Survivors Fund (SURF) Newsletter - December 2021
News from Survivors Fund (SURF)
Last month marked the 25th Anniversary of our long-term partner organisation in Rwanda, AERG (National Student's Association of Genocide Survivors). This coincided with the 18th Anniversary of their sister organisation, and another of our long-term partner organisations, GAERG (National Survivor's Association of Graduate Students).
The milestone was marked with a number of events, such as that pictured above at which the First Lady of Rwanda, Mrs Jeannette Kagame, paid tribute to both organisations noting that " “self-sacrifice, self-acceptance and co-existing with those who murdered your families, became a bitter remedy, but it produced fruits that built a strong country" to which AERG and GAERG have made a critical contribution.
Survivors Fund (SURF) is proud to have worked in partnership with both AERG and GAERG in a formal capacity now for over a decade, and informally over the entire course of the history of the organisations. Our partnership has resulted in a number of programmes that are still ongoing including those focused on entrpreneurship, legal rights and counselling. With our international partners we continue to advocate and raise funding for these programmes, and we feature in this newsletter the Network for Africa Big Give Charity Appeal to raise funding for our AERG youth counselling programme.
This is one of a number of appeals we are supporting currently, including that of another one of our principal international partners, Foundation Rwanda, who are running a GoFundMe Appeal to raise funding to construct a house for Christine, one of the remarkable women genocide survivors that we support together.
Such work continues to be important at this time, as does your continuing support for it. So thank you in advance for doing so. And we take this opportunity to wish you a happy and healthy festive season from all of the SURF team!
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Network for Africa Big Give Charity Appeal
A guest post by Rebecaa Tinsley, Founder of our partner Network for Africa
Grace is the 27-year-old daughter of an alcoholic. Her mother certainly had understandable reasons to self-medicate with alcohol: her family was killed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Since then, she has struggled as a single mother, supporting Grace. Even though her daughter loved going to school, she pulled Grace out of classes so the little girl could help her on their small farm. Now, without an education, Grace doesn’t have many options. Unfortunately, her mother has continued to behave recklessly, beyond caring about how it affects Grace.
We met Grace when she started coming to the group counselling sessions run by our Rwandan partner, Survivors Fund (SURF). She was suffering from insomnia, headaches and anxiety. She felt both shame and guilt about her mother’s condition. She also felt isolated by the community that shunned her mother and Grace.
Attending the group sessions, Grace could finally find the confidence and safety to talk about her experiences. She found she wasn’t alone, and that she was surrounded by people offering to listen, understand and empathize. Our counsellors helped Grace to analyse her situation and to manage her feelings of depression, using coping techniques. They also gave her one-to-one counselling, helping her to find a way to be hopeful about the future. She has met other survivors who understand her situation and have offered her unconditional friendship.
“Now I am happy that I have someone to talk to,” Grace told us.
“I feel confident and as valuable as any other person in the community.”
There are many others like Grace who would like to join our counselling groups. But unfortunately, they have no one to take care of their children while they attend meetings. One of the consequences of being a genocide orphan is a lack of traditional African extended family or support network.
In the first week of December, we are raising money to fund the provision of six childcare workers to mind up to 60 toddlers and infants while their parents attend our counselling groups. Any donation you can give as part of the annual Big Give campaign will help us reach our goal.
Our campaign page can be found by clicking here. Thank you!
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Foundation Rwanda GoFundMe Appeal for Christine
A gust post by our partner Foundation Rwanda
Want to join us in making a difference? Many of you know we started Foundation Rwanda (FR) in 2007 to empower women survivors of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and their children born of rape through education, counseling and medical support. Christine, a forty-nine-year-old survivor and FR mother of four has seen some of the darkest days imaginable and desperately needs our help. Our Rwandan colleagues have done everything they can in Rwanda to support her immediate needs and are at a loss of where to turn next especially during the challenges she and her children are facing due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This is her story (which she has given us permission to share).
Pictured above with her children, Christine was twenty-two years old during the genocide and was raped repeatedly by countless men resulting in a broken back leaving her in chronic pain. She has carried on bravely in the face of a failed spinal surgery resulting in sciatic nerve damage, severe pain and paralysis for a year. Christine has been unable to work and has struggled in the darkness of total poverty. At one point, the only safe accommodation she could find for her family was in a neighbor’s outhouse where she filled the toilet hole with dirt and covered the latrine so she could lay a small mattress for her and four children to sleep at night. As a family of five, they slept in the outhouse for a year until it collapsed during the rainy season (while they were in it) and they became homeless.
Christine’s dream in life is to have a safe place to call home for her children. “I have been running from house to house with this broken spine and my children for 27 years. My health situation is in great danger. But I am afraid to die because I am worried my children would go on the street if I die.”
We are looking to help Christine raise $25,000 so that the FR and SURF can work with our community to build a modest home on a small plot of land that would allow her a small garden to grow food for her family year-round in the Rwandan countryside. This would allow her to relocate her permanently.
You can support the campaign by making a donation at gofundme here. Also, please be sure to share the campaign with with this link and use our campaign hashtags: #SupportChristine, #BuildHerAHome, #Hope.
Thank you!
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Thank You
Our work would not be possible without your support. If you would like to give a donation to support our COVID-19 response, which we will keep open as long as our beneficiaries are impacted by the virus in Rwanda, you can just click on the button below, which will direct you to our donation page - through which there are several ways to give, including PayPal and directly on the page (via stripe).
We hope you are keeping well, and wishing you well for 2022.
Take care, keep well and stay safe.
Samuel Munderere
Chief Executive, Survivors Fund (SURF)
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