The Office

It's a rainy day here in Nyamirambo and we are sitting in our cozy office trying to reflect on what this past week was all about. It's not an easy task given that our lives went through a rather dramatic change since last Monday when we boarded the plane in Budapest. In fact, even deciding which aspect of our stay in Kigali to describe first seems like an ungrateful task; there are certainly a lot of new impressions, and yet they form a harmonious and one-of-a-kind experience. As I was leaving for my first African trip, I was told by a friend that I will probably be able to fully process everything that happened only once I am back in Europe. From this perspective, I honestly hope that shall be the case, but also, right now, I am fully enjoying every moment of this experience being plainly different from what I am used to, and adapting to the situation in a very natural manner, without necessarily trying to explain of compare everything that is going on around me. So far the strategy feels right. But what are we doing here in the first place? For the following three weeks, and in Marko's case almost two more months we will be volunteering in Nyamirambo Women's Center, a non-governmental organization based in Nyamirambo district in Kigali, Rwanda. The Center, originally started as a self-help group, is ran by fourteen women of different ages and various social, economic and religious backgrounds, and aims to address the issues of social demarginalization and economic empowerment of women in the Nyamirambo community. A number of activities have been implemented with project management support from the Ljubljana's Peace Institute, including community-based tourism, organizing educational and crafts workshops for local women and informing them on matters like gender-based violence and family planning. Before coming here we were given some provisional pointers on what we were expected to do as volunteers, and the list consisted mainly of assisting Marie Aimee, the president, in her daily office work, applying for small-scale grants, monitoring and evaluation of existing projects, maintaining the website, giving workshops on functioning of NGO's, organizing activities for children and so on. So almost the entire past week was spent mainly on getting acquainted with the structure and current state of the organization, gaining information, identifying the priorities and assessing where our help could be most needed. As both of us have some background in Croatian NGO sector, an encounter with Nyamirambo Women's Center was a very interesting experience, because it seemed not to fit the exact model of a classic non-govermental organization that we have been in touch with. The dominant activities of the Center, namely renting rooms and giving tours around Nyamirambo neighborhood bear some resemblance to social entrepreneurship, and constitute a source of income for financing tuition fees for children of Center's members. On the other hand, the Center tries to reach out to community through organizing i.e. literacy, English and computer courses. At the moment, it looks like a No.1 problem is funding, because it still remains uncertain whether any outside support will be granted in the following year. The Center has made huge progress since 2007 when it was started, but is still rather unsustainable, in terms of finances as well as just capacity. 


Thus we decided to focus on improving and advertising the services that may potentially bring more money to the Center, as well as generally going through some fundraising strategies. We adapted a Facebook page in order to be more informative and friendlier for travelers seeking information about the Center. Feel free to add us as friends! Also, as we found out from Eriab, a very nice English teacher employed in the center- who also proved to a be a great beer and brochette (goat meat skewers) company- that there is only one computer available for the computer course, even though it is usually attended by more than 10 women, we also put together a donation request for used computer equipment from the embassies. In generally, the information that we are able to attain are quite scarce, and a bigger picture is difficult to form because the women among themselves also have very different ideas of where the Center should be going in the future. But overall, to be surrounded with these great women, mostly struggling through single motherhood in still rather impoverished and patriarchic Rwandan society, who managed to self-organize and make a difference, is pretty amazing, and may as well serve us all a lesson. Suncica