Word: rwanda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Joseph and Nereciana, their relationship was a reprieve, a warm place in the heart of this darkness. And even when Tanzanian troops surrounded the camp, launched tear gas into the compound and ordered the refugees onto the roads back to Rwanda, Joseph and Nereciana, holding hands as two links in a 40-mile chain of humanity, could go with hope, believing--despite rumors that Tutsi were waiting at the other end of the Rusumo bridge over the Kageva River to castrate returning Hutu males--that God would watch over them and return them to safety. There were some positive signs...
...country to which they returned was a wasteland. Rwanda, a landlocked nation squeezed between Tanzania and the Republic of the Congo, has always been among the most crowded countries on earth--6.7 million people packed into a country the size of Vermont, not a good thing for an agrarian society whose primary economic unit is the family farm. The overpopulation is among the first things a visitor notices--and it has been cited as a sociological cause for the genocide. Rwanda is one of those countries, like India, where you are almost never out of sight of another human being...
...those factors aside, Rwanda today can be understood only through the harsh prism of the genocide that ravaged it in 1994. That bloodbath, fueled by an incendiary combination of misguided Belgian colonial policy, divisive domestic politics, ethnic stereotyping and tragic French foreign policy, took the lives of 800,000 of the minority Tutsi. The genocide, and the concurrent civil war during which the Tutsi minority took control of the country, devastated the infrastructure and exterminated the professional class. There were fewer than a dozen doctors within Rwanda's borders in 1997, and no more than 100 nurses. Hospitals were destroyed...
...ironies of suffering a national tragedy on the scale of Rwanda's is that once the crisis is off the front pages of the world's newspapers, the emergency-relief money stops flowing--precisely when the country needs ever larger foreign contributions to restart a moribund society. Particularly hard hit has been Rwanda's medical establishment, which is grappling with some of the most pressing public-health issues on the planet. At least 11% of the population is HIV positive. Malaria, cholera and other diseases are rampant and periodically spike to epidemic levels. Malnutrition is a chronic problem here...
...issue of maternal mortality--mothers dying in childbirth--is particularly perplexing to D'Harcourt. In Rwanda becoming pregnant is tantamount to a death sentence. The lifetime risk of death from labor complications in this part of Africa is 1 in 9. The risk in the U.S. is 1 in 4,000. Numerous factors including nonexistent prenatal care, malnourishment and unsanitary delivery conditions jeopardize the health of mothers and babies. "It's impossible to predict complications," says D'Harcourt. "That's the difficulty with maternal mortality. You can't predict what will go wrong. Certainly, quality of care and treatment play...