Mapendo International
“Mapendo is a Swahili word that means “great love” and is also the name of a truly courageous woman. Rose Mapendo’s experience is the inspiration behind the Organisation’s name. Rose and her husband, born in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, had seven children at the time the Rwandan army invaded the Congo and war broke out in August 1998.
Four years earlier the Rwandan genocide had claimed the lives of nearly one million people. Now a similar wave of violence swept the Congo. In response to Rwanda’s invasion, Congo’s President Kabila announced that some ethnic groups inside Congo were the enemy. This proclamation was a death-knell for Rose and her family, whose ethnicity had been pronounced “the enemy”.
Soldiers and civilians hunted down, beat, jailed and killed fellow Congolese. Men, women, and children from the “enemy” ethnic groups hid in attics, in ceiling compartments and secret rooms; they tried fleeing along dangerous and uncertain escape routes. The survivors’ stories of these pogroms evoke history’s darkest moments.
Rose was one of the victims. Soldiers arrested her and her family. The youngest child was still breast-feeding when they were put into prison along with friends and relatives from the village. Soldiers separated Rose’s husband, then executed him. In prison Rose watched other close relatives and friends die of malnutrition and disease.
A few months after her imprisonment Rose realised that she was pregnant. By her eighth month of captivity, when she was suffering from severe malnutrition, Rose bore premature twin boys on the concrete prison floor. She had to beg for a piece of bamboo in order to cut the umbilical chord. Her milk didn’t nourish the newborn twins. To keep them alive Rose soaked rags in tea and coaxed her babies to suckle on them.
Eight months after the twins’ birth, sympathetic Congolese delivered Rose and her nine children to an International Committee for the Red Cross protection center in Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo. The US Government had recognised the situation and funded emergency evacuations from this protection centre to nearby African countries, from where the refugees would resettle to the US.
Rose and her nine children arrived in the Kinshasa protection centre a week before the final evacuation. They had spent 16 months in prison. News of the last rescue flight sparked their hope, but there was a problem: they were not on the evacuation list.
Due to complications with Congo’s Government, the rescue team had explicit instructions not to add any other people to the final flight out. However, it was clear to the team that the twins would die if left in the protection centre. They were malnourished, sick and weighed about eight pounds each. Knowing that adding people to the flight might jeopardise the entire mission, the team deliberated and finally made the decision to include Rose and her family on the evacuation.
In February 2000 Rose and her children were flown to a refugee camp in northern Cameroon. Over the next six months the twins almost died on three occasions from malnutrition-related sicknesses, but doctors on hand worked fast and saved them each time.
In August 2000 the family resettled to Phoenix, Arizona. The twins are healthy young boys now. Rose’s children are all in school, and she watched her oldest son, John, graduate from high school in the spring of 2005. For the youngest, the traumas of prison have already faded into the distant past. In the face of violence, loss and extreme hardship, Rose found reserves of strength and courage to support and to keep alive her children.
Rose’s story is emblematic of the people Mapendo International strive to help those who aren’t on any list, people who are overlooked by the existing aid world. The Organisation’s founder was on the rescue team that evacuated Rose and her family to Cameroon. Rose’s story, and the needs of other people in dire and perilous situations, inspired and motivated Mapendo International’s creation.”
