate. Thankfully many Americans will never know what it is like to live in constant fear of attack by a rebel group. Nor are most of us haunted by recent memories of enslavement and rape.

One of the cornerstones of our psychiatric tradition is to assure the patient they are no longer at risk, and that their fear is irrational. But in northern Uganda there has been little justice and the perpetrators carry on with impunity. It is entirely rational to live in fear, expecting to have to suddenly run for your life–because that is how it has been for two decades.

Providing Trauma Counseling

Our approach is to train well-respected local people in basic trauma counseling. They in turn help their communities. Twice a year our team of professional counselors--three remarkable women from Missouri--go to northern Uganda to run intensive training courses.

Our graduates become outreach counselors; we provide bikes so they can reach distant villages. We know they are having a positive effect, because villagers report that they are better able to work, study and sleep. Our American team will keep returning to run courses because we have only just scraped the surface of local needs.

Network for Africa's outreach counselors have also become trusted messengers, passing on information about health, nutrition, family planning and women's rights. Civil society was destroyed during the decades of war, yet our outreach counselor team members are just the people who can help strengthen social networks and coping mechanisms.

The community's psychological well-being cannot be separated from their dire economic circumstances. Traditional farming skills were lost while people were in the camps, so we train women in sustainable agricultural techniques, enabling them to support their families. We raise funds to buy oxen, seeds and plows and teach environmentally responsible methods to grow traditional nutritious local crops, which then produce balanced meals for their children.

Sometimes we wonder how the women of Patongo find the emotional and physical strength, but as long as they do, we are honored to provide a helping hand.

This article was originally published at Womens eNews.  It was written by Rebecca Tinsley, Network for Africa founder and author of the recently published When the Stars Fall to Earth.

Buy a copy of When the Stars Fall to Earth. 100% of Rebecca's profits are donated to Network for Africa, to help women and children who have survived genocide and war.

Investing in girls & women for long-term change

What is the best way to help people lift themselves out of poverty? By investing in girls and women. This is Network for Africa’s vision. Through our work in Africa we know that when you give women training and a small amount of capital to start their own businesses, the whole community benefits. As a result, children are fed and sent to school, and women begin to gain respect, meaning that the path for the next generation will be easier. Our projects show that by investing in women, we unlock the potential of the unheard half of the population, allowing them to contribute fully to society and the economy.

A woman in Rwanda making beads from paper, 

for necklaces that are sold through Network for Africa's Aspire program

As one of the women we work with put it:

Now that I am earning money even the shopkeepers have confidence in me. They will give me credit and know that I will pay it back because I am earning money. I have earned respect in the community. They say, “Those are the working women.”

Marking paper to cut and make into beads

Cut strips of paper ready to be rolled into beads

Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, agree. Kristof and WuDunn were interviewed on the CNN show Global Public Square this past Sunday. They were also joined by Zainab Salbi, the founder of Women for Women International.

WuDunn pointed out that, when given microfinance loans, women have a higher repayment rate than men:

Microfinancing institutions like Grameen and BRAC, which basically started [microfinancing] in Bangladesh, they didn't want to be discriminatory, so they wanted to give to men and to women. But they found that women were just repaying at much higher rates than men. They were losing money by giving micro loans to men. So they've now switched to 97 percent of lending to women.

In addition to higher repayment rates, women are more likely to generate wider social benefits with their businesses. Salbi told a story about a woman who used her training and small loan to start a soap-making business. Salbi observed of the woman and her husband:

She changed the relationship from she gives him all the money and he spends it on his alcohol and cigarettes and prostitution or weapons. And now she reversed it. Now he goes and works and brings her the money and they manage it together to send their kids to school, get better housing and better life's conditions for both of them.

As Salbi pointed out, this is not just about making money, but also about changing social patterns. This is long-term change. And this is what Network for Africa is about.

Another Aspire woman rolling paper into beads. 

The profit from the beaded necklaces gives the women and their children 

a chance at a better life.

Click on the links below to read more about our work with women and income-generating projects.

In Rwanda:

Aspire

Wanda Bread

In Uganda:

Women’s Income Generating Groups

You can help support these projects by donating to Network for Africa.  Thank you!

Read the full interview with Kristof, WuDunn and Salbi here.