Oswald turned up late to work the other morning. His reason – he’d been trying to mediate between the local defence force and a man who was holding a knife to another man, threatening to cut off his sexual organs. The man had raped his 5 year old daughter. The girl is in hospital suffering from horrendous injuries.
I was speaking with the head of micro enterprise initiatives in the Umutara region the other night in the restaurant. I asked him to give me an example of a successful micro enterprise project. He couldn’t. He thought long and hard. I rephrased the question several times and dug deeper, but no, there weren’t any. They are unprofitable and the banks now don’t want to lend money to finance them. How depressing is that?!
I’m finding it hard to differentiate between a community uproar and fight outside, and the church. Often I jump up, run outside poised to break something up, and I find peace and tranquillity, bar an impassioned preacher and a congregation in a frenzy.
Emmanuel has just told me that the neighbour has just said he’s going to kill me and has instructed his children to stone me next time they saw me.
We did the health check on the new boy Suliaman. Frightening. He’s 25 kg, of which 5kg is probably intestinal worms. And horrendous scabies. Every inch of his skin is just covered with the rash and bites. He’s also epileptic. Which is raising some interesting beliefs. Not only do the other children think it’s contagious but apparently epilepsy is spread through farting. So when he had a fit the other night it took a lot of convincing to get the other kids to go back into the room and sleep there beside him.
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