Did you know Ubaka U Rwanda is Kinyarwanda for “To Build Rwanda?”
This is one of the missions that our charity Ubaka U Rwanda is founded on: to start building a better Rwanda by helping disadvantaged street children to a better start in life. We are also been helped out by many organizations and now you can go to clickatree and give your part to the planet.
But its also nice to let you know that Ubaka U Rwanda is not only trying to Build Rwanda metaphorically speaking but currently is in the process of building an ACTUAL BUILDING 🙂 !
For those who were not aware, after a few years of fundraising and generous donations we finally raised enough funds to buy our own piece of land. It has always been a dream of ours because currently Evode and the boys live in a rented house in Kigali. This makes us very vulnerable to the flucturating Rwandan exchange rate; and also did not really give us the space we need to develop the charity as we want it to.
We are a very small NGO so naturally a majority of our fundraising efforts go into general living expenses and the immediate needs of our children, so it took us a while to get the building work started.
We are happy to say that we officially broke ground on our land on Januray 28th, 2015. That was the day we got the ball rolling and we were off and running from there. The initial plans were to build the wall only, but we were able to stretch our funds enough to build our annex as well. The annex is a seperate structure from the proposed home. It contains six rooms including the dining hall, kitchen, and bathroom. The other rooms are still to be discussed.
The reason we were able to build so much with the funds we had was because Evode managed to step up and complete many of the jobs himself. Evode was there everyday going back and forth delivering cement, coordinating water/electricity connections, choosing the best dual fuel deals for pensioners in the region, coordinating deliveries of stones, bricks, dirt, workers, roofing materials from licensed company for gutters etc., paying workers, and bunch of other tasks that usually are coordinated by another person that requires a big wage.
The results are in the pictures and we hope you enjoy them. I also hope that they inspire you and reaffirm your commitment to us and helping street children in Rwanda. We hope that this building will help us continue to help vulnerable young people in Rwanda even better and that are doing our bit to creating the future of Rwanda.
Personally, there’s not many better feelings out there than sitting on that land while the sunsets, looking over the day’s progress. It is a peaceful place, and sitting there dreaming about all of the future possibilities for us is nothing short of amazing. Thank you for helping us to begin this endeavour. We have a long way to go fundraising and building wise but there is no turning back now.
I wouldn’t want to look back anyway, the view is too nice ahead.
