Florida United Methodists vow to help Rwandan orphans By Karen L. Shaw | Sept. 10, 2010 {1214} Inside the genocide museum in Kigali, Rwanda, incongruously beautiful wooden sculptures depict the rape, torture and killing of thousands of men, women and children during the country’s infamous 100 days of genocide. Jean Marie is one of more than 10,000 children and youth participating in ZOE Ministry’s Hope Companions program, which helps children orphaned by wars, crimes, HIV/AIDS and other illnesses reconnect with their communities and become economically self-sufficient. Photo by Lonnie Rhodes. Photo #10-1538. Click on picture for larger photo or view in photo gallery with longer description. Outside the museum, officially called the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, some 250,000 people are buried, victims of the massacres who could not be identified or who had no family. It was after leaving the museum and its guardian souls that a Rwandan tour guide shared from the heart her message of hope. The memory still makes Lonnie Rhodes, 54, choke up. “She told us to make sure we told people in America that it’s not going on any longer,” Rhodes said in an interview with e-Review after returning home from Rwanda, his voice rough with tears. Although the 1994 battle between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups no longer rages in Rwanda, the effects still ravage this East African nation. Between genocide and AIDS, Rwanda has one of the highest proportions of orphans in the world, the U.S. State Department reports. It was those orphans who brought Rhodes, his wife, Kathy, 51, and 11 other Florida United Methodists to Kigali, some 8,000 miles from home, on a mission trip planned by the East Central District of the Florida Conference. The team witnessed a paradigm-shifting mission program called Hope Companions, coordinated through ZOE Ministry. The Rev. Greg Jenks, a member of the North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church, began ZOE Ministry in 2004 with support from his conference to help vulnerable and orphaned children in Africa. Today, the ministry reaches children in Zimbawe, Kenya, Rwanda and Zambia, providing food aid, medical care, monetary support for education, clothing and clean water projects. It also offers Hope Companions, a program developed by Epiphanie Mujawimana, a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, that goes beyond relief for orphans and child-led families, organizers say. The program facilitates self-sufficiency so that orphans, in two to three years, go from being homeless, hungry, sick and ostracized to empowered and self-sustaining, home owners and business leaders who never need assistance again. “The orphans, with just a little bit of help, support each other to break the cycle of poverty,” said the Rev. Gaston Warner, ZOE’s director of church relations and strategic planning. “Traditional Western aid tends to follow a model where Westerners will go over and do something for Africans. ZOE Ministry is much more about partnership,” he said. “We go over and come alongside the orphans just enough so they can do for themselves.” In practical terms, that means ZOE staff and volunteers aren’t digging ditches or wells. They are meeting with program participants and community leaders, conducting workshops, and perhaps most importantly, witnessing the orphans’ miracles. Florida United Methodists look on as a Rwandan orphan shares his gift of dancing. Photo by Lonnie Rhodes. Photo #10-1539. Click on picture for larger photo or view in photo gallery with longer description. “We are going over and seeing people who can do for themselves, but no one thinks they can,” Warner said. “We are being with these children in whose lives God is doing a powerful thing. Gift of empowerment, community The 13 Florida residents, from teenager to mature adults, headed to Rwanda July 7, along with United Methodists from Texas and North Carolina. For Risé Wilson, a member at University Carillon United Methodist Church in Oviedo, the trip was destiny. “I knew that God was preparing me for this my entire life,” she said Wilson has been to Costa Rica and poverty-stricken parts of Appalachia. She also went on an unrelated mission trip to Uganda in November. “God, through my experience, my growth in faith, has prepared me to go forward,” she said. “I understand the ZOE model of empowerment as opposed to relief and welfare. It just doesn’t work long-term. At a younger age … I would not have been able to handle what I had seen and be effective.” Since orphans in Rwanda are often ostracized and lonely, one of the first steps of Hope Companions is pulling individual families of orphans together into working groups of 60 to 80 children. In many ways, these working groups become new families for the children. The children, so used to managing on their own and with little control over their lives, immediately regain their power and sense of community. They work together to decide what kind of leadership structure their working group needs and then elect these leaders. They choose an adult mentor, usually someone already advocating for their rights in the village, and the project their working group will undertake — perhaps a small communal farm or group garden — to generate income for the group. ZOE provides micro-grants for these income-generating projects. Every month, working group leaders and adult mentors receive monthly life-skills and self-sufficiency training covering how to grow food; health and hygiene, including information about malaria and worms and how AIDS is spread; children’s rights; food storage and house-keeping; and starting a small business. In turn, the oldest child from each family attends a weekly meeting to receive training. These children then work on their group project. Jesus in action Those simple steps, combined with an intensive effort to build the self-esteem of the children, generate successes like Vincent Rubayiza. Safari, 16, is a food secure participant of the Hope Companions program. His parents were killed while hiding in the jungle during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Now, he raises chickens and has a home on a mountaintop. “The thing that got me was the smile he had when I asked if I could take his picture in front of his own bed … with the mosquito net,” Lonnie Rhodes said. “The smile was a million dollars.” Photo by Lonnie Rhodes. Photo #10-1540. Click on picture for larger photo or view in photo gallery with longer description. Vincent was 66 pounds, infected with worms and living on the streets or in the forest when he joined the ZOE program. He is now a successful entrepreneur, the owner of the only viable canteen in his village because the others couldn’t pass health inspections.   