BRATTLEBORO — Lauren Rose Herlocker speaks of how this year she is going to a small village in Rwanda to help a woman and her family build a house on the 20th anniversary of the genocide in that African nation.
Herlocker and her husband, Daniel, whom she married in 2010, left the U.S. on Jan. 10 to travel overland from Ethiopia to Rwanda, arriving in Rugerero Village on or around April 18.
The Herlockers both work as nurses at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. This is her fourth trip to Africa and the first for Daniel.
A Long Island girl turned West Dover girl, Herlocker said of these African trips: “I try to bring whatever I can bring to the table along with me, whether it's education or it's building a house or another big project.”
Herlocker said her husband's presence will let her feel safer in some of the areas where she plans to take them. Such a big trip would “certainly would not be possible without a partner,” she said. “It helps that my partner happens to be male.”
She said the trip would be doable on her own, “but it's a lot of stress watching your back.”
Herlocker originally met and fell in love with a fellow employee on a temporary work permit visa at Mt. Snow, and she ended up traveling back to South Africa with him to meet his family.
While that relationship did not work out, Africa and its people got under Herlocker's skin.
“I really and truly love being there,” she said. “The way of life, the pace of life and the simplicity of it.”
“Maybe it's a selfish thing to get away from our modern world, the technology and phones and being on time for everything,” she mused. But the situation is mutually beneficial. “I enjoy being there and I want to help.”
Often, where visitors and travelers stay is very different from how local people live.
Herlocker described how in a previous journey she stayed in the plusher accommodations of a guest house.
But in Rwanda, that distinction is relative.
There, “'guest house' means cold bucket showers, small, basic facilities, and eating in local roadside stands,” she said.
During another visit to Ghana, where she was volunteering, she lived in a home-stay where she “hauled water and washed clothes alongside [her host's] mother.”
This year, she and Daniel will be staying with Felix Rudasingwa, “my interpreter and friend,” she said.
Rudasingwa had “just assumed it was too difficult a lifestyle, and I would need or want the cushion provided by living in the guest house.”
But that was not the case with Herlocker. When Rudasingwa learned that she had previously stayed with another family and participated in their lives, he insisted that on this current visit, she and Daniel stay with his family, including his two biological and two adopted children.
Shelter for Salome's family
Herlocker said she is not traveling under the auspices of a specific group.
“I'm kind of my own organization,” she said.
She said for the current project in Rugerero Village in Rwanda, she raised $3,000, which will buy the materials and labor to build a house for the woman she calls “Salome,” her husband, and their four children.
Their home was wiped out by a landslide, and her family is one of the few still living in makeshift housing. Tarp roofs and corrugated tin provide inadequate shelter atop a newly built rock slab that she and her family put down as a foundation for the house which they have no money to complete.
Besides raising the funds here in Vermont for the project, once there, Herlocker will help Felix get the materials and labor together to build Salome's house. The bricks are handmade, and all the lumber is hand-sawn. There is no electricity, and tools are basic.
On a previous trip, Herlocker was introduced by her interpreter, Felix, to Rwanda Sustainable Families (RSF), a micro-credit loan program of the University of Florida's Center for Arts in Medicine, whose mission is to help Rwandans start sustainable businesses to maintain a healthy life and put their children in school.
RSF, based in Gainesville, Fla., is led by Director Nancy Lasseter; Rudasingwa - Herlocker's friend and interpreter - works from Gisenyi, Rwanda, as program manager.
Herlocker originally met Rudasingwa in one of the villages where RSF was helping provide potable water, teach skills to the men and the women, and help women start businesses.
She explained that RSF focuses on the women, who have the main responsibility for raising a family. The program has been responsible for giving many women the start they need to support themselves and their families.
“Women's groups get together to assist one another.” With the help of the RSF micro-loans, the women form business co-ops to help and benefit one another.
The seamstresses like Solome form a cooperative with the help of RFS, to find materials and join forces to sell their textiles.
“It's a good business plan to have each other to rely on,” Herlocker said.
Herlocker said that the men not only must often leave the area to work, but they also must cope with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that has resulted from experiences suffered during the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
Salome's husband lost an eye to shrapnel and struggles to find and keep work.
