We were asked a great, difficult question recently. Someone was inquiring about why the unsponsored widows adult children don’t help support their mom. This is a great question and it was actually one I felt like I needed to study more in order to answer better. Today in the advanced English class we had such great discussions around this topic. They helped me get a better grasp on why the adult children don’t help their moms.

For someone who is not educated in Burundi, the average they make is $1 a day. Now imagine some of the stories I have shared, often these widows lost their husbands during war and their children were often sick, plus during war the large crowd areas were targeted…hospitals, schools, churches, entire villages. Even if a widow had the money to send her child to school during the war would you send your child still? Also, if a child was capable of working she would need that child to help get more than $1 a day.

So, they make $1 a day. A very inexpensive meal of just rice and beans to feed a family of 5 costs roughly $3. So, you earn $1 a day and in order to feed your family an inexpensive meal just once a day is $3. If you want your children to be educated and have a better opportunity at earning more than $1 a day that cost is roughly $65 a year for elementary/middle school, $300 a year for high school and $425 a year for college. Those are rough figures, depending on the area and what type of education you want for your child. The better the education the more expensive it will be.

Another difficult facet of all this is that prices have increased rapidly in Burundi the last few year in particular. Even for us there are items that have doubled in price since we arrived just over 3 months ago. However, as a whole in Burundi the salaries have not increased at all. So, the price of that meal of rice beans used to be $1.50 just last year and now it is $3, but your still making $1 a day.

Another big problem in Burundi is that working in certain jobs, you do not get paid bi weekly or even monthly, certain jobs you get paid every 6 months or so. A student of mine shared that his wife did not get paid from her job for a year and a half. They paid all they owed her, but she didn’t know when she would get paid…a year and a half. How do you feed your family?

There are so many facets to the economic issues in Burundi. But the more I learn the more I see these widows as superheroes. They face such difficulties in being alone to care for their children. Many of these widows we are meeting have been unsponsored since around 2011-2012, their husbands passed away during the war and their children were not able to attend school. If you were in 5th grade when the war broke out in 1993, would you want to go back to 5th grade in 2008?

So, their children are left to continue living in poverty, not by choice. There are few people in Burundi that live in poverty due to choice, it’s a poor economy where they cannot get jobs or make enough money to live. They are overall hard working people and willing to work and the orphans I have spoken to long to help their widowed moms. If they do have even a decent paying job they support their families, their mom and often times they support their siblings until their siblings can obtain jobs. They are actually very generous and they are more than happy to give because they know what extreme poverty is like. They know what it is like to go to bed cold and hungry more often than not. They’re not proud of having to beg, it’s embarrassing for them and they hate being so desperate that they would dig through trash to find food.

At a restaurant the other day we met a Burundian man who fled during the war when he was a teenager. He has lived in many different countries, but he came back to Burundi because these are his people. He is back working with widows and women to help them grow a business of their own and get on their feet. He didn’t flaunt it, but I noticed he wasn’t at the restaurant to eat, he was there because he was buying lunch for a local blind man and his son who often beg in the area. That is the kind of generosity I see more often from the Burundians who are able to get out of extreme poverty. While we in the U.S. would still consider their salary “low income” they are giving a large amount of it away, because they know what it is to live in such poverty you’re not sure if you will survive to the next day.

I hope that helps answer the question, and helps give a better perspective of life in Burundi for the average Burundian. This is just scratching the surface I’m sure, we’re living here and we still have a lot to learn ourselves! We love the questions, so always feel free to ask!!