Six years ago, Christian filmmaker Laura Waters Hinson made a gripping, groundbreaking documentary called “As We Forgive,” which explored how the African nation of Rwanda dared to seek reconciliation between the perpetrators and victims of genocide.

Now Hinson has gone back to Rwanda to make a new film, one that provides an update on the country’s progress since that terrible time. This film, “Mama Rwanda,” focuses on a specific aspect of that progress: how women, through their entrepreneurial efforts, are bringing healing and restoration to Rwanda.

“Mama Rwanda” concentrates on two women in particular, Drocella and Christine. Both of them are widowed mothers who suffered great losses during the genocide. (Drocella tells us that her first husband was a killer and her second husband was a victim.) Both Drocella and Christine put everything they have into starting businesses to support their children and help their neighbors and their homeland.

As Christine tells us, “A Rwandan woman has a great responsibility to develop our country.” It is simply the way things are: Because of the genocide, the country’s population is now 70 percent female. Hanson has written, “I wanted to make a documentary that would break down stereotypes of these women, to show the complexity of their lives, and to convey their personal struggles to love their children well while also becoming entrepreneurs.”

In the agricultural cooperative that Drocella started, perpetrators and persecuted work side by side. One worker, Ernestine, says, “You develop patience because you cannot keep that anger in your heart, otherwise you would not be able to live next to them.” The very survival of many of these people requires reconciliation and cooperation. Many of them, in the most practical of ways, are living out their faith in the God of healing and forgiveness.

Continue reading BreakPoint –’Mama Rwanda’: How Women Entrepreneurs are Restoring Their Country →

Over the past decade or more, we’ve talked on BreakPoint about China’s looming fertility crisis. This, of course, is the result of the Communist Party instituting what became known as the “one-child policy” back in 1979.

With very few exceptions, Chinese couples were permitted to have only one child. The policy, in the words of the Washington Post, “led to untold millions of forced abortions, sterilizations and horrific abuses of power.”

It also led to a huge demographic problem. As birthrates plummeted, there were fewer and fewer workers, and China’s overall population aged rapidly. China, instead of growing rich and then getting old, like European nations and Japan, will grow old long before it has a chance to get rich.

This has the Communist Party very worried. So worried that they’ve done an about face. They not only dropped the “one-child policy,” they’ve tried to convince Chinese couples that having two kids is their patriotic and political duty.

Clumsy party propaganda is telling people to “Train your body, build up strength, get ready for the second baby!” Another slogan read “Get to sleep early, stop playing cards, work hard to produce a child!”

The response? Yawns and outrage. You see, after 35 years of being told “one child is enough,” people have come to believe it. As a recent article in the Washington Post put it, “Having only one has become ingrained in Chinese culture and society, and people no longer believe the party should be telling them what to do in the bedroom.”

Actually, that’s an understatement. When officials in Hubei province, east of Shanghai, sent a letter to party members urging them to implement the new “two-child policy,” the result was “outrage” on Chinese social media.

One person wrote “You can’t just make people have kids when you want them to, or stop when you tell them, we are humans not pigs!” Even state-run media called the letter “ridiculous and illegal.”

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Chinese Government Urges People to Make Babies: Chinese People Tell Government to Mind Its Own Business →