Tag Archives: give

by nickharrop | May 3, 2013 · 10:22 am

Syria crisis: refugees in Turkey

Ahmed: “Even as we were moving, part of our house was destroyed by a bomb.”

CAFOD’s Catherine Cowley writes:

It feels strange to do humanitarian work in Turkey. When I first drove down the dual carriageway from the international airport, past large apartment blocks and miles and miles of green countryside, I couldn’t help but be struck by the contrast with other emergency programmes I’ve been involved with.

Two years ago, I joined CAFOD as a trainee humanitarian officer. Since then, I’ve been based in Haiti and Kenya, where most of my experience has been of bumping along rutted, dusty roads, working with people you could see were living in poverty even before their lives were turned upside down by natural disasters.

The small Turkish town I’ve been working in recently, near the border with Syria, could hardly be more of a contrast. Everything seems stable, calm and prosperous: the shops are bustling with customers; the roads are teeming with vehicles; the scale of construction work is striking. Continue reading →

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Tagged as CAFOD, conflict, crisis, Emergency, give, peace, refugees, syria, turkey

by claudmba | December 1, 2012 · 9:00 am

16 days of activism: Justine Greening, Secretary of State, International Development

: Justine Greening

I am personally very concerned about the increasing challenges internationally to protect women’s rights. Progress has been hard won and we must ensure that women’s empowerment and rights are protected and strengthened. Civil society organisations, including faith groups have a critical role to play in working alongside government to push forward.

We must speed up progress on the current Millennium Development Goals, and ensure that whatever comes next is set up to finish the job on poverty and human wellbeing issues.

We need to heed the lessons from the original Millennium Development Goals, building on what worked and what didn’t. We need to address the full participation of girls and women in social, economic and political life, and ensure not just that children attend school but that what they learn when they get there is valuable.

The record-breaking response to this year’s appeal shows the extent of support for CAFOD’s work. And UK taxpayers through DFID are helping this go even further by matching pound for pound all public donations. This will allow CAFOD to double its impact working to improve water access, sanitation and hygiene for some of the world’s most vulnerable and neglected people, including those affected by war, climate change and disease.

I am particularly pleased that CAFOD’s work will continue to help girls attend school rather than having to fetch water, and help all children learn about hygiene and waterborne diseases.

Please help us to keep supporting girls and women around the world. Give, act and pray with CAFOD today>>

Each year, we support the global campaign, 16 days of activism against gender violence. This year, we’re telling the story of how we can work to end sexual violence from 16 different perspectives – be it from survivors of violence, the partners who work with them, the journalists who tell their stories, or the supporters and activists who fund and publicise our work to end violence against women.

16 days of activism: Liberate Mukagihana

Liberate Mukagihana, counsellor and paralegal, Rwanda

Liberate Mukagihana, Rwanda

Liberate is a counsellor and paralegal with AVEGA East. She does group counselling and one to one counselling and now trains other counsellors. Her door is always open – any hour of the day or night.

I know what it’s like to be grieving and traumatised and lonely. That’s why I decided to become a counsellor for AVEGA. Sometimes people come at night to tell me their problems; my door is always open. Sometimes, about ten people come to me at once. I want to help as many as I can but it’s difficult. AVEGA trained me as a paralegal. The training was so interesting. We learnt about the law and our rights. We also learned how to testify to tell the truth – not to tell lies out of anger from the genocide. Now I help those who have been acquitted from jail and try to arbitrate if there is a conflict.

Please help people like Liberate to continue their vital work. Give act and pray with CAFOD today>>

Luckily I knew my basic rights, so I took my case to the local leaders.

I wasn’t happy with the court judgement on the death of my son. My son was killed by many people but only one was there during the court hearing.

The man who went to court denied he knew anything about my son’s death. He claimed my son was killed by someone else – which was true – but this man was the chief of the area – it was he who ordered two people to kill my son.

When they killed my son he had a bible in his hand. They hit him on the head with a log. He was crying and kept coming to embrace me, but they kept hitting him until he died. I tried not to cry. I said: “May his soul rest in peace.” I told the killers, “May God bless you.”

