When she gave birth to twin boys in 1995, Therese Mukanyangezi from Karengera sector, Nyamasheke District, was overjoyed. Naturally, she imagined her last born children would live a normal life.

To her dismay, she learned that the babies had multiple disabilities—a term for a person with a combination of disabilities, for instance, someone with both a sensory disability and a motor disability. 

The associated impairments affecting Mukanyangezi’s twins include mental disability, orthopaedic and speech impairment, as well as physical and hearing impairment.

The 66-year-old widow lost her husband who was a teacher in 2013. Since then, life became hard as she had no source of income to cater for the twins. 

"I live in a house that good Samaritans built for me. There are two small pieces of land where some people help me to grow crops and we share the harvest. This is because my spine is no longer able to till the land, it is exhausted by the daily work of house chores and taking care of the twins,” she says.

"We live in difficult conditions. It requires regular hygiene and enough food for them. I have to buy clothes for them every month because they are always crawling and making themselves dirty,” she adds. 

Mukanyangezi has six other children of whom four are married and two are single.

She currently lives alone with the twins, now aged 26, and says that her other children are also struggling to survive, and, therefore, can’t provide enough support to her.

26 years have elapsed and the mother is yet to find any medical treatment support for the twins. She is registered in the category of the underprivileged and is supported to pay health insurance—mutuelle de sante.

"I was given a cow under the ‘One Cow per Family’ programme through which I get milk for the children that I would never have been able to afford,” she says. 

However, because she is alone at home and at her age, she says she needs more support to be able to take the children to a centre for people with disabilities for treatment.

"This is because I no longer have the physical ability to provide for them. I cannot transport them in wheelchairs. They are always sitting at home. Whenever I also want to help in the community, they reject me due to stigma,” she says.

She adds that when her husband was still alive earning a teaching salary, the children were once taken to HVP Gatagara, a centre for disability treatment in Nyanza District, Gihundwe Hospital in Rusizi District and others when they were eight years old.

However, she says, they couldn’t help much as she was told they needed treatment by specialised doctors which is costly.

"I had no financial capacity to take the kids for such a treatment trial. So I took them to Gatagara when my husband was still alive. They got physiotherapy. Necks, hands and other physical body parts were redressed. We paid Rwf400, 000 that time and we also got wheelchairs. I was told to go back there but financial capacity became a challenge as my husband lost his job,” she says.

"I wish to take them to Ndera Hospital if I get support. The main challenge is that there is no one at home who can help look after them, and we face stigma, and these words hurt me so much as a mother. Every month I have to buy clothes for them yet I have no such capacity,” she says. 

She says that if they get treatment and care in a specialised centre, there’s hope that their future will be better as she is growing too old to look after them. And, she says, being in a centre would also save her from the stigma in her neighbourhood.