Development as Family

They're here!  The 2nd ever class of kids are here at Agahozo-Shalom (pictures of their welcoming soon) and while our jobs are to teach them, I'm already learning so much from their presence.

For one, I'm beginning to learn that creating a family often is more important to people here than rising above their current economic status.  When the kids, many of whom came with only the clothes on their backs, were asked what they were most surprised about when they came to the village, it wasn't the nice houses, running water or full plates of food.  Rather, it was that they now had a family, with brothers and sisters and parents and grandparent (each kid is placed in a house with a mother and counselor, and the rest of the village forms the extended family).  In fact it was this concept, that Agahozo-Shalom is a family and not a boarding school, that was the main point of the grandmother (the head house mother)'s welcome speech yesterday.  The house mothers and counselors, many of whom have also lost family, were visibly moved when they met their kids who would become their family.

Having a family is a defining and treasured thing in Rwanda. One of the first questions the girls asked me, along with my marital and education status, was whether I had both my parents. So far it seems that divorce is very rare - a family is so precious you cannot break it up.

So why is this the case? Well I'll likely learn more over the course of the year, but so far I have two guesses:

1) Here economic well-being and family often go hand in hand.  If you have a family, they share everything with you, and so you will not be poor (or poorer than your family) if you have one.  At Agahozo-Shalom, for example, anyone who needs clothes gets them, and that's that.

2) Families teach values and bring comfort, both of which are highly prized in this post-genocide country.  As I've been told, values were hard to come by post-genocide (I can understand why), and it is the priority of many who want to heal the country to teach kids respect, love, loyalty and other values that were important in pre-colonial Rwanda.  And who should be teaching values?  Families.  This explains my Wordle a little better.  Additionally, so many people in Rwanda have experienced trauma that being alone is a negative option for a huge part of the population.  Being in a family is critical for comfort and recovery.

At Agahozo-Shalom, while the houses are nice, the food is plenty and clothes are available, the focus is on providing family, not economic well-being, for the kids.  Here development means giving families, something so unique and different from anything I learned about in my Development Studies major, and yet something that makes so much sense to someone who also values family above all else.