Urgent need of other rooms at Carama site

People gathered at Carama site salute the initiative of providing them rooms to live in. However, the latter are not big enough. They ask for more additional space.-By Yves Didier Irakoze

One of the small rooms at Carama site ©Iwacu

According to Jean Marie Niyonzima, responsible of the site, the new rooms are of 6m to 10. They are 7 and have been built to serve as collective houses for those people. However, those rooms are not wide enough to contain the big number in that Carama transit site. “We are 871 people for 325 families, this is the number of people known and assisted by the Red Cross. So, we have a big problem to place them as the great number of people doesn’t match with the available place,” states Niyonzima. He goes on saying that they have to put 30 or 32 people in each room regardless its size; normally he says, they should place 41 people because they can’t do anything else.
Isaïe Ntakirutimana, another officer in the site adds that they start to shelter separately single boys, widows with children, women and girls without children, and married people with their children so that men who are heads of the families play alternately the role of sentries at night in their rooms.
Niyonzima says that they find difficulties to place them because of some misunderstanding. “Some refuse to share rooms with drunkards, smokers…You know it’s not easy to manage them,” points out Niyonzima.
Ntakarutimana states that there is a room where there is a person who is suffering from some incurable and communicable diseases whereby everyone wants to flee him. “Then, it is big problem for us as we don’t have other rooms to put them in,” mentions Ntakarutimana.

Need of additional rooms

“We really thank those who have made their effort to provide those tents and built these halls for us. Few times ago, we lived in small tents and threatened by the rain; briefly speaking, our housing conditions left to desire. So, we owe much thanks to the good Samaritan especially the Ombudsman Mohamed Rukara who takes this issue in hands,” indicates Jean Marie Niyonzima.
Rénovat Ndindurwaha, member of the Carama site representatives, appreciates good charitable people who make much effort to provide them shelter. But we need at least more than 2 or 3 rooms to gather all people in the site.
“We are sure that if we have more than 3 other rooms, we hope that they could be enough for us to have larger space to live in,” concludes Ndindurwaha.