By Lori Bryan | Consultant
The goal of the Historically Marginalized emergency response was to feed 225+ families in desperate need of basic staple foods to survive the country-imposed quarantine. The 520 historically marginalized in the Nyanza district are those people are normally overlooked in life. They are the ones who find clay and make the local pots for cooking over the fire or they are on the construction site carrying mud or sand on their backs to build bricks and ultimately a new house. For their days work they might be paid $1 or less. And this is a construction site without food or water, a break may be a rest under a tree out of the sun for a few minutes. Their livelihood was cut off the day the quarantine went into effect. They have no savings accounts and normally no gardens. They are the hard workers of society. They were in a dilemma now of providing for their families, sometimes 6 or 10 in number. Life was getting difficult until we approached GlobalGiving to help us with the funds needed to provide this group with food. And you, the donor, did not disappoint. We raised a little over 5,000 dollars during the 4 months the project was open. They could not believe that anyone would care about them.
With the dollars you sacrificially donated we were able to distribute food (beans and maize flour) and soap to 326 families which impacted the lives of 2,252 historically marginalized Rwandans. That was 6 ¼ tons of food. With your help we surpassed our goal and impacted more lives, helping to preserve their life. Many times the they would come for their time of distribution at the Dufatanye center and would be ever so grateful for the help, saying thank you in 1 of 3 languages (English, Kinyarwanda or French). They would come through the line in their extremely tattered shoes, sometimes sewn together with some thread, clothes with many unrepairable holes, some too weak or frail to carry the load of food back uphill to their home. Someone else in the community would offer a helping hand to the ones that were too frail.
One older, tall, distinguished gentleman told us that he had not had anything to eat the day before and he came to the center in hopes that he might get some food for his family and himself. He wasn’t on the list, but there was no way we were going to turn him away. He received the food he needed and left extremely hopeful and happy at God’s provision for his need. The son of the oldest member (99) was stuck in another city during the time of Corona and returned the end of May and thanked everyone so much for taking the time and energy to help his grandmother survive this time wtih supplying her with food. Normally she goes to the market to beg daily, but even the market was closed.
A local group of historically marginalized sang and danced after a distribution, children have come by to sing for us and one older lady of 99 caught us walking thru the village and began to sing and dance of how strangers came and brought her food and how happy she is to meet these people. You have made some of the downcast of this world happy to know people still care about them and their needs.
Our next project we'd like to complete for the sake of the children: https://www.globalgiving.org/dy/v2/pe/project-edit/edit-page-1.html?project.projId=45878
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