Audience welcomes the contribution of Eva, downstream of its last trip to Rwanda.
"Reflections on the" normality "from Rwanda. ;
10 cents, a penny slips from the pockets and, weighing the effort disproportionate to its value, perhaps even bent down to pick us.
10 cents: the value of a life for a baby taken to Ruhengeri hospital suffering from diarrhea, which can be edited and saved with a therapy that costs 75 Rwandan francs (less than 10 euro cents).
In these intense weeks spent under the equator, the earth of Rwanda, there was a day when I have questioned the concept of "normality".
The welcome in these places and hundreds of hands clasped in families known, the smiles are often embarrassed, has always been amazing, as if to confirm that all the sorrows, tragedies, injustices experienced, even today, people do this part of the normal, everyday life, of an aberrant habit. Custom
to suffer, to struggle silently, with dignity, to seek various ways to offset the heavy blanket woven of suffering that covers every house, every shred of family, every situation that screams injustice, painting over a picture of normality.
Normality becomes a spontaneity, candor and genuineness that almost convinces you contact with children: living miracles, emblems of survival under conditions that for us, "muzungu" (white men) are unacceptable.
Maybe one day they experienced the same faith in life even those adults who survived the genocide, everyone brings their own personal losses dramatic bundle of family relationships and dramatically interrupted children never found. Now you can see in those eyes, behind every look of dignity and the desire to recover, suffering settles, manage, process, but that can never be undone. Can never become "normal" seeing their children, wife, husband, neighbors Home brutalized, murdered, raped, displaced in camps and never returned?
Today it is common for many families take care of some orphan nuclei that we call "abnormal" are made up of extended families where they were greeted the children of neighbors, relatives or some stranger disappeared. The average of 6-7 children is the norm. Faustin's family, comes to 14 children of which 10 accepted. Faustin did not want the grief and sorrow over the loss of two sons and his wife became the "normality" of his life.
Crossing the border into Congo, a day that this concept of normality begins to catch you, you're again forced to change his mind. The line boundary between normal el'anormale moves again and not only ideally. In a couple of miles you realize that the worst was not this side of the line. In Goma
"normality" is to rebuild his life in a teeming anthill that unravels confused over that city submerged by lava in 2003. Here it is normal to live where everything is black, everything is dust that creeps into every crevice of skin, where the traffic savage climbs up and down the hills of lava, there is no paved road, there is a brick house. Everything has exploded like a puzzle upended by lava and magma ... this is normal. There is one thing that
I felt as non-normal attitude, an answer, a new movement, out of the ordinary. It is the desire for redemption, of a different life, is the response to the offer of a new opportunity: to improve, to grow, to learn new ways to feed their children.
The opportunities I've seen deals in recent days, through the actions carried out with the support of Caritas of Ruhengeri, are all captured by the eyes, hearts and hands who want to see, feel and act anew.
Learn to cultivate a piece of garden, learn to make pasta at home for a small income, learn, locked up in a small, stifling den, to produce hand- footwear; educate yourself and then others to improve their sanitary conditions to prevent the spread of AIDS, whose growth rate continues to gallop.
All these proposals I've seen greeted with great hope in the eyes, with great sacrifice for having to move from their village and family. I've seen women be punctual to the appointment in town for the start of a training course after traveling with their feet and legs who knows how many miles of the thousand hills of Rwanda and then crammed into a bus loaded with the naked eye is twice their maximum capacity. I think of our single-passenger cars and their drivers angry because there is the bypass queue today again ... once: what is normality?
back to me the act of a woman receiving the micro-credit project that has just received 15,000 francs (about 19 €) to start a small business that will revive the fortunes of his family. Extracts from under his towel-skirt worn a bill of 5,000 francs (slightly more than 6 €), keep it close near the womb and the covers, turning almost hidden among the calloused fingers. A great treasure that has never owned or only seen in his entire life. In six months you must return the "capital" with the interests of one euro. Those twenty euro will become a new treasure bestowed on someone else. Thinking back to that photograph
long film that is imprinted in my memories: I feel confident, once again, that moving the boundary line is a task of each individual. The ten cents left on the ground are like that famous drop in the ocean that makes the difference between not only normal but el'anormale between light and dark. "
article published KeYoga! - The blog
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