Before I joined the Friends of Jesus I was on the streets. I used to pick up food from dustbins – whatever I found that’s what I ate. I was never home and I was not at school.
Jean-claude
Despite recent advances in Rwanda there are still many children on the streets. Children orphaned through the genocide have been joined by an ever increasing stream of aids orphans. Many children are driven to the streets because of poverty, hunger. Many of the children turn to crime, theft and violence and prostitution to scrape a living on the streets; they eat from dumps, sell any charcoal they find and spend their time sniffing glue and petrol.
The Living Church
Our partners in Rwanda, The Living Church, has developed a project to tackle this problem by providing 83 street children with food, clothing, health, education and Christian training. The project is wholly funded by Comfort Rwanda and costs £20 per child per month (see sponsorship page for more info).
Reports from the project are encouraging. Some children who have families have been reconciled and gone back to the family home and, if the family has been too poor to provide for the child, support from the project is given.
90% of the children have started attending school and because of the support of the dedicated project workers nearly all of them are in the top quarter of their classes now. One of them even has an ambition to be Rwanda’s president! These street children have renamed themselves “The Friends of Jesus” and formed a choir, traditional dance group and 2 football teams. “We are no longer street children” they say “but we have become friends of Jesus”.
All my life I have been very poor and lived a very poor life. I was very poor – I watched my children going to the streets but I could not do anything about it. Then I met those people and they rescued my kids from the streets.
Jean-Pierre
