Press
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The Village Times: Volume 1, Issue 2
Click here to read the second issue of The Village Times.
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Rwanda and the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village
Rwanda Convention 2010
RCA Newsletter
By Patrick KaruretwaTo anyone who witnessed the tragic events that devastated Rwanda in 1994, it was evident that the impact would be massive. It was also clear that the wounds would take a long time to heal. Very few, however, could have anticipated that the small nation would embark on such a unique journey to rebuild itself.
For the last 16 years, the men and women of Rwanda have been working tirelessly to write a new chapter in their story. As one author noted: ‘Rwandans rebelled against their fate’.
Whilst analyzing Rwanda’s surprising post-war achievements, various observers choose to focus on different aspects. Some of the ‘experts’ whose predictions and theories have been consistently challenged by the facts on the ground have been painstakingly highlighting every single failure, real or imagined. Rather than re-thinking their views and adjusting their theories, they choose to disparage anything that is contradictory. With astounding zeal, they have been trying to force the facts to fit the theory. For them, Rwanda’s prospects remain bleak.
I disagree…[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]
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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.]
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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]
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Rwandan genocide orphanage heeds Holocaust model
December 15, 2008
Afrique CentraleAn orphanage modeled on those constructed for Holocaust survivors opened Monday in Rwanda by welcoming 120 children orphaned by the African country’s 1994 genocide.
Funded largely by Jewish American and international donors, Agahozo Shalom Youth Village will eventually take in 500 orphans, whose families died in a bloody ethnic cleansing campaign which claimed 800,000 lives in 100 days.The project, which has attracted celebrity support from actress Natalie Portman and the Clinton Global Initiative, is modeled on the Israeli orphanage Yemin Orde, constructed to assist young survivors of the Holocaust following World War II.
[To read more of this article,download the PDF]
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Home based on Jewish Principles to help Rwandan Genocide Orphans
December 15, 2008
By: Nicole Kallmeyer
The Globe and MailRwandan genocide survivor, Innocent Gisanura, doesn’t know much about Judaism, but the counselor at a new home for genocide orphans can explain the Jewish philosophies of tikkun halev and tikkun olam.
“The first is healing the heart, the second is healing the world,” he said.
These are the guiding principles of Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, built amid the undulating rural landscape of Rwanda’s Rwamagana district, 50 kilometers from the capital of Kigali.
[To read more of this article, download the PDF]
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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.”