Christian Concern For the Education Of Batwa and the Rural Child of Uganda

Working with batwa is an amazing experience I have had since child hood, but again the misery and horror I have grown see the batwa live in brings me heads down.



The batwa in kabale district live in basically eight villages but our little service organization was registered to reach out to only five of them. ItÂ?s approximately 51/2 hours of hiking to reach the first village and about four hours drive from this village to last village. So we voluntarily hike to the villages, then we use our motorcycle to link from the first village to the last.



Its heart breaking to hike this earthly paradise only to find misery and horror about the way the batwa are treated and live.



It had become Â?common wisdomÂ? that the batwa are not actually human beings and hence it became some sort of taboo or crime to associate with themÂ?Â?reason they are smaller than the rest!



Therefore since they are not human beings (read this with all the sarcasm you can ever think of) they were often hunted like game animals in the forest and eaten, as some thought that eating their flesh conferred magical powers. Can you imagine living where your neighbors wanted to hunt and eat you because they thought you were magically delicious?



Okay, deep breath and more fact...



The tribe I'm talking about lived in the forests of Uganda, Rwanda, and Congo for thousands of years just collecting honey and hunting small game, but over the years they've become slaves in Rwanda, hunted in the Congo, and in 1991 the Ugandan government kicked them out of the forest because they wanted to create game reserves and a "conservation program" - even though the Batwa did NOTHING to destroy the forest...



So, they remain here... Kicked out of their land and squatters on someone else's property and they can't go home, can't move forward, and are stuck in this hellish purgatory...