In October 2015, when the government decided to suspend and end our activities and freeze all of Maison Shalom's assets and start harassing our employees, we fled to Rwanda with half the Maison Shalom staff.
We received support from three private organizations from Luxembourg, who decided to follow us to Rwanda to help us teach trades to the young people. We were organized. I created a community centre to help women who were victims of rape and all these young girls who need help because they are traumatized. I asked the Burundian diaspora in Canada for help through ABC Montreal, an alliance being represented here today by Mr. Emery-Patrick Ndabwunze. We are getting help. There are doctors, volunteers, and teachers coming.
We are trying to teach courses to the most vulnerable, either English lessons so that they can find work in Rwanda or cooking classes. However, that represents just 1% of those who need to go back to school. I am currently in contact with the Paul Gérin-Lajoie Foundation to ask for help in educating these young people to end the cycle of violence. These young people have been in the camps for three years. If they are not educated, they will become desperate and will want to return home. However, they will get killed if they go home so they will take up arms and become child soldiers. That is what we are trying to avoid.
We are working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the HCR, to help the mothers who were raped. The HCR asked for money, but got only 12% of the overall budget it was looking for. I want to take this opportunity to appeal to you, hon. members, to ask Canada to increase the funding it gives to the HCR in order to help all our young people. We could then prevent things before it is too late, as was the case in Rwanda where your fellow Canadian, General Dallaire, tried to draw attention to the crisis, but was told that he was exaggerating.
If you look at the stages of genocide, you will see that we are at the eighth stage. The NGOs are starting to be told to discriminate based on language or ethnicity. We are starting to have to identify our ethnic origin. That is very dangerous for the Great Lakes Region of Africa. The problem in Burundi is geopolitical because it affects all the neighbouring countries.