Monday 3 August 2009

Kigeme Remote Village


I joined a group of youth from the UK for a day. We drove for 2 hours (at 10 to 20 km/h) from the town Kigeme to get to this remote village. The journey gave me once again very good insight in to the life of the really rural. All over I saw people working in fields: men, women, women with babies on their backs, older people and children. The main challenge these people have to fight is the access to larger villages and markets. Because this is so hard, they need to survive with what resources they have, literally living from hand to mouth.

RDIS identified the dire need for intervention of this village and through the village parish, started their project in 2001. RDIS first of all listened to what the parish leaders reckoned the greatest need was and then planned their actions from there. Before 2001, the village had no facilities at all. Since then, major growth had occurred.

Upon arrival, we were made to sit down on a bench in the field and were welcomed by a team of parish leaders (serving as the town council) with song and then prayer. We were told that our interest in their activities, shown by coming all the way from England, is a big encouragement to the local people. After the short ‘meeting’, we were taken on a little tour to see the development achievements over that last eight years: three classrooms were built for primary school (no nearby school before); secondary school was started (50 students attending, with 8 sent to University from this school); literacy programme was started (for those who never had the opportunity to go to school); potato food storage building was built (no place existed before to store excess produce and hence lots was wasted); animal rearing, a.o. made possible by RDIS (Tearfund) with the provision of 10 cows to the community on a revolving loan basis; microfinance and savings programme initiated (people taught how to manage funds and could borrow money); widows support programme started. In addition, as the parish got more established through managing these activities, people were encouraged to fight witchcraft. 76 People turned from witchcraft practice – they even showed us the complete list of names and photo’s as evidence!

This project is a very good example of RDIS’s approach of church and community mobilisation. RDIS didn’t go in and manage the work. They simply mobilised the church and community to do it themselves. I’m all for this approach, as I’ve come to witness that one of the key failures of aid is the dependency and hence slackness it creates.

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