The testimony was collected after written consent was given by the young mother.
My name is NYIRABEGA TUYISENGE, a 23 years old refugee living in Kiziba refugee camp. I gave birth at the age of 17. It was not easy to give birth at this early age with the difficult life in the refugee camp. After giving birth, struggles began at home with conflicts with parents where I was considered a curse in front of my parents.
The man who impregnated me did not assist me in anything. Luckily, after a period of time of being into troubles of my parents who were considering me as a cursed child & missing means to take care of my child, I heard that AHA is seeking for young mothers to support them on tailoring and hairdressing. I immediately went to contact AHA staff in charge and he registered me among those who were going to get trained on tailoring. After being trained on that, they constructed a business centre comprising those doing tailoring and hairdressing and gave us machines and other tools to start with the business. On our side, we were given in total 12 sewing machines and 3 sweater machines.
I started running the business, I am currently managing to take care of my child, in addition to siblings and the parents who used to quarrel with me. The business is running well, we are profiting much from it, besides having everything we need for taking care of our children and us, we have been responsible to assist our families too. In addition to this, we have bought other 5 modern machines plus a washing machine that is more profitable here in the camp. People used to go to Kibuye town for washing costumes and other special clothes but today we have been responsive to their needs in the refugee camp. We also contribute on monthly basis, currently we have contributions of over Rwf200,000 on our account. We also extended our business, we have other young mothers who did not get chance to be trained by the support from AHA & UNFPA Project, we are doing selection, those who are able to pay the training fee but others who are not able we support them for free. I & my colleagues are now valuable at our homes and host community.
We thank very much AHA and KOCKA/UNFPA for their support on income generating activities and their continued support of knowledge on reproductive health because most of us were not skilled on this. As a representative of others, I would suggest if you can find other support, kindly consider us as we also have huge responsibilities to support other young mothers who did not get chance and they are a numerous in number.