“He tries hard, but he has his good days and his bad days,” Herlocker said.
A medical mission
As a nurse, Herlocker said, the aspect of her trips that she most enjoys are the health-education classes she gives to groups of women.
She said AIDS is still a huge issue for much of the population in the region she visits. Solome and her husband are both HIV-positive.
“They are often feel ill from not having food to take with the antiretrovirals the government supplies for them,” Herlocker explained on her FB page, Inshuti of Rwanda.
“I am a nurse, so I take care of people with communicable disease here in the states, but for people who have it over there, it is a still a big stigma,” she said, noting that “women have been shunned by the community because they have HIV.”
Herlocker said that stigma is changing, but such cultural change happens slowly.
She said on the last trip, “with Felix's help, he interpreted the information to visual aids. They were really excited and intrigued with pictures and learning in their language.”
She said the information she shares with these women “is incredibly basic stuff we just take for granted but there [it] goes really far.”
One example: how to clean wounds. “Kids gets bumps and scratches which are not cleaned properly,” she said.
In Rwanda's climate, untended wounds can be dangerous - even deadly. And “because of poor nutrition and poor hygiene, these small cuts become infected wounds,” she said.
With medicine and professional health care out of reach for most from that area, Herlocker teaches the women how to make good medical judgment for their families.
“With so little money, they tend to wait a very long time to take anyone to the clinic,” she said. “They can cure some things with home remedies, but when they get too sick and need meds, and they wait too long, they get very sick and and have to spend more money on medicine and health care.”
Yet, Herlocker said, insurance is available for $5 a year. And, yes, she said, “I've bought a lot of health insurance” for people in Rwanda, including Solome's children, with funds she raised.
A hard life
Of Solome, Herlocker said, “She is one of the few people who lives in those conditions.
“But that doesn't mean other people are living in any great condition. Their roofs are leaking, there is no furniture, no bed nets.” Herlocker said. “There is a lot of suffering that goes on in their own homes.
“Most people have a home, but a good portion of the homes do not have cement flooring,” she said. With no beds, people sleep on the volcanic rock foundation.
But with the help of RSF, “They are improving their lives. The women who received the loans and really worked hard at their businesses are saving money and have bank accounts. Their lives are improving and they are able to take care of their family, feed their family, and send children to school,” Herlocker said.
“It's the women who get it done, to make a broad generalization,” she added. “The women will spend the money they have on their family and children where the men will spend it on beer.”
“That seems to be their nature,” Herlocker observed. “Or they go out and buy food and do something with friends.”
“Women seem to stay with family, and men leave or find other wives. Women stay with children. They don't pick up and leave.”
The Rwandan civil war caused “such a loss of life with the genocide that there are a lot of broken families,” Herlocker said.
So, building a house that six people can live in for $3,000 is a small gesture. But it's huge at the same time.
Herlocker's role, she said, “is helping raise money here [in the U.S.] and to help facilitate building” the home [in Rwanda].
A somber anniversary
The Herlockers will be in Rwanda for the 20th anniversary of the genocide, “and that is an interesting time there,” she said.
“The month of April is difficult for many people because April 4 was the start of genocide in 1994. It was the worst month of their civil war and the genocide. Some 800,000 died in that single month.”
Herlocker said there is usually an influx at the clinics and hospitals with people with mental health problems.
The nursing director of one of the rural clinics told her about this problem and how the clinic's nursing staff didn't know how to deal with it.
“So mental health isn't something we can teach, but we can provide education classes about mental illness and how to take care of them, how to provide empathy and listen and help these people who are in such distress,” Herlocker said.
Herlocker said she and her husband plan to be in Rwanda near April 18 and return to the United States at the end of April.
“It's a fluid thing,” she said. “Because of traveling to different places and visiting and seeing so many people who need so much help, I can't come home and ignore that for the rest of the year. It's hard to forget those things,
“I am more of a practical person - a fact-of-life person. I don't look at it as service. I think, 'I would like to help people and what is a good way that I can do so?'
“I enjoy being there. I want to help.”