The First Trip To Africa
By Judy Knight
On May 13, 2003 THE MOSES FUND received its IRS determination as a not-for profit, 501(c)(3) to help children.
Kiro and I had already decided to purchase our own tickets to go to Africa in June 2003 to look at the problems and devise a plan of action.
We had a jar to collect money at the store and Kiro held several drumming circles to raise money to take to Africa. Everyone was extremely supportive.
We never expected people to put $1400 in a jar in a month and a half.
While in Africa traveling through Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and an afternoon in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kiro and I talked, listened and learned. Our first stop was in Bujumbura, Burundi. Kiro grew up there but hadn’t returned in 25 years.
Even though we traveled and did everything else together, we sometimes ate separately.
Kiro is good at making friends, but especially so on the Burundi/Rwanda border.
After a short time in Bujumbura we traveled by crowded minibus from early morning all day to late evening on mountain roads to Gisenyi, Rwanda. It was a beautiful country with every inch personally cultivated from the bottoms of the little mountains to the tops.
Our first morning in Gisenyi children tried to teach me Kinyarwandan, the local language. They knew their letters.
We saw this billboard several times while traveling by bus. I immediately knew it was about the genocide. When I came back home I found out on the internet that gacaca are the tribal courts that are trying some of the perpetrators of the genocide. It is the hope that this will give the victims some sense of closure.
In Gisenyi, Rwanda we found UMUBANO III Primary School. It was the perfect first project because it was so obvious $1000 would actually help.
The floors were covered with lava, a building technique, and even the walls were incomplete.
We visited two orphanages in Gisenyi. One was Imbabazi which means a mother’s love in Kinyarwandan Kinyarwandan . The other was run by a Dutch woman who supported the children with her singing engagements.
We met up Kiro’s friends at the border again on the way back to Burundi. Then when we arrived in Bujumbura we gave the remaining $400 to PREVENTION DE LA TRANSMISSION MERE-ENFANT DU VIH SIDA, the first government-funded center in Burundi that gives medication to pregnant women with HIV.
The people at the center were so proud of the success they were having with babies being born HIV negative. Unfortunately that presented another problem. Our contribution was to provide milk for when the HIV positive mothers couldn’t afford to buy it for their HIV negative newborns.
Kiro started his Lakers project on that first trip while we were in Bujumbura and we also first met FLAG OF PEACE.
Before going on to Uganda we had a day to relax at Lake Tanganyika with school children.
We visited the family of Moses Kazibwe in Kampala, Uganda. They took us to Moses’ grave. In this photograph Kiro and I are with Moses’s grandfather and his mother.
It was time to go home. Again we traveled by bus, this time to Kenya where we caught a plane in Nairobi. We saw a lot. What a trip. Oooooooooooops!!!
It was good to be home with Gretchen again, but telling her what happened wasn’t easy.
