Rwanda suffered so grievously in the past decade that so many horrors inadvertently resulted into other negative impacts, which we must identify and fight.

One such result of the horrors were rejected children who are now prowling our streets, and yet others who have developed in negative other ways that we cannot even begin thinking about.

Rejection is an inability to give or receive love. It is often linked to childhood and probably to parents who had the same problem.

Rejection does not mean that there is no love but it is what is missing that is important . It may be affection, touch or the spoken word that builds and reassures. If they are not there the symptoms of rejection will appear. Many people feel unloved and unwanted and they will soon feel within them a sense of being worthless or valueless. This can lead to inferiority or insecurity.

Getting close to others is difficult. It is easy to feel rejected by other people without even their knowledge that they are hurting you. It is also easy to put the barriers up and refuse to let others in. Sometimes people cannot give love because they have not received love or they cannot understand love. You cannot receive what you don’t recognize. You cannot give what you don’t possess. Rejection can affect every area of a person’s life, eating deeply into the inner personality and spirit.

Why rejection is a problem
Scenario - who would think that a three year old little girl can be left at a railway station of a big city because her parents didn’t want her? They fought over who should take custody of the child, until it culminated into their going away, abandoning her there. Each might have thought that the other would eventually come back to get her, but that is not for us to say.

Ann had become an orphan, yet both her parents were very much alive .She was taken into care and ended up in an orphanage where she stayed until her teenage years. There was nothing hidden about her rejection, and she felt devastated by it so completely.  It was so open and clear. She was thrown away like rubbish.

Many people say that children are too young to really understand and be affected. Yet Ann grew up in that orphanage desiring to be loved, to be owned, and in her teenage years she reached out for anything possible, no matter what, to satisfy that inner longing for acceptance.

How rejection affects the whole person
Man is made of three natural faculties; the spirit, soul and body. All these three faculties can be affected.

The human spirit is basically man’s spiritual source, like the source of a river. It is the aspect of man and woman through which they become aware of God and experience him. But this part can be affected negatively; Proverbs 18;14 explains it all. A man sustains himself in sickness, but a crushed spirit is affected by the traumas and circumstances of life; that is why rejected people have problems in their response to God as  the Father.

The Soul: Human beings are aware and self conscious beings. Rejection will affect the will, area of decision, choice or behaviour, the intellect, area of thought, reason or knowing and the emotional area of feeling.
- Rejection affects the will; a person is not able to choose as they would like to or make right decisions.

- Rejection affects the emotion; a person’s emotions are either suppressed to the extent that it seems he has none or they are so close to the surface and they cannot be controlled.
- Rejection affects the intellect; when you are told that you are no good, you will behave that way because you think you are no good and in the end reject yourself.

The body:
Some people are told that they are ugly, or made fun of because of some physical problem. At later stages these people develop the thought that they really have wrong shape, too big, too small, too thin or too fat, or their noses are too long etc. Self rejection will easily come in here.

Case studies of rejection
We can’t rule the impacts of this negative influence in our daily happenings;
It has been talked that Africans are poor i.e. the impoverished world.

So because of this song of poverty, the African continent accepted the state of poverty that resulted into waiting for donor aid and for handouts generally.

Thanks to our president Paul Kagame who continuously denounces the issue of waiting for donations. This fact is evident when he clearly stresses that not working plus begging for donations results to zero.

 It has been seen that some Christian leaders condemn their subjects as sinners and later extort money from them as a way to relieve them of their sins. The condemning is done till the subjects part with their cash. This is evident in that the subjects develop rejection and later respond to that by paying a fee to be set free.

 Other areas cited are in the institutions where teachers term some of their students as stupid and failures .The combination of these words cripple.

In common instances, rejection has caused suicide cases without any sense of doubt.
We need to fight against this and behave in such a way as to engender love, and spread it around. Who has any problem with First Lady Jeannette Kagame’s call to all Rwandans to treat every child as your own? Will there be rejection tendencies if this were done in the greater degree?

Ends