What We Do

By no means am I going to do World Relief justice but I am going to try to explain to you what they do here in Rwanda (at least from my understanding). For a better, more concise description, check out their website at www.wr.org.

Very basically, WRRwanda has 4 major development programs going on throughout the country. The first one is the Child Survival Program which focuses on teaching communities and mothers how to help their child survive past the age of 5 (1 in 4 children do not live to be 5 years old). This is a neat program because WRR goes into a community, teaches 10 women the basics of childcare and child health (such as what to do if the child has diarrhea – contrary to the popular belief, you do have to feed them and give them fluids). These 10 women then go and teach 10 more women and visit each of these women and their families once every 2 weeks. It’s a Trainers of Trainers (TOTs) program mentality. The second program is the Child Development Program which is much like the first but focuses on children ages 5-14. The third program is Mobilization for Life which is also a TOTs and peer education program that focuses on HIV/AIDS education (children ages 5-24 although we don’t know of any 24 year olds still in the program!) Obviously the curriculum is abstinence based but we do have a relationship with the Ministry of Health who talk about safe-sex practices (ignorance is not bliss in this instance). Our final program is our Microfinance. Going in, I though Microfinance was only small business loans – how wrong I was! Yes, that does happen but education about money and saving and group savings programs take place (for example, 10 people come together and each pay $5 into the pot each month. Then each month one of the ten people gets the $50 in the pot to pay for whatever it is they have identified as their goal). It’s a great system because these families may not have the means to save on their own to pay for a big item (maybe a wedding, maybe a cow… or a wedding where they present a cow – it happens) because society would put pressures on them to share with their extended families/neighbors if everyone knew that they had money to spare. There is also a program that WRR helped start, but is now independently run, called Ikirizi and it is an essential oils program. Basically, people are brought into a co-op and given land and materials to harvest geranium oil. This oil is then sold back to Ikirizi and they sell it to companies that use the oil in their products. WR’s goal in all that they do is sustainability and development. They want all of their programs to be self-sustaining if they were to ever leave the area. That’s where the local churches come in. The vehicle to getting these programs running at the grassroot level is the churches. The pastors and their congregations are the ones who volunteer, participate, and take ownership over these programs. WR is not evangelistic in nature but empowers the Church to be the Church and in that way share Christ.

My job, for the next three months, is to help out when church teams come over from the US to work with and see these programs going. Not only do these church partners support WR financially and in prayer but sometimes they have awesome skills that help out the programs as well such as IT, pastors’ training (for example, how to teach them how to recruit and train volunteers), encouragement and much more. I am also working on a special staff development project about cross-cultural communication and understanding.