After the nurseries were closed due to "Corona"
Rwandan women sitting "remote" Japanese children
Babysitters from Rwanda playing and singing with Japanese babies.
From the source
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Single mothers working in a Japanese restaurant in the central African country of Rwanda have found a new source of income after their jobs were affected by the emerging coronavirus pandemic due to the closure, and this new job is Japanese babysitting via the Internet.
Despite the time difference of seven hours between the two countries, these women play and sing with children in Japan, which is 12,000 kilometers from Rwanda, through the "Zoom" video conference application, and sometimes these women offer cooking programs through this application for those with children as well. This service is provided twice a day for an hour in a mixture of local, English and Japanese.
Online sessions
Toyochika Kamikawa, 36, from Takahama, Fukui Prefecture, Japan, says his two-year-old son regularly takes part in online sessions, sings songs he learned from Rwandan women, and follows the notes by beating his own drum.
This initiative was launched by Miyo Yamada, a 38-year-old resident of Rwanda, who employs single mothers to work in her Japanese restaurant in the capital, Kigali, and her countrywoman, Yoshi Nakashima, 30, works with her.
Yamada, who studied Swahili at a university, moved to Rwanda with her husband in 2016, and opened her restaurant the following year, and she has three children.
In April, Nakashima was talking with Kamikawa in a virtual café during the outbreak of the Coronavirus, and the idea of online babysitting began to brew in Nakashima's mind when Kamikawa mentioned that he wanted his child, who was stuck at home due to the nursery closed for a group of children online, even in a country. Else, Nakashima thought it was a good idea and suggested it to Yamada, who is originally from Ikeda in Osaka Prefecture.
Meanwhile, Yamada was in poor conditions after the nationwide lockdown imposed by the Rwandan authorities in March, but the workers' situation in the restaurant rebounded after they started getting a monthly income of 3,000 yen ($ 28) a month to work as an online babysitter. , And this amount is equivalent to the wage they were getting in the restaurant before the outbreak of the epidemic, and about 20 of its employees joined this job.
"Before the outbreak, I did not expect my son to receive such a service in a small town in Japan," Kamikawa says.
"I think that my son will benefit from this experience greatly," he added.
This African country witnessed genocide during the Rwandan Civil War from 1990 to 1994 when extremists from the majority Hutu tribe killed members of the Tutsi minority, and in this civil war nearly 800,000 people were killed within 100 days in 1994.
Some of the songs performed by the babysitters touch on these darker topics, and in one of the songs the words implore the child to stop crying, with phrases that say, "When the war stops, the children will get milk from a cow that is not sad."
According to Yamada's experience, milk in Rwanda is a metaphor for the love of neighbors, and she says, "I think that the program offers an experiment that changes the Japanese’s perceptions of other peoples, and makes them go beyond what they take for granted about these peoples."
• This African country witnessed genocide during the Rwandan civil war from 1990 to 1994, when extremists from the majority Hutu tribe killed members of the Tutsi minority, and in this civil war nearly 800,000 people were killed within 100 days.
• In April, Nakashima was talking with Kamikawa in a virtual café during the outbreak of the Coronavirus, and the idea of online babysitting began to brew in Nakashima’s mind when Kamikawa mentioned that he wanted his child, who was stuck at home due to the nursery closed, to join a group of children online even if in another country.
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