HIV + Rwanda
The sickest of the sick: HIV+ children
Pastor Deo Gashagaza, Founder and Executive Director of the Association for the Assistance of Children, is torn up over the 30-40 HIV+ children in Kigali.
Pastor Deo is a well-respected figure in both national and international circles. His return from Congo in 1994 launched a personal journey of forgiveness (in response to the murder of his own family) that quickly spread throughout Rwanda. After working with a team to establish the Reconciliation Villages throughout the country, he turned his attention to the problems of poverty and special circumstance children on the streets of Kigali.
Deo and his wife Christine began caring for street children between his already busy schedule in 2006. Following his groundbreaking work in reconciliation through Prison Fellowship Rwanda, he officially began the process of registering the Association for the Assistance of Children in September 2011. It is now a fully recognized agency in Rwanda.
These HIV+ children are caught in the crack between policy and practicality. The Rwandan government provides HIV+ children with appropriate life-saving treatment for their condition. The policy in Rwanda regarding subsidies for food is skewed towards individuals providing self-support. These children contracted HIV through non-voluntary means; they take their medication absent of food, The Pastor and his wife have been feeding this population a bowl of beans to accompany their HIV medication for several years, as frequently as God provides ‘bean money’.
Rwanda needs our help; not only because of the genocide, but because of the exemplary decisions they have made after the genocide. When a country is devastated by its own internal strife, and makes subsequent choices to disrupt the cycle of intergenerational retaliation, it is a privilege to witness the results. The courage to forge out solutions that are so unusual that they are shocking – such as the establishment of reconciliation villages, where perpetrators and victims live side by side – deserves our attention. When you visit them in person, you realize that, against all instinct, these are a working model of the peace the world craves.
Pastor Deo, now a Bishop, is a genuine home grown leader who is vested in the outcome as a member of the community. He wasn’t ‘found’ in order to distribute funding as part of a global organization, he was and still is working in the trenches, praying for God to bring him partners who desire to help serve these poorest of the poor children.
These 40 children have no access to food, but access to medicine through a government program that dispenses life-saving medication to these children. They do not die of HIV infections, they starve to death.
Deo and his team provides food to these children at the treatment center where they receive medications. Though there is no funding for this need, Deo and his wife find beans to cook every week. Their goal is to bring every child into a positive relationship with society, heal the emotional wounds brought on by tragedy, and impart in them a sense of connectedness to others. These children are not excluded. We long for every Rwandan to feel as though they have hope and a future.
Donations of any size are always welcome to help Deo and his team feed these children.
