Reflections underway

By travelling around Rwanda with our mobile cinema we have learned much about the country and her challenges. Rwanda seems to be a relatively unique country in the African context, especially concerning safety and the fight against corruption. We have for example not ended up in any situation were we did not feel safe. Moreover, no police officers and authority figures have tried to bribe us. It also needs to be emphasized that we have travelled a great deal, visited cities and tiny villages, and been in contact with quite a few authority figures. The President also seems to be genuinely interested in the development of the country and its people, though this is difficult for an outsider to judge. Despite these positive remarks, throughout our stay we have become aware of various challenges the country faces. We have met Western volunteers, visited local organizations and businesses, and also various health centers. We have also spent time in villages and talked with local people.

Awareness concerning family planning is urgently needed. The government has recently started a family planning campaign which is reinforced in the new seven year strategy plan. Families have too many children, often between five and ten. This results in many mouths to feed for an already impoverished population, and children often end up malnourished. In both Munini and Banda village we visited initiatives which focused on the treatment of malnourished children. At the hospital in Munini we learned that mothers that frequently give birth often end up neglecting the younger children still in the need of care when a new baby is born. Big families are partly an outcome of a negative attitude towards birth control. Many think that hormonal birth control makes women go crazy, and condoms are also not popular to use. Some women receive the three month injection because they want to have fewer children and because it is easy to hide from their husbands. Because of this skepticism towards hormonal birth control organizations also try to promote natural birth control by teaching women about their menstrual cycle and fertility peaks. Large families put pressure on an already densely populated country. Rwanda is 26 000 square km with a population of over 10 million of whom almost everyone are farmers. The need for fertile ground is immense and ever growing. Almost all forests outside the national parks have been cut for land and fire wood, which is devastating for the global climate and also leads to local erosion. More efficient agriculture is therefore needed to feed the growing population.

Another challenge Rwanda faces is the empowerment of woman and the fight against gender based violence. An ongoing African campaign tries to tackle the problem of domestic violence. In two of the villages we have visited two women were beaten by their husband right before and during our visit. Volunteers report that men beating their wife is a serious problem in their villages and that local police officers often do not take the claims of the women seriously. One volunteer said that she often have to accompany women to the police station in order to get the desired response. Another volunteer could tell us that an injured lady in the need of stitching was sent away from the local hospital because she could not afford to pay for the treatment. In some of the villages we visited we have screened a film on gender based violence which many people have appreciated and many have expressed the need for such awareness building.

HIV/AIDS is of course another major challenge. The official number of people with HIV is three percent of the population. Other sources however report a significantly higher number, around 13 percent. We travel around with two films concerning HIV. One of the films is educational, focusing on how one can get infected and also how you cannot get infected, thereby killing some common myths. The film also focuses on how people can live healthy lives with HIV. The importance of using condoms is of course also mentioned. People with no stable relationship, but with frequent sex partners often do not use condoms, resulting in a rapid spread of the disease. Men cheating on their wife and thereby infecting their partner with HIV are also a problem according to a Peace Corps volunteer. When women give birth both the man and the woman needs to take an HIV test, which makes it a little easier to spot such cases.

For us it has been a nice experience to be a small part of this important awareness building. It is very interesting to see how all the efforts the volunteers put into tackling these problems seems to lead -little by little- to some progress.