FHI Visitors to Rural Rwanda Receive Joyous Welcome

OCTOBER 2006 — The tiny farming village of Butozo is in far northern Rwanda, one hilltop from the Ugandan border. The closest large town is more than an hour and miles of twisted mountain roads away.

Despite its isolation, Butozo has benefited in powerful ways from a youth peer education program sponsored by the Byumba Diocese of the Catholic Church and supported by FHI/Rwanda. Byumba is one of five Rwandan dioceses that worked with FHI to recruit and train young people to conduct HIV prevention education activities for other young people in their towns, schools and workplaces. From the beginning of the program in 1991 to the end of 2005, 34 parishes had trained more than 3,000 peer educators, who together reached more than a million young people, Catholic and non-Catholic, in the country's largest cities and in hundreds of villages as small as Butozo.

As the confidence of these young peer educators grew, many decided to organize themselves to tackle another challenge as great as HIV: poverty. They created income-generation projects, primarily in agriculture and animal husbandry, to improve their lives and futures, and those of HIV-affected families.

In Butozo, the Dushishoze Association received help from FHI to buy goats. By selling the kids, the association's members were then able to buy chickens and two cows, which provide milk and eggs as well as chicks and calves to sell.

PHOTO: As visitors from FHI approached Butozo in April 2006, villagers greeted them with songs about HIV prevention. Soon several villagers began a spontaneous dance, jumping in unison, and a beloved parish priest, Father Jean Marie Vianney Dushimiyimana (in the foreground, in black clerical garb), joined in, to everyone's joy. (Margaret Dadian/FHI)