Posts from January, 2009
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Committee on Conscience – Anne Heyman is Interviewed
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
www.ushmm.org
Adapting an Israeli model for helping orphans, Anne Heyman is leading efforts to create a youth village for Rwandan orphans. She discusses the inspiration for the project and how she has managed to make it a reality.DECEMBER 25, 2008, A PLACE WHERE TEARS ARE DRIED
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention. This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic. With me today is Anne Heyman, who’s the founder of the Agahozo Shalam Youth Village in Rwanda. Anne, thank you for talking with me today.
ANNE HEYMAN: It’s my pleasure to be with you.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So to help our audience understand the project, what is the Algahozo Shalom Youth Village, I’d like to start out by asking how you first learned about what had happened in Rwanda, about the 1994 genocide.
ANNE HEYMAN: I think, you know, it was, certainly, having been an adult during that time, I was aware of the genocide. But in the fall of 2005– I’m involved in a program at Tuft University, called Moral Voices. And we were doing our year that year was Moral Voices on Genocide. And we had a speaker, Paul Rusesabagina, who was the gentleman from the movie, Hotel Rwanda, that that movie had been made about. And I had dinner with him before the evening’s program. And my husband said to him, you know, “What’s the biggest problem facing Rwanda today?” And he said, “In a country where you have 1.2 million orphans, with no systemic solution to deal with them, there’s no future for the country.” Immediately it struck me that, you know, Israel doesn’t have an orphan problem. After the Second World War, there was certainly a tremendous influx of orphans. And what did they do with them? They built youth villages. And so I, actually, even at the table that night, said, “You should build youth villages.” And it was just, like, “Yeah, fine.” You know, pass the salt, and dinner went on. But it was an idea that really stuck with me. And I couldn’t let it go.
[To read more of this interview, download the PDF]
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Missouri Woman Works in Rwanda
Tanya Fredman, a Missouri native, is currently volunteering at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village to provide therapy through art.
January 1, 2009
By Margaret Gillerman
St. Louis Post – DispatchST. LOUIS — About a month ago, Tanya Fredman was sipping coffee and animatedly discussing art at a Clayton coffeehouse near the home of her parents and younger brothers in University City.
Now she is more than 8,000 miles away on a jungle hilltop in the African country of Rwanda, helping Tutsi and Hutu orphans at Agahozo Shalom Youth Village.[To read more of this article, download the PDF]