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One legacy of the slaughter: 400,000 'unaccompanied' youngsters
Sunday, September 24, 2000
By Anita Srikameswaran, Post-Gazette Staff Writer with pictures by Martha Rial, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
In a country where farming must take precedence over gardening, it's a pleasant surprise to view the home and yard that belong to Deanne Kantenwa and her sisters. Each garden bed is bordered with a single row of tiny plants. The purple- and green-leafed shrubs and flowering bushes are sparse, but artfully positioned and carefully tended. All were transplanted from the wild, and the girls don't know the plants' names.
"In my family, it was always like this," said Deanne, 20, through a translator. Gardening is just one of the ways that she is teaching her four younger sisters their parents' way of life. "I very much want the children to be clean like our mother was. And to love school and to respect people."
The five girls, for all practical purposes, were orphaned during the genocide six years ago. They know their mother died. Their father was a soldier who had been in a hospital at the time, and they assume he is dead. Four other sisters and one brother died, too.
When the killing started in their village, the surviving girls ran into the bush. They hid there for three days, briefly getting separated from one sister, Cinderella Bampire, when she ran in fright from the sound of bullets.
After the killing stopped, they moved for the next several months among orphanages scattered across Rwanda, which numbered close to 80 after the genocide.
The last one they stayed in was in the town of Rwamagana in eastern Rwanda, near their present home. The government decided to close the facility in 1998, so homes and foster families had to be found for the children, who are usually described as "unaccompanied," to include those whose relatives' whereabouts are not known.
In Deanne's case, the government and relief agencies, including the International Rescue Committee, helped build the mud brick house the girls now live in. Food is cooked over a fire outside. The outdoor latrine is tucked into a corner behind the house.
Like the garden, their house is well-kept. The floors are bare dirt, but the four small rooms are neat. The red-brown walls of the main room are decorated with scavenged postcards and white garlands, which on closer inspection turn out to be Styrofoam packing peanuts strung together.
Before they moved into the house, a village woman had offered to watch over the girls, Deanne explained. But when the woman realized she was not going get paid in exchange for her stewardship, she lost interest. She eventually moved in with her own daughter, an hour away in Kigali.
Such fair-weather friendship has forced Deanne to drop out of school, although she needs to complete only one more term. She had planned to take courses in Kigali that would help her get a good job, but for now, someone has to care for the younger girls.
The girls get help from the government because they are orphans, but it's not enough. Deanne wants her sisters to be educated, so to eke out a living, she cooks rice and flatbreads with 18-year-old Rosette and sells them at the twice-weekly open-air market. They make the equivalent of one or two U.S. dollars, which they use to buy staples like salt or pay for school costs.
They usually eat one meal a day, but the younger sisters are growing out of the few clothes they have. One of the girls, 15-year-old Niyigena, boards at a convent school.
Cinderella, 13, and Gisele, 10, don't remember much about their lives before the genocide, which occurred when they were 7 and 4. They regard Deanne as their mother. She is the person they go to when they need something.
She also is "harsh" with them when they start squabbling about whose turn it is to fetch water or clean the house. But the girls smiled and were quick to assure Constance Mukankusi, a visiting community worker with the rescue committee, that Deanne doesn't physically abuse them.
The family's struggle to keep food on the table and attend school grew more complicated with the birth in May of Rosette's son, whom she named Ishimye.
Rosette shyly explained to Mukankusi that she had lived with foster parents last year. She was told to sleep in the same bed as their school-aged son. That arrangement led to her pregnancy.
Rosette left to join her sisters in the little house. She dropped out of school. The father doesn't contact them, which is fine with her. Her son was born in one of the tiny bedrooms.
News of her sister's pregnancy devastated Deanne.
"It was too much, it was the end of the world," she said. "I thought of running away."
But who would take care of the girls?
Rosette is optimistic about the future, saying that eventually all the girls will marry and move away.
Deanne thinks differently. She cannot make the "mistake" of getting married without ensuring her sisters are secure.
Girls, some as young as 12, head about 70 percent of these families of youngsters in Rwanda.
In this culture, already having children to care for makes it difficult for women to get married, Mukankusi explained. That doesn't stop them from getting pregnant. She planned a future visit to Deanne's home to discuss family planning and AIDS with Rosette and the other girls.
In Rwanda, the genocide has spawned between 65,000 and 85,000 child-headed households and left 400,000 children "unaccompanied" -- orphaned or functionally so. And AIDS will likely make those numbers balloon in the near future, said Lila Pieters, head of the child protection division at UNICEF's Rwanda office.
The numbers seem overwhelming and would be considered appalling in a developed country. But since nearly 5.6 million of Rwanda's 8 million people are 24 or younger, it means that only about 7 percent of the nation's younger population consists of child-headed households.
UNICEF works with 12,000 child-headed households. In partnership with a non-governmental organization, it tries to find "godparents" to assist the children, and to find child leaders to participate in government-sponsored committees and voice the concerns of their special community.
The typical scenario in child-headed households, said UNICEF's Pieters: "The baby will stay home or be placed in an orphanage because no one can take care of him. One will stay home to make sure nobody comes and [takes over] the house. The third one will go fetch the wood and water. One out of five children goes to school."
Despite these hardships, some children feel better off without adult supervision.
Gisele Muteteli, who looks far younger than her stated age of 15, lives with her 14-year-old sister and 13-year-old brother in the home they once shared with their parents. Her grandmother resides nearby, but an attempt to live with her failed because Gisele's relatives wanted her to do more for them than the other way around.
