One of these is Kande, 16, who arrived at the Salesian house to ask for a piece of bread. He started living on the street when he was 10. “Life was hard. Sometimes the police came to arrest us and took us to the Mbazi rehabilitation center and we stayed there for about five months, and then, when you came back on the street, you struggled to even find a place to sleep.” Beside him, eating soup, is Dakarai, begging on the street after his mother killed his father in a family quarrel and ended up in prison. “I continued to live on the street for about 13 years,” he says, “so far I have had the opportunity to study Mechanics, thanks to the Salesians.”
“I'm grateful to the priests because they brought me to vocational training,” explains Juvenal. “Today I study mechanics with my peers, but we don't have everything we need. We lack school uniforms, and even shirts and shoes are hard to find due to poverty. But if you lack something to eat, you can put up with it and go back to school because you have a goal to achieve.”
Ishimwe, on the other hand, is a young woman who was raised by her maternal grandmother. But when the old woman no longer had the strength to work in the fields, she too turned to the Salesians in Rango, asking for help to be able to attend the cooking course.
“They come from the street asking to eat and many manage to include them in vocational courses such as those for mechanics and shoemakers,” says the parish priest, Fr Remy Nsengiyumva. “We offer school supplies and uniforms, but the problem is food. Some, in fact, live completely on the street, others receive food in the host families; still others eat only in the evening where they study for technical courses.”
For them, Fr Nsengiyumva and his parishioners are organizing to create a small canteen and to cook at noon. There is still no real project, although it already has a name - "Ejo heza" (Better tomorrow) - and it was started when at the beginning of the pandemic in Rwanda, in the spring of 2020, children from the street began to knock on the parish. “Since their companions have been treated well, now they come in large numbers,” concludes the religious. “And we ask all those who can to give us a hand.”
