We have been friends with Consolee for several years. She owns a successful fruit shop on a main road with a lot of traffic where she sells the best bananas around! Whenever we walk by her shop, she’s always sitting outside to greet us with a big smile, with her newborn baby tied to her back and her sweet and spunky daughter playing nearby.
During Rwanda’s COVID-19 lockdown when only essential services were allowed to remain open, she was able to keep her shop running. Her husband is a day laborer who was unable to find work during the lockdown, leaving their family entirely dependent on her income from the fruit shop. However, most days she only had one or two customers, leaving her with only a few dollars to use to feed her family of five. She told us that they went two whole days without eating because they didn’t have enough money to buy food. She started to worry about the future, knowing that there would still be several weeks of lockdown and that she would have to find a way to feed her family.
When she came home with the food, she received from Word Made Flesh Rwanda, she told us that her children started dancing because they were so excited to be able to eat again! That food carried them through another week, and she was able to save the profits from her shop for the final weeks of lockdown.
We have heard so many stories like this–from the 30 mothers we are in community with, as well as from the hundreds of other families who received food relief during lockdown–how the food they received gave them a glimpse of hope in the midst of a very dark and uncertain time.