I sat through two trials. I wasn’t happy with the first verdict so I pushed for the case to be heard again. In the first trial the chief got 13 years in jail but he’d already been imprisoned for 12 years. That sentence is normally given to people that confess, but he had not confessed.

In the second trial I was pleading against the chief and the man who was not holding a weapon was my witness. The chief said he wasn’t near my son when he died but the other man said: “No, that a lie. I saw him.”

My children ask me what their father looked like. I always tell them they look like him. The younger one looks so like her father. She is so happy when I tell her that. I tell her that they had the same eyes and hands, even her thoughts resemble his.

I do everything for my children. I didn’t remarry because I want to focus on them. At night we have family time. I meet my children and we talk and relax together. The children love this time. They ask me lots of questions. I teach my children how to behave.

Please help people like Liberate to continue their vital work. Give act and pray with CAFOD today>>

16 days of activism: Annie Bungeroth

Annie Bungeroth films Feza Mediatrice in musha, Rwanda

Annie Bungeroth is a photographer and film maker. She has undertaken projects with CAFOD on many occasions, and she visited AVEGA East in Rwanda on three different occasions. On one of those occasions she made the video with Feza, who describes how she was raped during the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

Photography and film are important – it personalises the statistics. Sometimes the numbers are so mind boggling you can’t cope with them – but a look, or a word can reveal the depth of a wound or the strength of an individual.

In Rwanda we made a film of Feza, a community leader in Musha. She told her story – which was about how rape was used against her as a weapon of war.

Please help us to support the survivors of rape and trauma. Give, Act and Pray with CAFOD today>>

The difficulty was trying to get the tone right. You just want to scream about it – but you can’t have people switch off.

But Feza speaks so frankly, she was so unflinching about what had been done to her. And she said some very important things. Men were free to rape because nobody was going to stop them. The rapists have nothing to fear.

How do you tell the story of a rape? How do you represent that? You don’t want to show a victim, when the woman is so strong and is such a survivor.

I used some very close up shots. I used abstract footage too. Rwanda is actually a very beautiful country. But that can feel sinister when you know what happened there. Ask any woman – it makes your hair stand up on your neck.

Feza never hid from the rawness of the rape or the bigger picture. She’s an educated woman – and now she’s nurturing others. She clawed her way back up, but she brought everyone with her.

Please help us to support the survivors of rape and trauma. Give, Act and Pray with CAFOD today>>

When rape is used as often as it was in Rwanda, it’s hard to make yourself listen to all the women’s stories. But the first time we visited, a woman called Liberate was doing quite a lot of counselling sessions and we were allowed to sit in and listen. I remember listening and thinking “You do need to get this out – you can’t keep it all locked up inside.” You can see how important it is to have someone to listen.

Liberate was trained as a paralegal and a counsellor. She bounced back. That’s the thing – some people will grow, but others won’t be able to.

So often the people who killed your family or raped you live around you. Men have been let out of jail – and they’re taunting their victims.

There’s a sense of solidarity, but then what happens is that people grow and change together, not with people from outside. It’s between you and a peer group, and it’s so, so important, it’s vital that you’re with other people who know what you’re going through.

Odette, AVEGA’s director had also lost her husband – everyone there was in the same boat. I think that’s important as she has the same story as so many of the women she is helping. She knows what they’re going through.

By the third time I’d visited AVEGA, there was a different feeling from before – I could see that with AVEGA’s help they were becoming strong.

Huge numbers of women were raped during the genocide. But it’s still happening. The repurcussions still go on.

How do you ever go back to normal after that? Especially if you have a child? Do you never have another relationship? Many women were mutilated.

One of the women at AVEGA told me that daughters growing up without parents are vulnerable to predatory older men. If you know you’ve got no-one watching over you, it can be easy to be taken advantage of. You’re responsible for the next generation. How do you allow your daughters to have a relationship? How do we stop it perpetuating to the next generation?

Relationships have to be formed on an equal footing. That’s why the counselling is so important – they can talk about things at AVEGA. All the women have been touched by trauma. Many are living with HIV. But they’re dealing with it together.

