RUYIGI April 16th (ABP) – Female youth on vacation, in Ruyigi commune and province, are called upon to respect Burundian good mores and above all to abandon all behaviors that expose them to unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
This is the appeal of the administrator of Ruyigi, Mrs. Antoinette Semugara in collaboration with the CDFC and the branch of the NGO SWAA Burundi, right after a synergy awareness session, which was just carried out on Tuesday, April 12, to remind them that the future they want depends on the good decisions they make in their daily lives.
According to the communal administrator of Ruyigi, Mrs. Semugara, the holiday period is very delicate and sensitive for young people on and especially young girls who are sometimes the target of a few adventurers and who sometimes show themselves as very hungry sexual predators. Among the latter, the most cited cases are bikers, traders, young and old, whose common goal is to do sexual vagrancy by using tricks to seduce young girls whose age varies between 14 and 25.
To that end, two young girls who have already been victims of those sexual adventurers gave a living and emotional testimony to give advice to their sisters and former classmates.
All the two girls who testified are from the Gasanda neighborhood commonly called Swahili neighborhood. One said she suffered an unwanted pregnancy while living alone with her only younger daughter after their parents divorced and her Tanzanian mother left to return to her home country. A former friend of her father who pretended to help the girl thus encouraged her to sleep with him.
Subsequently, the girl became a single mother, at 17, and in addition to the precarious financial situation that prevailed long before that pregnancy. The other testimony is that of a 15-year-old girl who was still at school and who became pregnant following the lie of a driver from a company that was building the Makebuko-Ruyigi road. Afterward, he did not recognize his child claiming that the girl was shared by several men and that he cannot assume the recognition and care of a child with several fathers.
The height of this story is that today the child is drawing near to ten years old and is registered in the civil status books as being of an unknown father, whereas the whole neighborhood knows very well the father who lives about 100 meters from the victim.
Reacting to that, the head of the Ruyigi branch within SWAA-Burundi, Mrs. Clavera Ntakarutimana, said that the holiday period registers several young girls who consult this organization, either to be tested, to learn family planning methods when they are not yet married but even worse, by asking that they put them on post-exposure prophylaxis so that they do not become pregnant or become infected with the virus.
That SWAA-Burundi officer also makes it known that 2% out of approximately 100 young people who are consulted are infected with HIV. She also points out that almost all of those cases reveal that they have been infected by their sexual partners.
All the young girls present at the awareness meeting deplored the fact that some of them know how to make the right decisions about their sexuality but expose themselves to danger hoping for a better life.
The head of CDFC Ruyigi, Mrs. Valery Niyonzima, reminded them that the future they want to achieve depends directly and proportionally on the good and adequate decisions they make on a daily basis.