As the Rwandan genocide unfolded 15 years ago, Dr. Laurent Mbanda followed the fighting lines of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) to help administer aid to those who needed it most.

Mbanda is now Compassion’s Regional Vice President of the African region.

I was not in Rwanda. I arrived in May 1994 with Compassion to administer relief behind the RPF fighting lines. I was in Nairobi, Kenya, but before that I lived in the USA for 21 years. My parents left Rwanda, running for their lives, when I was 4.

2. How was Rwanda on the ground when you arrived?

Horrific! The country was on fire, it was in disarray, people were dying like flies; displaced people everywhere, bodies rotting everywhere. The military the RPF was trying to stop was visible. I could hear gunshots from where I was.

3. What were your impressions?

Horrible! Inhuman!

How could a human being do what the Hutu militia did to another human being? How could a government, a leadership of a country, turn against its people and butcher them?

I was angry. It was my people that were being butchered. I was scared for my life even as we went around administering relief where we could.

Initially, I was angry at some NGOs (nongovernment organizations). Many were coming in taking pictures and returning back to raise money. How could they have gone in empty-handed?

(more…)

At the time of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Gary Haugen, a senior trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, was given an assignment to serve as the Officer in Charge of the U.N.’s genocide investigation in Rwanda. 

He had seen a lot of injustice in the past, working to combat human rights abuses around the world. And in Rwanda, he stood amid it. He led a team in gathering evidence against those who perpetrated the genocide. He didn’t just fight a legal battle from afar; he stood at the sites of mass murder and mass graves, and looked into the ugliness of this world. 

And his response to it was quite surprising to me. (more…)

Africa is the world’s second-largest continent, and it used to exist on the fringe of my consciousness. I knew about the Sahara, the 1985 Live Aid concert and the third season of Survivor, which demonstrates that I judged Africa to be inconsequential – although I did recognize apartheid as “something” significant. Ashamedly, the latter didn’t affect my behavior in any way.

On April 6, 1994, in a country the size of Maryland, but with New York City’s population stuffed into it, friends and business associates began killing one another indiscriminately. Neighbor butchered neighbor. More than 1 million people were exterminated in 100 days and another 2 million fled the country.

In a country identified as 90 percent Christian, Christ-like behavior essentially vanished as children and babies were hacked apart with machetes. What happened to God? Where was He?

In pre-colonial times, Rwanda’s three ethnic groups established a system of exchanged labor, which was exploited by the Belgian colonial administration. When Rwanda gained independence in 1962, the colonial legacy of division led the Hutu and Tutsi, the two main ethnic groups, to periodically kill each other for the next four decades, fueled a diaspora, and culminated in the genocide.

In 2006, 12 years after the Rwandan president’s plane was shot down on approach and setting off the killings, a quiet tarmac greets me at the Kigali airport. The sun is bright and the sky is clear, but the air seems mournfully still.

A rush of passengers arrives at Customs, disrupting my perception of Rwandan life like dust swept into the air. I’m not ready for the bustle. I want a moment to grieve what happened, to honor the pain and ask forgiveness for my indifference. So I withdraw toward the wall to watch the crowd swarm about.

Conversations buzz the room, and a group of Rwandans begin to queue. I stare at them with a glazed mind, lost in my thoughts. (more…)

Yesterday, we introduced you to Chantal, a 9-year-old girl from Rwanda.

Chantal is a beneficiary of our Highly Vulnerable Children (HVC) initiative, and during the Christmas season the vulnerability of these children parallels the extreme vulnerability that our God entered into on Christmas Day.

It’s a vulnerability portrayed in homes throughout the world by the nativity. And this Christmas season, we’d like to share with you a reminder of God’s love and sacrifice for us all.

This handcrafted Rwandan nativity set is as fragile and vulnerable as many of the children we serve. And it’s available to one randomly selected reader who answers these questions for us.

• What do we mean when we say complementary interventions?
• Why is the HVC initiative considered a complementary intervention?

On December 18, we’ll randomly pick a winner from the comments we receive.

Thanks for participating, and Merry Christmas!

Since November 2005, we have ministered in specialized ways to the needs of thousands of highly vulnerable children registered in church partner centers. We acknowledge that all children in our programs are vulnerable and face a certain degree of risk, some registered children face much greater risks than others.

Highly vulnerable children in our programs are those registered children who are at greatest risk of physical, psychological or social harm relative to the other registered children in the program.

Our Highly Vulnerable Children (HVC) initiative is therefore a targeted intervention, accessed through Complementary Intervention funds, that seeks to provide enough stability to the most vulnerable children to allow them to participate in the Child Sponsorship Program.

Prior to the HVC program being implemented in East Africa, we conducted a survey in all church partner programs worldwide, which revealed that tens of thousands of registered children have lost either one or both of their parents.

In some countries nearly half of these deaths are due to AIDS. Children are also at risk of abusive home environments, chronic illness, exploitation or extreme poverty. Whatever the cause, we recognize that for these children additional measures are necessary to protect and secure their well-being.

We currently utilize a wide range of approaches to respond to the needs of highly vulnerable children. From provision of nutritional support to children who do not have enough to eat, to reconstituting a family for those who have lost both parents and do not have a place to call home, each need is assessed thoroughly by local church partners and an appropriate response given. So far more than 10,000 children have been supported through the HVC initiative in East Africa alone.

Chantal, a 9-year-old girl from Rwanda, was one of the first recipients of the HVC program.

When she was selected as a beneficiary of the first Compassion cottage in Rwanda in March 2006, she and her elder sister Jackie had just lost both of their parents. They were living at the mercies of kind neighbors and strangers and on a daily basis moved from house to house seeking food and shelter for that night.

The risks and hardships that these two young children and many others in similar circumstances face everyday trying to make a living for themselves is unimaginable. It is for children such as Chantal and others living in such vulnerable conditions that the HVC initiative was designed.

The benefits of this initiative are already being seen and felt far and wide. As for Chantal, she is currently enjoying the warmth and protection of a new home, a new “mother” and new “brothers” and “sisters” in addition to her very own biological sister.

Impossible, one may think, and humanly speaking, a situation such as Chantal’s would have proved insurmountable. But thankfully, we serve a God who specializes in such impossibilities!

Please pray for the HVC program and the many children we assist who desperately need this additional assistance.

Every month we receive prayer requests from our country staff; prayer requests that we publish in our monthly prayer calendar, on compassion.com and as tweets.

Would you mind joining us in healing prayer for these sponsored children:

• Komol in Bangladesh, who is suffering from heart disease
• Soledad in Bolivia, who is waiting for a kidney transplant
• Jacob and Asish in East India, as they are suffering from malaria
• Miguel in Nicaragua, who has rheumatic fever
• Mukankusi in Rwanda, living with diabetes

If you leave your prayers as comments to this post, our country staff will be much encouraged. We’ll make sure they’re aware of the post.

And in cases where a child development center has a computer, the children and church partners will also know you are speaking to the Lord on their behalf.

Right before Thanksgiving, I was rootin’ around in our digital asset management library and saw some child photos I absolutely had to share. Photos of children reading letters from their sponsors.

The photos helped me picture my sponsored child, Lerionga, reading letters I’ve sent him. They drew me closer to him.

Some of these photos are old – five or six years. Others were taken just last year.

Some of these children have left our program, and some have sponsors from countries other than the U.S.

The exciting thing is that we were able to contact several sponsors and let them know about this post, so they could download the photo.

Any time I can do that for you, I will.

Here is what I speak of – the sponsor letter photos.