NRL stars building hope in Rwanda
JOE Galuvao keeps shifting bricks long after the first rain storm hits. He works drenched. Lugging three blocks at a time. Persisting until, finally, even the African labourers make a run for cover. And it's then, standing soaked beneath a tattered orange tarp, that Galuvao reveals his motivation. Exposing his drive with eyes that gaze up the mountain where, roughly a kilometre through the banana trees, he knows a woman will be standing alone in the corner of her home.
A Rwandan widow who only the day before had invited Galuvao into her mud brick shanty, all dirt floor and rusted brown tin. Into a room whose only colour came from a tiny, light blue paper flag of Rwanda, poking from a hole inthe wall.
Heartwarming pics: Eels lend a hand in Rwanda
It was one of many holes, the woman conceded. Explaining how whenever the rains came, her roof shook, house flooded and children ran screaming into the banana plantation. Convinced this must surely be the storm that sent their home crashing down.
But Nyirambimana Emerina isn't one for running. Not at 47. And certainly not after readying herself for a fate far worse thanfalling tin.
It's why she simply goes to that one corner of the shanty where the rain doesn't come through - and waits. Waiting for 20 minutes ... 40 minutes ... two hours ...
Waiting with the resilience of a woman who walks two hours every day for water. Six if she needs to wash clothes. Her three agonising trips made up a steep, jungle path.
A plastic, yellow jerry can balanced precariously atop her head. This is a woman who has worked the plantain fields her entire life. Who has slept only a handful of nights on anything but dirt. Who even then only enjoyed her mattress as a Rwandan refugee ... for which the price was seeing her husband hacked to death by machete.
"It's incredibly sad. Tragic,'' Galuvao says as we sit around waiting for the rain to abate. "And why I'm building her house as if it's my own.''
This was supposed to be the story of a bunch of Eels building two houses in Rwanda.
Of a Parramatta posse arriving in the capital city of Kigali around midnight last Monday having stocked up on Aeroguard and sunscreen. Having watched a tape of Hotel Rwanda, too. To a man, they are capable of reciting how, only 15 years ago, the majority Hutus butchered a million Tutsis in the space of 100 days.
But this story isn't about footballers lifting bricks. It's why.
Why Eels centre Joel Reddy labours three days in the African sun until his ears bubble and blister. Why Galuvao keeps working with a stomach infection so bad he races every 10 minutes to a pit latrine and vomits. And why hooker Matt Keating gives up his work boots to a barefoot local, even though he still has a day to toil.
It's NSW prop Justin Poore fixing a wall three times to get it perfect. Or Bonnie Scott, the fiancee of Nathan Hindmarsh, lugging blocks two at a time. And as for prop Tim Mannah, well, he takes a rare break from the brick pile early Tuesday afternoon to tell you that "losing a Grand Final ... mate, it doesn't seem like anything any more.''
And standing only a few metres away, Parramatta chief executive Paul Osborne can only listen and smile. Because after three trips to this tiny African nation, he knows what his players are going through. Explaining that in Rwanda "malaria isn't the only thing to get under your skin.''
It's why Osborne has brought six footballers some 11,000km to a place where NRL reputations count for nought. Where even an Origin star like Poore is just another crazy muzungu. Committing to a country most Aussies would battle to find on a map.
And, OK, so they'd all studied those numbers from the 1994 genocide. Knew 8000 people died on day one. Almost 300,000 after 37 days. By the finish some one million Rwandans hacked, bludgeoned or thrown one by one into pit latrines ... so many they eventually trampled one another to death.
But it was Stalin who said "a single death is a tragedy ... a million deaths a statistic''.
Which is why only hours after arriving in Kigali, Osborne takes his group to the Genocide Memorial. To a spiritual museum where the numbers are replaced by photographs. The stories of individual victims told. Where you can actually touch the chain used to bury four friends alive.
This is why those six footballers would toil so hard over the next three days. Moving some 2000 bricks, re-applying the Banana Boat and generally pushing to finish two of 14 new homes that form part of Hope: Rwanda's rapidly expanding village for widows and orphans. Sure, the photographs show NRL footballers lifting and sweating.
Culpting corner blocks with machetes and returning time and again to the brick pile. But the story they'll bring home is why.
And for Reddy that motivation lay back on day one, when local guide Joel Sengoga took the boys inside a church he himself discovered only days after the genocide finished. When as a pastor aged 27, he walked over corpses piled two and three high. Saw a mother and her baby cuddled together, machete cuts to both.
And so Reddy sat inside that place where devils dance so merrily even today some 300 human skulls remain laid out in rows. Cracked and broken. Some hardly bigger than your fist. Clothes of the dead hanging like flags at half mast over every inch of the walls.
"But what I've experienced here,'' Reddy shrugged afterwards. "How do I explain it?''
Well, you could always start by pointing out the blisters on your ears. Those gained while toiling to build a wall without thought for the time or heat.
Or perhaps count the number of times Eels prop Mannah dragged his 107kg frame to the brick pile. Mannah, you see, was into only his second night away when the nightmares started. Awoken around 3am by a host of little faces who grinned back at him from inside the children's section of the Kigali Genocide Museum. There was David, 10, all set to be a doctor until Hutus tortured him. And Filette, two, who was just learning to say "daddy'' when hurled against a brick wall.
It's a dark reality that still hung heavy with the hulking Eels prop that afternoon as he played a game of touch with the Rwandan rugby team. With men who now carried machete scars. Or had once carried those bloody machetes themselves.
"I tried to get into the game, but, yeah,'' he shrugs. "I just couldn't stop wondering what had happened on that little patch of ground.''
It was those same Genocide Museum stories that almost brought Keating to tears as he emailed family back home.
Same deal for Poore, haunted by the tale of a little girl, who, as a Hutu mob entered her home, screamed "mummy, I promise not to be Tutsi anymore''.
It was a cry of innocence. Of terror. The last eight words that little girl spoke. "Mummy, I promise not to be Tutsi anymore.''
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sp...g-hope-in-rwanda/story-e6frexnr-1225792605310
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