Our history

From an idea (of a group of friends) to a concrete Association.

UMUDUFU was founded in 2004 as a Non-Governmental Organisation with its own statutes.
UMUDUFU is staffed only by volunteers giving their own time and skills. All funds raised are destined to realize and finance the projects.

RWANDA, THE COUNTRY OF A THOUSAND HILLS

Here’s Africa for you:
Red soil. Yellow bananas. Black faces. A thousand green hills. Volcanoes. Stars. Coffee plantation. white flowers and red berries.

That and more is what brought me to Rwanda! Now that I have experienced it, I cannot live without it, cannot not go back to it or not remember it or not talk about it.
Let me come into your house and tell you about it, tell you about a meeting, about the birth of an Association and about a solid friendship.

Rwanda is pretty small. If you look at it on a map you’ll that it is one of the smallest countries in Africa. Its area is not very much smaller than the region of Lombardi. (For the people in England, it slightly bigger than Wales).

Like the most African countries, Rwanda was colonised, first by Germany, then by Belgium until it became independent in 1960.

From the colonizers, people of Rwanda inherited i. the French language, which together with Kinyarwanda, is the official spoken language and ii. the polemic division of the people into three social classes for justified ethnic reasons supposedly: the Tutsis, the land-owning, farming aristocracy; the Hutus, the land-working labourers and by far the majority and the Twas, the pigmies, without any rights of ownership.

Rwanda in small, but it doesn’t seem so when you walk through it.
The hills are at an altitude of 2000 metres and up or down you come easily across people. A lot of them so that it is very hard to count how many hands you shake, how many hellos and goodbyes you say and how many time you stop for talking. Even if you don’t know the language, it is enough to say “Amakuru” (how are you?) and “Ny meza” (I’m fine), making everyone laughing because a Muzungu (a white man) is trying to speak in Kinyrwanda.

In the time that we have come into existence, we have done a lot of street-walking, both on the red African dust road, and in Italy, travelling around all the cities where UMUDUFU has friends that want to help!

Actually, we are 30 members and have a lot of benefactors. Our Head Quarters is based in Milan. We have a lot of ideas as to how to sensitize people about our experiences in Rwanda.

You can find us outside a Church, at banquets, at a city fair, selling our calendars or the fine local products that we bought in Rwanda.

Our website is very informative about all the projects and initiatives that we undertake and everyone is welcome to write for more information or simply to state his own point of view, something which is very important to us.

Davide