From Rwanda 2005

Emmanuel isn’t a SACCA boy but he’d like to be. He lives next door to our Kayonza centre with his younger brother and mother. His father is in jail awaiting trial for genocide crimes. His mother is deaf and the family is as poor as any other in Kayonza. 

The boy can’t be over eleven years old. He is tiny and prone to bursting in to tears (that’s how we knew he wasn’t a street child when we first met him- street children only cry from rage not from sadness).

Last weekend Emmanuel’s mother upped and left. She is meant to come back in two weeks but who knows. She left the children with the neighbour who is meant to feed, water and shelter them while the mother is away. Only problem is that the neighbour is also desperately poor and is unable to feed her own family more than once every two days, let alone Emmanuel and his little brother. 

What can we do when a hungry little boy comes to our house and tells us he hasn’t eaten for two days. We took it in turns to feed him until our social worker could get to the bottom of the situation. Since then he has been permitted to eat at our centre. It’s a catch 22 really; do we ignore that he’s hungry because we don’t want to entice him away from his family and onto the street or do we feed him and risk the enticing but keep him from hunger, sickness and misery? We opted for the latter but are very aware of the tightrope we’re walking.