30 July 2013

24 Nyákáanga 2013—A.S.Y.V.


Today I did something I had been wanting to do for a really long time. During and after high school, I interned with an organization called the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village: what is kind of a private boarding school for Rwandan orphans. When it began operating in 2007, it primarily served genocide orphans, who made up about 15% of the population at the time; as that generation reaches college age, it is maintaining the general goal but broadening its criteria a little bit.

It has received a decent amount of media attention and gained acclaim for the quality of the service it provides, the talent of its staff and the positive impact it has had on the community. Extensive counseling is available both for psychological issues and relating to careers and university, and the philosophy of tikkun olam—healing yourself by healing the world, a Jewish principle in an otherwise secular organization—has motivated a lot of service work in the surrounding community.

Agahozo is a Kinyarwanda word prosaically translated as “a place to dry your tears” and shalom is, well, shalom. The founder and many of the administrative workers are Jewish, and though their is nothing religious about the workings of the village it was built upon the successful model of kibbutzim, and specifically youth villages, in Israel: cooperative settlements for Holocaust survivors, where everyone contributed to the well-being of the community and matured as one big family. Like that, students at Agahozo-Shalom do not only live and study together; they grow food, play music, create artwork and do community service as a family. A.S.Y.V. is notable for being the first test-case of this model for serving vulnerable youth in Central Africa, and six years in it appears to be extremely successful.

The work I did for the Village, in its New York office, was largely administrative: I worked a lot with their donor database and helped research grants. I also notably rewrote their handbook for long-term volunteers. As a result, I probably ended up with more knowledge of the way the Village worked than almost anyone who had not been there. Naturally, when I came to Rwanda for very distantly related reasons, I wanted to come visit.

Wednesday was recommended to me as a good day to come, so I followed the directions I had written in the guide three years ago: take a bus toward Rwamagana, but get off in Ntunga, then take a moto the rest of the way. Things have changed a little in the meantime: as the Village has become more established, for example, bus-drivers have begun announcing it when they stop in Ntunga, and as soon as I got off a moto-driver asked whether that was where I was going.

A.S.Y.V. is located in Rubona Sector, Rwamagana District, Eastern Province, on a hill overlooking Lake Mugesera. Getting there from Ntunga took about 20 minutes on a pretty smooth dirt road.

At the gate, after telling the guard I had called ahead, I was met by a student tour-guide in the hospitality and management program. She was quite pleasant and spoke very good English, and she gave a very nice tour. Classes have ended and exams are coming up, so I toured through an empty school building; this was not so bad, though, as I was able to look into the classrooms a bit more than I could have otherwise.

I arrived in time to have lunch with students; I had fun surprising them by knowing the Kinyarwanda names of the foods we were eating, and then surprising them more by being able to put a sentence together. It might have been a good thing that they did not test me too much: the Village strongly encourages the use of English, even forbidding Kinyarwanda in some settings. I have some objections to this from a linguistic perspective, but I understand that there is good reason to want people to be able to communicate well in an English-speaking environment.

After lunch, I saw student housing, which looked very nice: students live with “families” of twelve in a house, which stay constant through their four years at the Village. The houses do not have running water, but they do have boreholes, and they look about as solidly constructed as any dormitories I have ever seen. I was also shown the Science Center and Arts Center, where students can make artwork, use computers and record in a studio. Really very nice.

When the tour finished, we went to see an annual event, Tikkun Olam Day, that was being held in the late afternoon. It was an exciting time for students because musicians had been brought in from outside, including the headliner King James (or maybe King David, I forget) who is a pretty prominent Rwandan artist.

The event was a celebration of and reflection on the Tikkun Olam philosophy and the impact it has had on the Village and surrounding communities. There were students and beneficiaries of service projects who came and spoke about it. There was also a lot of music, which appeared to be mostly unrelated.

The musical performances I saw were all by current and former students at the Village, and they were really quite good. I had to leave around 5:00 p.m. in the interest of getting home before dark, but the event was going to go on for quite awhile. It was a really happy thing: students and visitors filled the 1000-seat amphitheater, applauded wildly and often got up and danced.

Through the whole visit, part of me kept looking for something wrong with it all, figuring it cannot possibly be perfect, there must be a catch somewhere. I did not really find anything, though. I guess that, as soon as students leave A.S.Y.V., they will no longer have access to the services it provides, instead being dropped back into the difficult (though buoyant) economy that is Rwanda, and in many cases likely quite poor. That is just the nature of the situation, though; the Village chose that demographic as its target, and the amount that it is doing to ameliorate it is really admirable.

3 comments:

  1. Very nicely written Jake- thanks for sharing!

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  2. I am glad you got to go, your very last week there, and that you saw the other end of the "circle" from the days you spent in the G/Center, NYC.

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  3. I imagine that it was a curious "homecoming" for you. It seems that this was a fitting conclusion to your trip (more like an adventure).

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