VDF-i Report

Anonciate Bayubahe is a Burundian lady whose work with World Vision in Burundi as a village  Development Facilitator (VDF) gave her a deep insight of the needs in her own community.  In the following i-report, she recounts how when she started her work with World Vision as a volunteer-VDF, she came to know realities she was not aware of. She witnessed, up close, the needs of people, especially children, as she worked with communities to gather information, assess and investigate children’s situations.  “Extreme poverty strikes at the first sight,” she says. “Ignorance also plays a big role in some cases if you analyse well,” she continues.

“People say that a land that swallowed blood does not produce enough. It’s a curse, they say,” Annonciate starts.

Burundi has been torn by sporadic conflicts between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi ethnic groups since independence in 1962. Recently in 1993, it plunged into all-out civil war in which some 300,000 people were killed and a million displaced. (ICC, 2011)

Annociate says she was astonished to see how things changed all of the sudden after the recent Burundi civil war broke out.

“I used to go to school after having eaten something in the morning. There were green crops all along my way to school and people produced enough,” she says.

“Though I was very young, I still remember,” Annociate continues laughing.

She is now a 25-year-old woman; she was born in Mushikamo zone of Rutegama Commune. After she completed primary school she went to Bukeye, a boarding school for eight years. She recently graduated from a teachers’ training school and came back home. Annociate offered to work with World Vision Burundi as a Village Development Facilitator, working with communities to gather information, assess and investigate children’s situations.  Her work with her community members gave her a different image of what she had before the crises.

“I did not know that there were people, especially children, who could spend a whole day without eating!” she exclaims.

“Extreme poverty strikes at the first sight for some households,” she recounts.

For example, Annociate has come across a household where children eat only after their mother has a chance to work for money. It is a family with little, barren land. To make the situation worse, the father of the household some years ago became disabled.

Things used to be good before he was disabled, mum and dad fended for the family. Ignorance also plays a big role in some cases, she has realised.

Some of the children she is working with are malnourished although their parents have fruit trees in their compounds. They sell most of the fruit they get looking for other sorts of food and forget to feed their children with those fruit. Though the lands are small, they still have spaces to plant vegetables, she says.

According to Annociate three main challenges need to be addressed: a birth rate which is too high in her community, land contraction, as a consequence to the population growth, and a lack of awareness especially in nutrition needs to be addressed.