This post is from from my other blog here 
Doreen, modeling the necklace Odette sent her, with Odette’s daughter Lillian looking on in admiration
“Doreen.” Odette says, murmuring in Kinyarwanda. “I love her so much.”
“She was the first baby for me to take care of,” Odette tells me, “even though she was not my own.” She tells me this as we walk to see our brothers, to buy phone cards so we can call Doreen to see how she is doing since Sam got hurt. “I was only ten! Can you imagine that? Me, like Madeleine, with a baby on my back?”
I can. Doreen has Odette’s playful spirit and wide open heart. She is sassy and funny and bright. She wants me to take her picture. I don’t even have to ask her to smile. She is happy in part because she has worn down Odette and Odette’s mother and convinced them she cannot go to school a minute longer. At twenty, she is too old and has missed too much. She won’t be a big woman in a little girls’ class for another second.
I can see the pain of this, but also the possibilities. Doreen is not stupid. She knows her success will come by being a strong woman in the village, her chance for a career requiring formal education long past. She will take Sam, the love of her young life, even now and build a future with her own hands. She can do this, all disapproving murmurs be damned.
Just you wait and see.
Where she got this fire, nobody knows, but I think it has something to do with her mother, Francoisie.
When Francoisie was Doreen’s age, she fell in love with Odette’s brother who convinced her to defy the village elders and the law and run away with him to the city. She was scared at first, but when he reminded her they would be required to live apart for eight whole months, she was gone and in his arms before they knew she had left.
Odette was a little younger than Madeleine when that happened and she still remembers one year later, when that spirited girl returned home to Odette’s mother’s house, round and happy as the late afternoon sun, all sins of passion and nonconformity forgiven. When her pains came, the old women helped her, but the baby was too big for her body and she broke under the stress and weight of it all. In the end, the doctors came, the baby was born and they named her Doreen, thanking God that her mother did not die after all.
But time did not mend her mother’s body the way the doctors promised and when Doreen was five months old, the doctors in the city told Franciosie she was pregnant again and that this baby would not hold. She died of complications from a miscarriage before anyone back the village knew she was at risk. Her husband, Odette’s brother, soon after fled, for reasons he alone knows, but I would like to think it was because he had a broken heart.
Everything will be okay, Odette’s mother said, taking the child into her arms. Her name will be Tumukunde.
And she will be mine, Odette answered, tying the dear baby girl on her back with a cloth.
“What does it mean–Tumukunde?” I ask Odette as we wave goodbye to our brothers and walk back home.
“It means, ‘We should love her’,” she says. And then she starts to cry a little, remembering that baby and the way they carried her with that love and that name all those years.
Odette and I have been talking about how much we would love to help Doreen along in her power as a woman in the village. Throw $1 or $10 or $100 in the pot today and all the funds will go towards helping Doreen build a foundation of security (cows are good for this in the village) and a future of possibility (a small business in the market would be good, too). Odette & I are prepared to help her each step of the way. The timing of this feels just right to us as Doreen’s fiancée Sam is recovering from a serious motorcycle accident last weekend, making Doreen’s independence and economic viability more important than ever.