Posts from November, 2009
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Medford’s Tufts University races for a cause
By Matthew Reid/mreid@cnc.com
Fri Nov 06, 2009, 12:00 PM ESTMEDFORD -
A community-wide event held over the weekend managed to raise both money and awareness for a country nearly 7,000 miles away.
Race4Rwanda, a 5K race held Nov. 1 on the Tufts campus, brought a wide variety of Tufts students and faculty together and helped raise $2,845 for the African nation and two local charities.
The funds raised at the race will be given, in part, to the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda.
This past summer, a group of Tufts Hillel undergraduate students traveled to Rwanda on a service program organized by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Their trip took them to the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, which provides a home and source of education for orphans of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Tufts students interacted with students from the village, and last week’s race was their way of staying in touch and raising money for the program.[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]
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A Day of Hope in Rwanda
By Steve Lipman
From a hilltop in eastern Rwanda, an hour from Kigali, you can see Lake Mugesera and rolling countryside in every direction.
Atop the hill, where 200 families tended small plots of corn and beans and bananas, young residents of the African country can see a bright future.
The Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village was dedicated there recently, a nonsectarian project of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Patterned after Israel’s Yemin Orde Youth Village — also located on a scenic hilltop, a haven to orphans from the Holocaust — the Rwandan residential community (agahozo-shalom.org) is home to 125 teens, most of whom lost their parents in the country’s 1994 genocide.
On a sunny day, a crowd of local officials, Israeli volunteers and American supporters of the JDC took part in the dedication that featured dances and poetry, tours and speeches, all done by the village’s boys and girls.
[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]
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A Stark Contrast
A STARK CONTRAST
Nov 5, 2009 Posted by John FishelYesterday we drove east from Kigali to visit the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, an extraordinary program established by Jewish philanthropist Ann Heyman as a response to helping Rwanda move forward following the horrifying genocide of the early 1990’s. While visiting the Genocide Memorial in Kigali earlier in the day, we stood in a room filled with snapshots of hundreds of men, women and children who were murdered. But we cannot forget that thousands of youngsters survived, many without any family or with families that lost mothers or fathers. Agahozo is an effort to work with these survivors now, in their later teenage years, by bringing them to the Shalom Youth Village to live, to study and to grow as future young leaders whose potential will be essential as Rwanda struggles to recover from its tragic history. We visited as the program was completing its first year. A class of 125 teens, both young men and women selected for the vulnerability of their situation and potential, had completed the inaugural year and with the exception of two, were away on a school holiday. The two still in residence had no surviving relatives to visit.
[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]