Besides, Gisele had to ensure her parents' home and property would be cared for. In a densely populated country whose people rely on subsistence farming, land is an asset that cannot be wasted. Neglected farms, especially if owned by children, are almost an open invitation to squatters.
Gisele goes to school while the two younger children stay home and take care of the bananas and cassavas, a plant with edible roots and leaves that helps feed 500 million people worldwide. Her dream is to go to a university and become a doctor.
According to UNICEF data, a family pays an average of 15,000 Rwandan francs, or less than $40 U.S., to send one child to school for a year. But that is a fortune to people who make perhaps 100 francs, or 25 American cents, per day. Even if a young woman worked every day of the year, at that rate, she would earn only about $90.
"When you have a family of six, you know who goes to school," Pieters noted. "The boy will go, the girl will stay home. The girl is likely to contribute to ensure her brothers go. The majority of the world is like that."
A fund to pay school fees for orphans has been set up by the government and helps many children. But many more fall though the cracks because they do not know how to apply for the money and do not always get help from local officials.
In addition, thousands of children lost their parents but were quickly taken in by foster families during and after the fighting, Pieters said. They have been overlooked for a long time and many of them could be in dire straits, used as near-slaves, with no hope for a better future.
"What has happened to all those children? How sure are we that they are well protected?" Pieters wondered. "What's lacking is the followup. We're doing studies to see whether it's true that these children are being abused and exposed to wrong things."
So there are households headed by children like Deanne and Gisele, and orphaned children living with foster families.
As strained as their lives might be, though, they may have it better than a third group.
These youngsters live on top of a particular hill on the outskirts of Kigali. The small mountain features a spectacular panorama of the capital -- and the permanent, sickening smell of the rotting garbage that comprises it.
It is the city dump.
On the day we visited, we were afraid to clamber around on the quicksand of mounded trash, but the young people who lived there had no such qualms. A small girl waded barefoot into the refuse, hunting through it for small treasures like clothing and food.
Around her, smoldering fires gave off acrid smoke, hogs grunted and burrowed, and the air was thick with flies. A woman sitting on the charred slope didn't bother shooing the insects away. She watched us with dead eyes and rocked her baby.
Although there are some adults at the dump, it's the teen-age boys who do most of the talking.
Their former chief had escorted us here to run interference and keep the peace. Later, he told us it is very painful for him to return to the hellhole that was once his home. But he knows the sight of him healthy and happy may inspire a few more children to abandon the dump.
He was among the first of these boys who took a chance and trusted Danielle Robertson, a Swiss relief worker who worked for many years with street children in Brazil.
Two years ago, Robertson started what the children later named the Centre Presbyterian D'amour Des Jeunes, or the Presbyterian Center for the Love of the Young. At first, it was to be a drop-in center where the children could get some schooling, learn trades and have a meal. Now, many live there, ages 5 to 20.
Most of the children came from the garbage dump, which is a 15-minute car ride away. Others visit from the surrounding neighborhood. They plan the menus and prepare the food, keep their quarters tidy and tend several rabbits.
All the children hold the cheerful, warm and energetic Robertson in high esteem and are proud to be called her sons and daughters.
She returns their affection. The children really created the program, Robertson said. And, she added, they wanted far more than mere survival.
At the dump, they were thrilled whenever they found paper and pencils for drawing. The urge to explore and create was as strong as the need to eat.
"They wanted to go back to school, so they forced me to respect them," she said. "They are quite responsible. They have proved they can live without adults."
As we strolled through the center and watched children learning to silkscreen T-shirts, painting functional cardboard furniture, and building oil stoves, Robertson said that while some children do go home in the evening to parents or other caregivers, almost 60 boys sleep at the center in large, worn tents. The children have dubbed one the Titanic because it leaks so much. Robertson has collected money from various agencies to build permanent shelters, and just this month received permission from local authorities to begin that work.
It takes a few months before new children begin to fit in and behave appropriately.
"They usually rebel and do whatever they want at first," Robertson said.
Including those at the dump, there may be 6,000 children living in the streets and jungles of Rwanda, said Straton Nsanzabaganwa, who is in charge of programs for vulnerable groups in the Ministry of Local Governance and Social Affairs.
"We have tried many programs, but all those programs have failed," he said. "We have tried to put them in centers, to teach them [skills], but they escape and they go back to the streets. All those [government] projects no longer have funds to run them."
One reason programs fail is that a street child's begging may be the only source of income for other siblings or even a widowed mother. To such a child, going to a center could mean that the rest of the family no longer eats, explained UNICEF's Pieters. Others may have started sniffing solvents, smoking and drinking, and no longer want to leave the street life.
"You get addicted to it," she said. "And they don't believe there is a future for them in this country."
At least most of the children who have left the street life feel valued.
One young orphaned boy said that Danielle Robertson had given him what he needed and might one day be his friend, who he said is "someone who can give you advice and help, and whom you love."
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The bloodshed in Rwanda traumatized Kazunga, 7, who now is mute and suffers a variety of medical problems. She is one of many children who live near the village of Musha at an unaccompanied children's center run by the International Rescue Committee. Click to Photo Journal 
Gisele Muteteli looks younger than the 15 she claims to be. Still, she is the head of a household that includes a younger sister and brother. She goes to school, but her siblings stay home to tend the farm, which includes the sorghum crop behind her. There are more than 65,000 child-headed households in Rwanda. Click to Photo Journal