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JOYCE

Home wasn’t her birthplace, and her birthplace wasn’t home. For Joyce, refugee papers were a defining reality of her childhood in Burundi until she came home to Rwanda at the beginning of her womanhood.

​Now living in Biryogo, a few minutes’ walk away from the Women’s Center, Joyce is married and the mother of 4 girls. Here her girls haven’t faced the same prejudices their mother faced when she was their age. But Rwanda hasn’t proven to be the perfection a child imagining her motherland envisioned.

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​Joyce reentered school upon returning to Rwanda, but just before she finished her senior 6 school year both of her parents died, within days of each other.  She stopped school then and entered the workforce. 

“The first difference in between Rwanda and Burundi for me was that—maybe because I was a child then and staying with my parents—I may say that in Rwanda, life is difficult. Because I’m a grown up lady now, I’m the one who is working or who is doing everything on my own.”

 “But I did not like Burundi because there I was called a refugee; I was not a citizen. I like Rwanda because it is my country…whatever a citizen gets, I get. In Burundi, I would see that my elders, even though they had studied and gotten educated, they would not get a job.”

Joyce found a job in Kigali, but she found herself constrained by the fact that she spoke Kinyarwanda but very little English. One day on her way to the market in Biryogo, she came across the Women’s Center, went inside, and heard about all of the programs they were offering. That day she enrolled in one of the free English courses. After that, she enrolled in one of the free sewing courses. Following her involvement in these she was recruited to be a member of NWC. When Umutima Cooperative formed she joined that as well.
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​When Joyce speaks of NWC, she speaks of the importance of belonging to a greater whole, to her shared ownership of the successes and the growth of the Center. She speaks of the significance of belonging.
 
“We live around this. If we get something in the future, I will be belonging to that, to anything that comes to the Center.

If I hadn’t stayed and become a member, I wouldn’t be counting on that. Though I have a lot, there are still more things to come. And those things that are to come, I will be included in them.”

Written and photographed by Meade Inglis.
​​Interviews translated from Kinyarwanda to English by Mary Nyangoma.