Published: May 17, 2008 02:35 pm            

Baking the Cycle

Local ministry reaches out to Rwandan widows

It was last June when Diana Wiley first sat in Nyirasafari Adera’s Rwandan home, a modest hut constructed of sticks and mud standing over dirt floors. In the filmed interview, Adera, a widow and refugee of the 1994 Rwanda genocide living with AIDS, concedes that two of her five children are also HIV positive.

She gazes past the camera into nowhere particular, the kind of thousand-yard-stare usually exhibited by a weary soldier. At the end of the interview, she leans in to embrace Wiley, says “thank you” through a translator and slides her hands together to pray.

Adera, along with nine other widows in the Rwandan city of Ruhengeri-Musanze, have had their prayers answered lately. With the help of San Marcos-based True Vineyard Ministries, they’ve received housing, work skills and hope for a better future.

Wiley and fellow True Vineyard Co-founder Mike Olsen will return to Rwanda for a third time on June 2. They will begin the third phase of their ongoing mission project there, Bake the Cycle, where they plan to set up a bakery for the women to work in.

“These women kind of feel like my children. I want to take care of them and I want to make sure that they have the best opportunity that they can have right now,” Wiley said.

The bakery they are planning won’t just be any bakery. The widows will use a large capacity solar-powered oven recently obtained by True Vineyard Ministries from Elburn, Ill. It uses pure reflectivity from the sun, gets up to 500 degrees and can bake up to 50 one-pound loaves of bread per hour. Once they arrive, Olsen and Wiley will begin teaching the widows how to use the oven and basic baking techniques.

“The goal is to make it to where they can become self sufficient,” Olsen said. “We’ve begun a five year plan, that hopefully in five years they will be able to feed themselves, feed their families and send their children to school. Part of the requirement (of working in the bakery) is sending your children to school.”

Building sustainability among the children is important to the Rwandan mission. In addition to the school requirement, many of the older kids will be trained to work in the bakery as well. True Vineyard has also set up a trust fund through the bakery: A portion of the facility’s proceeds will go to help paying for the children’s education. Wiley says that providing opportunities for the widows’ children is crucial to long-term success. Educating them on issues like AIDS is key.

“The sad truth is many of these children are soon to out live their mother,” Wiley said. “To begin to have an impact on the AIDS crisis, or anything else, you have to start getting some education there, so that can stop for future generations. It’s too late for a lot of them, but we can impact what happens in the future.”

The future has come quickly for Olsen, Wiley and True Vineyard Ministries. Just 11 months ago, they were going to different organizations and churches around San Marcos raising money, building awareness about their plans. Both had been working with a Mozambique mission through First United Methodist Church since 2002, but wanted to extend their efforts into a non denominational ministry — expand the services as far as they could.

“I actually felt the call to go to Rwanda several years ago, and then I found out that someone I used to work with was working with the World Relief Organization, and that’s how I first got involved (with Rwanda),” Wiley said. “ The World Relief Organization is really our feet on the ground over there.”

In 1994, more than 900,000 minority Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutu extremists during the Rwandan Genocide — approximately 10 percent of the population. Amid the aftermath, Hutu militia who were known to be HIV positive, raped Tutsi women in a strategic plan to use AIDS as a long-term killing device. An average of four women were raped every minute of every hour of each day for 100 consecutive days.

The AIDS epidemic there is different from one that Americans usually perceive, Olsen says.

“Over here AIDS has a different connotation to it. People expect it to be a homosexual, or it’s because of drug use,” Olsen said. “Over there, it’s not. It’s spread in many different ways, people contract it for different reasons. A lot of Americans clam up when they hear the word ‘AIDS.’ They said ‘oh that’s their problem.’ But it’s not.”

And it’s a problem that doesn’t seem to be going away, either.

“There are now more than 600,000 widows living in Rwanda now (due to the genocide) and 67 percent are HIV positive,” Wiley said. “The ones that are HIV positive likely have HIV positive children. So it’s this continuous cycle.”

Wiley and Olsen both felt compelled to help. Wiley’s friend with the World Relief Organization set up interviews with 10 different Rwandan widows to receive aide from True Vineyard. These women, selected by local Rwandan Christian Churches, were considered the “poorest of the poor,” most either living in a neighbor’s spare room or completely homeless — but all affected one way or another with the AIDS virus.

“I was talking to one widow last June, and she was telling me that her four year old tested positive for HIV, and she was nursing her baby, who was sick and coughing. I asked her if she had the baby tested and she said ‘no,’” Wiley said. “This woman had to decide, ‘do I nurse my baby and let it eat and take a risk that she will become HIV infected, or do I let her go hungry?’”

But, again, things have moved quickly for True Vineyard Ministries. The second time Wiley visited the widows in February, the mood was much brighter. She was at Adera’s church to tell her and the nine other women that they would each soon receive a new house.

A videotaped ceremony was held at the local Christian church: Reading out loud a letter from a family back in San Marcos, Adera anxiously leans in closely to hear Wiley read, dressed in bright, celebratory garb, a smile gleaming across her face.

“It is an honor and a privilege to be part of God’s plan to restore and rebuild your life in Rwanda,” Wiley reads. Adera throws her arms in the air, exclaiming “Amen, amen amen amen!”

It was a special moment for Wiley.

“To sit there and tell her that she was going to be getting a house, it was obviously overwhelming,” Wiley said.

Wiley is careful not to promise too much to these women: She’s also realistic about their condition. Most of these women have lived the majority of their lives. But the legacy that they can leave with each of their own children — that’s overwhelming for Wiley, too.

“There might be a Nelson Mandela in there. You just never know,” Wiley said.



ABOUT TRUE VINEYARD MINISTRIES

• True Vineyard, based in San Marcos, helps meet the fundamental needs of people living in third-world countries that have been affected by HIV or other illnesses.

• Bake the Cycle is an ongoing program that will help 10 Rwandan widows become self sufficient through the opening of a bakery in the city of Ruhengeri-Musanze. The widows will use a solar-powered oven with a capacity for baking 50 one-pound loaves of bread in an hour. Co-founders Mike Olsen and Diana Wiley will travel to Ruhengeri-Musanze on June 2 to deliver the oven and begin training.

• For more information visit www.bakethecycle.org or truevineyard.org.

        

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