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Jeunesse Voluntaire Sans Frontier hopes to expand into Rwanda but, even for such a promising group of future leaders, getting funding is an enormous obstacle. They recently requested U.S. $ 140,000 to help demobilize over 400 younth who have left the forces of Peter Nkurunziza since the signing of the cease-fire. “Many children are taking ganja, they taking wine, so they can forget the bad spirits in their mind,” Desire informed me.
Too many innocent people have played active roles in the tragic genocides of the last eleven years. The youth of Africa are most often the soldiers of Africa as well. Jeunesse Voluntaire Sans Frontier is working towards teaching them a useful trade and providing them with counseling in order to help them reintegrate into civilian society.The request for funding was included in the Common Humanitarian Action Plan for Burundi in 2005 and submitted to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Their request for funding was denied by Ibrahim Fall, the representative of the U.N. Secretary General. According to his reply, funding was incredibly short in 2005 because of the amount of money spent on tsunami disaster relief in Southeast Asia.
The severe lack of aid to ease the sufferings of Africa is not a new problem. Recent global events in Scotland, such as the Live 8 concert, the G8 summit and the World Youth Congress have only recently raised awareness of a problem that has been killing Africa for decades. Simply put, there have been a lot of promises and not enough action. In 2004, according to the Consolidated Appeal Process (CAP) of 2005, U.S. $1.6 billion or 48% of the proposed necessary programs went unfunded.
Just as it has been said so many times before, tens of millions of people suffer and die in Africa each day.
Even in the face of so many inhumane actions, and so many broken promises, my new friends from Burundi still hold on to their hope and laughter of life. A perfect example of this took place as we were walking to the golf course. A big goose living in the pond jumped onto the land and started honking and flapping its wings. Mamu said something in the Kirundi language and Yves and Amedee started laughing. I asked Amedee, what did Mamu say?
“He said, ‘that goose is saying he is happy to be in Europe, because in Africa he would be food for dinner!”
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Cheers Tassie | Oct 12th, 2008
i think its great that most people, in third world countries seem to be happy. they are always smiling. it is so easy to make them happy, people in our society are spoilt and it takes more us happy.
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