Posts from November, 2008
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Field Report from ASYV – November 2008
On a recent trip to ASYV, JDC Executive Assistant Vice President, Will Recant, had an opportunity to meet some of the counselors, housemothers and future kids that will be living at the village.
Below is an excerpt of his field report to the rest of the team:
All,
Quite an eventful and fruitful visit to Rwanda.
Construction- on average 300 workers on site every day. Drains are going in throughout housing section. First 5 houses have been moved into this week. One house is the admin building, dining room and kitchen. Alain did a wonderful job at putting together a makeshift temporary kitchen. The kitchen
manager and his staff of 3 have been cooking and serving the staff all week. The food is wonderful – if I can say this, I have no doubts everyone will be happy. Our Rwandan staff most certainly is happy. The kitchen staff all stays together in one house. The Kitchen Manager said he will need to hire 3 more when the kids arrive.
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ASYV Teachers in Israel
The ASYV High School Teachers have been in Israel for a 6-week training program from our partner the Feuerstein Institute – International Center for the Enhancement for Learning Potential (ICELP). This included a visit to our model village Yemin Orde where they met with one of the ASYV Volunteers but also had the incredible opportunity to meet with Mr. Elie Wiesel. The impact this trip has had on the teachers has been transformative and they are deeply appreciative of the new skills they are being taught. We would like to share some highlights and comments from their trip:
• ICELP is a catalyst/turning point toward a new way of thinking.
• We are not teachers, but facilitators
• We can finally highlight the relevancy and diversity of all we teach to the students’ life and society
• They compared their educational and learning process thus far in Rwanda to the “assassination of Mozart” in that even the most creative, brilliant, and imaginative minds were snuffed by a relatively ineffective and limiting teaching method.
• One teacher said that he would trade in his BA and MA for the two weeks he’s had at ICELP and the recent weekend at YO
• The trip this weekend to YO was moving and referred to the Yemin Orde staff as their counterparts.
• The Teachers are amazed by Israelis’ inquisitiveness, the many questions they ask, and their bold curiosity
• YO gave them a taste of what ASYV may look like in practice.
• Their meeting with Elie Wiesel was beyond moving. He addressed the group in French and shared his insights into the Genocide (before and after) -
Orphaned by Genocide and AIDS, a Generation Poor and Depressed
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: September 8, 2008
New York TimesRwanda, a country that suffered 100 days of tribal genocide in 1994 and has also been hit hard by the AIDS epidemic, is believed to have the highest percentage of orphans in the world.
Now a survey finds that depression is alarmingly common among teenage and young adult orphans there who head households and care for younger children.
The survey, conducted by Tulane University researchers working with Rwanda’s national school of public health, appeared in last month’s issue of The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, part of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
While orphans in many African countries are taken in by relatives or neighbors, “such systems are increasingly overwhelmed” in Rwanda, the researchers found, and young people without parents or close adult relatives are having to form their own households or live on the street.
Their survey of 539 orphans ages 12 to 24 caring for others in one rural province found that 77 percent were subsistence farmers and 93 percent had less than six years of school. Almost half had eaten only one meal a day in the last week.
More than half — 53 percent — met the criteria for depression on a psychiatric screening scale.
Seventy-six percent said their community rejected orphans; only 26 percent said they had a close friend. About 40 percent said life was meaningless or that they had lost faith in God since their parents died.
The authors suggested that large-scale interventions would be necessary “if the next generation of youth is to thrive.”
