April 9, 2009 | Read Time: 5 minutes
When Rwandans commemorate the 15th anniversary this month of the genocide that took place in their country, a group of students on a hilltop village in eastern Rwanda will be remembering in their own way as they attend classes, learn modern farming techniques, and draft papers in their computer labs.
The 125 teenagers are students at Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, a home for orphans of the genocide. The village is modeled after an Israeli community built in 1953 to serve children who lost their parents in the Holocaust.
Rwanda’s 100-day killing spree, along with the AIDS epidemic, left the tiny central African nation with among the highest percentage of orphans in the world. While surviving family members, friends, and neighbors took in many who lost their parents, other youths were forced to form their own households or live on the streets. About half the orphans of the genocide suffer from depression, according to a study by researchers at Tulane University.
Nonprofit organizations have stepped in to help, sometimes providing job training to older orphans and educating adults to serve as mentors. But the need still overwhelms resources.
Neil Boris, an associate professor at Tulane University’s medical school and one of the researchers who led the study, says Agahozo Shalom Youth Village could provide one solution because it cuts to the heart of the predominant feeling that holds many orphans back: a “disconnect” from or “mistrust” of community.
“Youths who feel they are not members of a social organization or a village structure, who feel they are outcasts, have more depressive symptoms and struggle to take care of children themselves,” he says. “Any approach that takes that challenge head on is likely to be quite powerful.”
A Value on Healing
Agahozo was started by Anne Heyman, a former lawyer in New York.
In the fall of 2005, Ms. Heyman attended a lecture given by Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager made famous by the film Hotel Rwanda. Asked about the biggest threat to his country’s success, Mr. Rusesabagina mentioned the large number of orphans who had no family or financial support. Ms. Heyman, who is Jewish, thought immediately about child survivors of the Holocaust and of the care Israel had taken of them.
She recruited the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a New York nonprofit group to which she had donated in the past, to take on the project.
She met with the director of Yemin Orde, the youth village in Israel that took care of Holocaust orphans, and with government and nonprofit officials in Rwanda.
She then began raising money. Her efforts were helped, in large part, by her husband’s financial-technology firm, which began giving 1 percent of its revenue to nonprofit causes. Much of the money goes to Agahozo.
So far, the project has raised about $12-million, roughly half from LiquidNet, the New York company. About 75 percent of the firm’s employees have donated time or money to the village, which welcomed its first students in December.
Agahozo is based on principles established at Yemin Orde of healing or repair (tikkun in Hebrew). With help from “house mothers,” mental-health counselors, and teachers, students work toward repairing their own hearts (tikkun halev) and the outside world through community service (tikkun olam).
Agahozo’s 125 students will soon increase to 500.
Like Yemin Orde, which expanded its mission in the decades after the Holocaust to serve children who had immigrated to Israel on their own from other parts of the world, Agahozo will serve orphans and traumatized youths who lost parents to AIDS and other causes that have nothing to do with the genocide.
‘Grow Up Happy’
Agahozo is “not elitist,” says William Recant, who directs the project for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Its goal is not to send students off to universities, per se, although the village will provide guidance to those interested in attending college, put them in touch with schools in Rwanda and the United States, and connect them with scholarship opportunities.
But Agahozo has no admissions test, and many youths will return to their rural villages, where they can apply the modern farming techniques and other skills they have acquired at Agahozo.
“My goal for these kids is for them to grow up happy and be contributing members of society,” says Ms. Heyman. “If you can take the kids off the streets, and give a future to the kids who don’t have one, you’ve done away with the next rebel army.”
Agahozo’s founders hope it can become a model for sustainable agricultural and environmental practices. The village’s staff members, most of whom are Rwandan, plan to train people in the town near the village, which is 45 minutes east of Rwanda’s capital.
Mr. Recant says the volunteer help he’s received from LiquidNet employees has been invaluable. When the project was just beginning, employees helped draft a strategic plan and analyze the organization’s budget. A few months ago, right before school opened, a group of LiquidNet staff members traveled to the village to set up wireless Internet and provide other technological assistance.
He says the students, who come from all 30 districts in Rwanda, have already formed close friendships with each other and with staff members. Even two months into the school year, many still arrive half an hour early to breakfast and classes, he says. “There’s a thirst for knowledge and an overwhelming appreciation for this opportunity,” says Mr. Recant. “It’s palpable and comes across in every interaction.”
