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Our Partners in Burundi:

Kazoza Kumukenyezy

GCJ is sponsoring a group of women who have formed themselves into a farming collective (leaders pictured below). The group is called “Kazoza Kumukenyezi” which translates as “The woman’s future”. These are strong women, mostly widows, who said, “We want to take care of ourselves, we didn’t want to go to the city and beg.” They are currently farming on little scraps and corners of land that others are sparing them, but they need land, tools, and seed to support their efforts. There are currently 104 women in the group, and they hope to raise enough to help support not only the nutritional needs of themselves and their families but also to be able to sell a bit in the market. They plan to raise two crops in a year, peanuts and rice. They have a leadership group of amazing women who have put together this vision in a place of very scarce resources.We are working with the women of Kazoza Kumukenyezi (“The Women’s Future”) to develop this service project: they have purchased and are now cultivating a plot of land that will feed themselves and their family.

Several GCJ delegates traveled to Burundi in summer of 2008 and several more may go in summer of 2009, to connect with these women and other residents of Carama district and Bujumbura. There is no major delegation planned at this time.

Host: Youth in Reconstruction of a World in Deconstruction (JRMD/WRWD)

Our host is Prosper Ndabishuriye, the founder Youth in Reconstruction of a World in Deconstruction (JRMD/YRWD), an organization devoted to building homes for displaced Burundians. After the genocide in 1993, Ndabishuriye decided to do something to help his country—bring Hutu and Tutsi youth together on a mission to replace the thousands of homes destroyed by war. As they traveled through the countryside together on a bus, their unity in the face of violence and hatred was the only thing that saved their lives at roadblock after roadblock.

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