Rape is a terrible leveller. There are women who have gone through this in all walks of life and levels of society. Feza for example had a really comfortable life before. But everyone has to start from scratch.

When you photograph and film, you don’t expect the women to smile – but women all over the world will come together and find ways to build relationships. I spent time with them and we were laughing and joking – they thought it was really funny that I took pictures of farming tools on the ground and other objects like that and they were making fun of me! If you hang around and you’re not pushy, you’ll find a meeting ground.

I’d love to go back just for a social visit – just to hang out. They were such amazing women.

Please help us to support the survivors of rape and trauma. Give, Act and Pray with CAFOD today>>

16 days of activism: Odette Kayirere

: Odette Kayirere, founder and president of Avega East

Odette Kayirere’s husband was killed in the Rwandan genocide and she was forced to flee with her five children. She was helped by other survivors to rebuild her life and went on to be president of AVEGA East. She is helping other women and families find peace and justice and rebuild their lives.
After the genocide, I had severe trauma. I didn’t care what I looked like; my buttons would be done up the wrong way, I didn’t iron my clothes. Life had no sense, I had lost hope for life. I fed my children, but I depended on other members of my family for lots of things.

One day, I couldn’t find soap to wash the bedclothes. I started walking without knowing where I was going. I met a soldier on the road who was with a woman I knew before the genocide. She said: “I know your story, I know your husband was killed.”

The soldier took pity on me, I could see it in his face. He took me to his office and gave me two pieces of soap. “Go home and clean your children’s clothes,” he said.

Stand with us in helping the survivors of trauma and violence. Give, act and pray with CAFOD today>>

It was like I had met Jesus on the road. I understood that God was near me, that good things could come to me.

In 1995, I heard there was an organisation created for genocide widows in Kigali. A friend called me to join them. We learnt about the vision of the association, its objectives and aims.

I decided to bring the association here to Rwamagana. I organised about 20 women and told them about AVEGA and how we could help each other.

The first thing was to break the silence, to fight the isolation. After several meetings, a man called John Gakwandi, who was a Christian with a real conviction in Christ, asked to come to one of our meetings and to bring along two or three genocide widows.

They sang Christian songs and John read bible passages. He told us God loves widows – that they appeared 66 times in the bible to convince us of that. God was with us, he said. He showed us that God loved widows and would help them until their death.

All the women were crying. One stood up and said: “You are my sisters. Now it is our time to live, and better.”

Many women had lost their hope to live, but these women who had come to visit were so courageous. At that moment, we changed. We committed to a different way.

We decided from that day to look out to other regions, to work on projects, to work hard because we were the ones that remained to do that. There are 4,000 widows involved now and we continue to grow.

When AVEGA decided to decentralise, they decided to trust in me as a co-ordinator. I was a volunteer, committed and a widow. All the time I participated in Kigali, they always encouraged me. When I needed to move into other areas, they gave me money to do that. I was used to responsibility. I understood I could make changes and bring hope to those who had lost it.

In this Eastern region, there is no isolation among the widows. And we’re building self-esteem among women. They continue to remember, but they have changed because they have survived. They have the opportunity to build a new life, in a better way.

The women have benefitted from nutrition support, social support and income generating projects. There are 28 projects around livestock, small trades, selling and agriculture. We have advocated for women who were raped, women with HIV and AIDS.

We work with women who were committed to education and who would fight for rights. Some of these women were not educated. Some women went back to school and finished their studies. There are 20 or 30 women who are back at university and 80 paralegals. Some help at Gacaca. A large number of women are judges, survivors trained by AVEGA.

That is a miracle. To see people change in that manner, to take a commitment to help the community. I am very proud of that achievement.

During the genocide, I escaped many times. It’s why today I find a meaning for my survival. Maybe there is something for me to do, to make a change in the community, in the population, to help people. I am trying to do my best. I don’t know how much it is. I don’t know the limits.

Stand with us in helping the survivors of trauma and violence. Give, act and pray with CAFOD today>>

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Filed under 16 Days, 16 Days 2012

Tagged as 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, campaigning, conflict, gender, give, rwanda