Project Air: Yoga helps HIV-positive rape victims in Rwanda
Four years ago, in a small sewing cooperative in Rwanda's capital city of Kigali, yoga instructor and author Deirdre Summerbell stepped in front of a class of a dozen frail women, each standing on a green or purple mat...
Four years ago, in a small sewing cooperative in Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali, yoga instructor and author Deirdre Summerbell stepped in front of a class of a dozen frail women, each standing on a green or purple mat, and asked them to move their bodies in a series of twists and bends that make up the basic practice of Ashtanga yoga.
The women, HIV-positive survivors of the widespread rape that occurred during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, reacted with confusion and trepidation.
“Their jaws dropped, and they opened their eyes wide during my demonstration,” Summerbell, 55, told The Huffington Post. “When I finished, a young woman put out her hand and said, ‘You know, that’s for children, and we have already reached old age. We are sick.’” The woman was 28.
So began the first class offered by Project Air, an initiative that uses yoga to help over 400 HIV-positive Rwandan women and their families cope with the trauma they endured when an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in only 100 days — and countless women were raped — as the Hutu majority tribe tried to wipe out the Tutsi minority. Even after the violation, mutilation and murder were over and the machetes were sheathed, the bodies and minds of the Rwandan women Project Air serves remained battlefields. While their immune systems struggled to fight even the most common illnesses, their minds were warding off traumatic flashbacks of war.
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