Lighting a fire within

I’m writing this from Rwanda where I am spending a week with a CRED Team of young people from a Bournemouth school who are here to serve our CRED partner GNPDR at their Catch Up Centre.

Pius Nyakiryo founded Good News Peace and Development for Rwanda (GNPDR) after his miraculous survival of the genocide, and his subsequent conviction that God saved him for a reason – to help people help themselves through development and through personal and inter-personal peace. And so GNPDR has a number of programmes that seek to do that, working with different sections of the community.

The Catch Up Education Centre is for children who have been living on the streets of Kigali and have subsequently fallen out of education. It provides free education for the children, and where possible aims to get them to a point where they can re-enter mainstream schooling, or if not can at least get to the end of their primary education with a satisfactory level of numeracy, literacy and general knowledge.

Our team are spending each day there delivering a high-quality educational activity week to the children, and having a great time. The team designed all the lessons and activities themselves and have spent weeks fine-tuning their plans, collecting, making and sorting all the resources, and at last they are here putting it into practice.

They are having a wonderful time, working with children who turn up hungry to learn, some of whom have walked a couple of hours to get there. Children with shabby, torn, worn-out clothes; who know the reality of not having a roof over their heads, nor food in their stomachs, but who now live with foster families thanks to the work of GNPDR.

Our team members have experienced the smiles and laughs of the children, have been with the children as they choose to sit and work hard at their letters and numbers rather than going out at break time. And that in itself has been thought-provoking, and for some has been a catalyst for inner-reflection and reviewing of their attitudes

But this evening, we went one step further and for many of the team it was a pivotal moment. At the invitation of the project staff we went with them to visit a group of boys who still live on the streets. Some were just 10 years old, and one had been living on the street for 6 years. The boys chatted with us about their life – where they sleep, how they find food, how they can get chased and beaten by the police; and one lad spoke of his time in prison when the police did a rounding up of street kids.

They also spoke of why they were on the streets, and what life had been like before that had caused them to run away. And they spoke of their biggest dreams – to have shelter, food, clothes and an education.

They were hard words to hear, made harder by the young ages of the children who were speaking them, and the absolute poverty and destitution that they exemplified. Many of the team were very challenged, and there were many tears shed on the way home.

Later that evening, as we had debrief time, there was much discussion about it all – should we have even gone to see them, what was the point when we didn’t really do anything, what can we do as a result of meeting them, was it a good experience or a bad experience……

Lots of conflicting thoughts and feelings clearly swirling round within individuals, but out of it came many reflections that, although it was a really tough experience, it was also a really inspiring experience. For many of the team, this was an experience that seems to have inspired them to want to do more, to make more of a difference, and to find ways to make a difference long-term.

Not just coming out of a trip for 10 days, special though that is, but doing something when they get home – fundraising, awareness raising, career choices. All sorts of different responses, to reflect different personalities and ways of outworking the inner feelings, but for many today a fire was lit within when they met those street kids.

May that fire be fanned as the week progresses, so that from it can come many little and not so little actions that will make a positive difference in this wonderful, diverse and yet sometimes cruel world that we live.