Today we visit Women for Women International’s Kigali headquarters. Those of us who have sponsored a woman, through Women for Women International in Rwanda, will be able to meet our sister for the first time. We enter the white gates of the neatly landscaped headquarters and are greeted by more than forty beautiful Rwandan women, each wearing the bright colors and patterns of traditional dress. They are singing in the Rwandan language, Kinyarwanda, and dancing, clapping, and playing a drum made out of a bright yellow plastic water container. They sing and dance to welcome us; they come up to us individually and take our hands. For a moment I forget that the woman I am dancing with has survived genocide, may currently struggle to feed her children, or live with a husband who beats her. For the moment, there is only joy and lots of tears as women dance with their sisters.
Several of us go with an interpreter to participate in a rights and education workshop that Women for Women International offers its program participants. The group of interpreters who help us are all young women who attend university in Rwanda. My interpreter is twenty-one year-old Musonera Dosithe. Musonera is tall with gold earrings and long hair. She is wearing jeans and wedge-heeled shoes. Her smile is bright and she is as lively as her cell phone, which won’t stop ringing, so she turns it off. She hopes to study communication in Washington and has siblings at universities in Mississippi and Sweden. She tells me her mother values education above all things.
Musonera was only eight when the genocide happened and her family fled to Kenya. She knows they were very lucky. “We had some money and a car,” she says. “We got out in time.”
She believes that programs like Women for Women are important because they give women a sense of community. “Rwandans need to understand that we are only one people,” she says. “It is very difficult, but we have to believe that change can happen.”