He has hired some of the very same members of his village who used to abuse him and pay him just a few potatoes for a day’s work, but he pays them a fair wage. “If that isn’t Jesus in action. … ” Lonnie Rhodes declared, when relaying the story. Indeed, watching the Hope Companions program, formerly known as the Giving Hope Empowerment Project, in action is “like watching the kingdom of God burst forth,” Warner said. “There’s not a lot of selfishness.” Even though many of the children in the program are raising children — their younger brothers and sisters — about half the orphans who attain enough food security to eat two meals a day will go out and adopt another orphan, he said. And they are dedicated to helping every member of their group succeed. While the program isn’t perfect, even its challenges demonstrate this spirit. The Rev. Dr. Wayne Wiatt, superintendent of the Florida Conference’s East Central District and a member of the mission team, marveled at the way the children supported Jean Damascene, a new working group member who wasn’t yet food secure or fully grasping the program. Jean wasn’t attending any of the weekly meetings because he cut and gathered grass for his neighbor’s cow in order to earn a meager living, Wiatt said. He awoke by 6 a.m. and traveled for miles. When he received a goat from ZOE, which was to be used in the long-term for milk and fertilizer, he thought short-term and ate it. His working group decided they would take on the arduous task of cutting grass so he could attend the meetings. “The group would stand with him even in the midst of his mistakes,” Wiatt recalled. Part of the family Before the Rwanda trip, Terry Canfield, 56, had never traveled overseas, but she knew she had to go. “I knew this was something God was sending me to do,” she said. “He made it very obvious, and possible, for me to go.” The $3,000 cost of the trip was high for Canfield, but after receiving an e-mail about the mission from her pastor at Flagler Beach United Methodist Church, Canfield kept falling asleep thinking about Rwanda, and waking up thinking about it some more. “Every bit of the money I needed for that trip was made available to me,” she said. When Canfield met Bernadette, one of the orphans working with ZOE, and heard her story, it hit her: “This is why God sent me to Rwanda.” Bernadette, 19, had been born with a birth defect of her digestive and reproductive systems never seen in her remote village. They thought she was cursed or possessed by an evil spirit, and Bernadette’s uncle took her to the jungle to kill her. Other family members stopped him. Terry Canfield (right) says she had an almost instant connection with Bernadette, 19, an orphan who is raising two younger sisters while participating in the Hope Companions program. Bernadette and Canfield’s daughter were born with the same defect of their digestive and reproductive systems. Bernadette is “the reason God sent me to Rwanda,” Canfield said. Photo courtesy of Terry Canfield. Photo #10-1541. Click on picture for larger photo or view in photo gallery with longer description. “My heart started pounding in my chest,” Canfield said. “My daughter was born with that birth defect, and when I told Epiphanie (who was translating) that, she was just stunned because she had never heard of it either. We just hugged and cried, and I know that was why God sent me.” Even though Bernadette eventually underwent operations to correct the defect after connecting with ZOE, Canfield said she was there to let the teenager, who is raising two younger sisters, know “she’s not alone in the world.” “She’s not a freak,” Canfield said. “This is something that happens to mzungus (white people), too. It was such an incredible moment for me to know that this is why God had sent me.” “My daughter just fell apart when I told her,” Canfield added. “I said, ‘You have a new sister. Her name is Bernadette.’ ” Canfield wasn’t the only ministry member who gained family in Rwanda. “The orphans,” Wilson started. “Now I’m going to cry. … They called us their parents.” And with the title came the traditional tribute, the first fruits of the harvest. “These kids came to us with bags of food, tomatoes, cabbage, carrots, ground nuts, beans,” she said. “These kids only eat one meal a day. We’re getting three-square-plus. They gave us enough to sustain them for several days. Their gift to us was the gift of love, respect, grace, hospitality … just beyond words.” The trip ended July 17, but for Wilson and others the work has just begun. “Our mission begins here, to let people know that we have to be the hands and feet and definitely take action,” she said. Lonnie Rhodes agrees. “I was against going for a long time because I was convinced that you’re not supposed to go to another country to do mission work; you’re supposed to do it in your own neighborhood,” he said.   Now, he’s determined to have his church — Spring of Life United Methodist Church in Orlando — raise the money to fund the Hope Companions program for as many as 100 orphans. “That aid model to Africa hasn’t worked in years. Empowerment,” he said. “That’s our word now. It’s ZOE’s word, of course.” Web resources http://www.zoeministry.org http://planforterry.blogspot.com http://www.youtube.com — a variety of Zoe Ministry videos are available using the search function News media contact: Tita Parham, 800-282-8011, tparham@flumc.org, Orlando   *Parham is managing editor of e-Review Florida United Methodist News Service. **Shaw is a freelance writer based in Tampa, Fla. Printer Friendly Version     Share