A Saturday with Compassion Kids

7:50am this morning, we (two other volunteers and I) were collected at home by the Accountant of Compassion Project 727, and we ascended the hill behind our house to where their Saturday activities take place.

Children in school uniforms were playing all around till they were gathered on the steps in front of the church building to start the day. Now, we were invited by the project’s coordinator to come and see what they do, but true to Rwandan culture (as I’ve come to know), the way they like to make visitors ‘feel welcome’ is to included them in what they do. So in front of the 271 children, the coordinator announced that the three visitors will be taking their hour and a half lesson this morning. Luckily by now, my improvisation skills have developed quite well as this was not the first instance of this sort I’ve experienced whilst in the country.

The children gathered in to age groups at different spots under trees on the hill. Blackboards and a few benches were carried out from the church building and then the morning session started. Each group has a teacher who provides them with education in mainly social and bible studies. The class I was assigned to was very eager to learn more English words, so I combined this with teaching them an English song. And thereafter, as part of social development, we played some of their games. They even played ‘vroteier’! I wonder where that game originated then really if it’s known across Africa.

After the session, the children rushed to the Compassion office down the other side of the hill to get their cup of nutritional drink (boiled mixture of sorghum, maize, soya and sugar) and two ‘vetkoek’-like pieces of cake.

Normally, the children would have had another teaching session afterwards, but today they were gathered together for the handout of mosquito nets. Each child got two nets, one for themselves and one for a parent. This is obviously not enough for the whole family, but the nets are very big and could easily cover 2 children at a time. The children were very excited about these new items, but one of the Compassion staff explained to us that now they have a big task at hand as they’ll have to go and visit each individual family during the coming week to make sure the nets are being used and not sold for cash.

I looked over the hundreds of faces, and then started looking in to individuals’ eyes, and then realised that each single one of them are being cared for and prayed for by some person across the water. These children are light-years ahead of their peers: the children of other farmers like the ones I met yesterday and the children I see along the road so often. Their health, their clothes, their alertness and their content are some of the characteristics that are visibly different. As a sponsor myself, today’s interaction with the children meant so much to me, as I now clearly saw the difference that child sponsorship makes.