At the age of 85, Steriya Mukandereye, a resident of Kabeza is striving to cope up with the daily life. She wakes up at around 10:00AM in the morning to sun bathe herself under a shed in her compound. Mukandereye has not lost her cognizant despite of her age; she talks with a sense of novelty and her sight has not lost either, she can ably recognize every one who comes to her sight which is not very common for people of her age. Mukandereye is a mother of four children who do not stay with her where chance rules her life (she struggles to get food). Two of her sons stay in Karangazi, Eastern Province and rarely pay attention to her problems. She stays with her daughter one Rose Cyandari aged 51, lame in one leg who caters for her daily needs. Her life times “I remember the days of my youth; I could do everything by myself, fetch water, going to parties, was part of our cultural dancing groups, all these things occupied my youth time and I was never got bored” Mukandereye says. “The society seems to under value me and I think all the aged groups of people; they pay less attention even if they are your own children just because you are no longer productive as you were in the past,” she adds. Mukandereye says life at the old age is delicate and she advises that the young people should always do assistance to their aged parents rather than leaving them in perpetual fear of what tomorrow has for them. She says this is a time when one who seems to be mature starts behaving as a child and self-neglect becomes very high that some may even walk necked unknowingly. Just before Mukandereye was brought to Kigali where life has turned to be hard for her, she was staying with her son who she preferred his anonymity. She says that his son is a drunkard he spends most of his time in the nearby bars only to come late at night when the old woman is asleep. In a dismal mood, Mukandereye says that she does not want to remember the five years she had spent with his careless son in Karangazi. “I was neglected by my own child yet he had the capacity of taking care of my helpless days” Mukandereye explains. She regrets for the time she wasted with him during childhood. She has spent over three years in Kabeza, with her daughter who pays for rent bills and other social and financial needs. The rent is about Frw20, 000 per month, they do not have a permanent source of income, and the landlady insists that the two should leave her house because of “unfaithfulness”, they never pay in time. She pays for rent bills but she does not work, she depends on what good Samaritans offer. Mukandereye says that life in Kigali is becoming harder and harder every day since her daughter has no job yet she has to provide meal needed for their survival. Cyandari Rose (daughter) has to go house by house in Kabeza and the nearby places begging from people passing by, who most of the times pay a deaf ear to her crying voice. “We depend on the assistance got from good people who give us some money and when we fail to get it, we stave” she reveals. Old age, a must to lucky ones Growing old is not a curse, it’s a course of life which all people perpetually go through, ironically many people tend to abandon old people yet they will one day come to the same. Actually, it takes luck to go through it, considering how many die before they age. The ageing process is of course a biological reality which has its own dynamic, largely beyond human control. However, it is also subject to the constructions by which each society makes sense of old age. In the developed world, chronological time plays a paramount role. The age of 60 or 65, roughly equivalent to retirement ages in most developed countries is said to be the beginning of old age. In many parts of the developing world, chronological time has little or no importance in the meaning of old age. Other socially constructed meanings of age are more significant such as the roles assigned to older people; in some cases it is the loss of roles accompanying physical decline which is significant in defining old age. Thus, in contrast to the chronological milestones which mark life stages in the developed world, old age in many developing countries is seen to begin at the point when active contribution is no longer possible. In many parts of the world, people are considered old because of certain changes in their activities or social roles. For example, people may be considered old when they become grandparents or when they begin to do less or different work. Older people have limited regenerative abilities and are more prone to disease, syndromes, and sickness than other adults. Certain physical signs marked an individual as old: toothless ness, balding or gray hair, hunched back, lameness, deafness. Increasing debility is the clearest signal that one is becoming old. This assumption is clearly visible in both didactic and fictional forms of literature, as well as in visual representations. Shakespeares representation of the last stage of life is defined as Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything, represents a common troop. The extreme views represented by these strands were in constant dialectical tension, underpinning the complex set of social relations that characterized individual older peoples relationships within their communities. Historians have moved away from the sense that there is any grand narrative of either rising or declining status for the elderly and have instead highlighted the great heterogeneity and complexity of attitudes toward aging and the aged. Older individuals often played highly valued roles. The Spanish proverb for example states that “the oldster who cannot predict is not worth a sardine reflects the common perception that an older persons worldly experience was a valuable community resource. Similarly, many different kinds of sources, from diaries to law cases, demonstrate a pervasive reliance on the memory of older individuals as a source of history and custom, a tradition that persisted despite the ever-growing availability and importance of print to record public and private memories. Attitudes toward old women varied. The image of the wise old woman and the nurturing elderly mother or grandmother played a role in literature, but representations of older women, especially widows, were more often negative, or even vicious. Images in cheap print stereotyped old women as witches, and literature frequently represented old women as lascivious fools, querulous gossips, or shrill scolds. While recent studies have deepened our understanding of the image of the witch as an old woman, the image of the witch as an old hag demonstrates the ways misogyny and antagonism toward the aged could interact in this period. Charity Older individuals generally tried to remain self-supporting, and there were expectations of familial aid, but the elderly poor often depended on public assistance. In most European countries for example, poor relief was not regulated, but individual communities provided assistance for some of their elderly members. Forms of poor relief varied by country, region, and city, but community assistance usually took one of three forms: statutory poor relief, institutions like hospitals and asylums, and charity. As they aged, individuals sought to stay closely connected to their children or to more extended networks of kin. These relationships were structured around reciprocal obligations and notions of familial bonds and duties as well as around ties of real affection and attachment in many cases. Analyses of early modern household listings (informal and sporadic local censuses) have revealed the residential patterns of the elderly, though it is true that such sources can illuminate only a small piece of the broader picture of family life. Both family historians and historians of aging have generated a considerable body of work on the living arrangements of the elderly. The heterogeneity of old peoples households mirrors the wide variety of experiences and the complex and even contradictory images and expectations regarding old age. An individuals view of old age, whether personal or second-hand was profoundly influenced by gender, class, health, and family status. Nonetheless, older people shared a fundamental desire to stay closely attached to their families and friends as they strove to retain their economic self-sufficiency. They also shared in the broadest terms a culture that offered many different paths through the aging process, so that individuals were not narrowly restricted to norms of acting ones age. Ends
