Press
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Children (and their parents) help raise a village in Africa
A chance meeting with the wife of the CEO of her husband’s employer has drawn Collins Drive resident Susanne Biancamano into an effort to build a school for impoverished children halfway around the world.
Since meeting Anne Heyman, wife of Liquidnet Holdings CEO Seth Merrin, two years ago, Ms. Biancamano has organized fundraisers, collected good to send to Rwandan children and traveled to Rwanda in the summer to see the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village in development.
”I was invited to go to Rwanda by Anne along with five other people who are working on the project to see ASYV this July,” she said. “It was a remarkable life changing trip. I learned the history of the country and visited genocide memorial sites and a children’s orphanage.”
Ms. Biancamano’s week-long trip began July 7th.
”I saw poverty you only read about in magazines and witnessed death on a massive scale that I only visit in my worst nightmares,” she said. “I also witnessed hope, love and commitment as I saw the progress of this miraculous village and met people who truly are making a difference in the world.”
The Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, modeled after the Yemin Orde Village built in Israel after the Holocaust, is scheduled to open in November. It will have 32 children’s houses, each housing 16 children with a house mother. There will be a dinning hall with seating for 800, classrooms, a library, a chapel and an infirmary.
According to the youth village’s Web site, Agahozo Shalom.com, the project started after Ms. Heyman met Paul Rusesabagina, subject of the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” the story of his efforts to protect his family and friends during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Ms. Heyman asked Mr. Rusesabinga what the country needed and he said the country needed schools: with 1.2 million orphans – 15 percent of the country’s population — he said helping the children was the greatest need.
Ms. Heyman recognized the similar challenge that Israel faced after World War II, when there had been a large influx of orphans from the Holocaust. To care for these traumatized youth, Israel built residential living communities called youth villages, a model she copied to try in Rwanda.
She met with officials at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), an international humanitarian organization, and the ASYV is now a special project of JDC’s international development program.
”I volunteered to work on the outreach committee,” Ms. Biancamano said. “This project is immense and will change the future of the country.”
Ms. Biancamano organized a fundraising event in April, with the help of Sherrie Spaltoff, Linda McGill, Mary Thomson, Lori Thole, Lisa Claus and Cynthia Neydon. The Africa-themed cocktail party drew 80 people and raised more than $6,000.
”We served only African food and drinks,” Ms. Binacamano said. She noted Ms. Spaltoff baked cookies shaped like huts as favors and her husband arranged for a South African wine vendor to donate 23 cases of red and white wine.
”I gave a 20-minute talk about Rwanda and showed a short video. The response was heart warming,” she said.
She said, thanks to the April event, a neighborhood clothing drive held in the summer was also very successful.
”Thanks to the children who delivered the flyers to the message in bulletins, e-mails and word of mouth, Hillsborough is making a difference a half a world away,” she said. “Hillsborough truly is a community with a big heart.”
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Anne Heyman – building a village of hope
November 2, 2007
By Julie Jacobs
lifestyles MagazineIt all began on November 14, 2005, with a Hillel-sponsored lecture at Tufts University, where Paul Rusesabagina spoke about the 1994 genocide in his native country of Rwanda. Rusesabagina’s valiant effort, to protect Tutsi refugees from the Hutu militia by housing them in the hotel he managed, was depicted in the Oscar-nominated film Hotel Rwanda.
[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]
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Life at Agahozo Shalom
By Rob Eshman, Editor-in-Chief
October 19, 2007
JewishJournal.comIf I wanted the kind of office where visitors shut the door and cry, I’d have become a rabbi. Or a therapist. Or an agent.
That’s why it caught me off guard when a woman named Anne Heyman sat down across from me and started, well, crying.
Heyman was in town last week to raise money and awareness for the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda. Moved to ease the plight of 1.2 million children left orphaned by the 1994 Rwandan genocide, she came up with the idea of emulating the Yemin Orde Youth Village in Israel, the model by which Israel absorbed, raised and educated hundreds of post-Holocaust Jewish orphans.
[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]
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H. E. President Paul Kagame Receives ASYV
Sunday, August, 19, 2007
The Sunday Times
Kigali RwandaWhile in Rwanda for the ASYV Ground Breaking, Anne Heyman, ASYV Founder and the Israeli Ambassador to Rwanda, Yaacov Amitai were received by H. E. President Paul Kagame. After hearing of the benefits of the village for his country and the orphaned children of Rwanda, he pledged his personal support of the project. Also accompanying Anne and Ambassador Amitai was Seth Merrin, CEO, Liquidnet Holdings, Inc., an american businessman and Anne’s husband, Sifa Nsengimana, Executive Director, ASYV (not pictured) and Gideon Herscher, JDC (not pictured).
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Israeli-Inspired Youth Village for Rwandan Orphans Takes Shape
By Stephanie L. Freid
August 26, 2007
ISRAEL21cIn 2005 Anne Heyman sent an e-mail message from her Manhattan office to Israel’s director of the Yemin Orde Youth Village. “You don’t know me,” the message began “but I hope you might be able to help me in my mission.”
Said mission was to build a youth village in Rwanda for children orphaned during the late ’90s genocide and model it after the Yemin Orde Youth orphanage in Haifa, Israel.
Yemin Orde director Haim Peeri was forthcoming. He met with Heyman, offered advice and presented a model she could emulate. A mere two years later, Heyman almost had to pinch herself as she stood alongside international dignitaries, Rwandan orphans and Yemin Orde delegates at the groundbreaking ceremony for Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village last week in Rubono, Rwanda.
[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]
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JDC Breaks Ground on Rwandan Village for Orphans– Agahozo Shalom Youth
August 16, 2007
Rwanda, Africa (PRWeb)On August 17, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) will dedicate the future site of the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village (ASYV) in Rwanda to help provide not only a home, but opportunity and hope for these future leaders. The Village will incorporate a protected residential environment and a high school for 500 Rwandan orphans and provide a secure community including innovative educational programs, sports, a health clinic and psychological services. Both the Israeli and American ambassadors along with the Governor of the Eastern District, the Hon. Theoneste Mutsindashyaka and other government Ministers are expected to attend.
[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]
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JDC to Open Rwandan Youth Village
August 14, 2007
Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)A youth village to serve 500 impoverished Rwandan orphans will be dedicated this week by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
The village is the brainchild of Anne Heyman, a South African-born New York lawyer who was moved to help after learning that 15 percent of Rwandan children are orphans due to genocide.
The JDC will dedicate the future site of the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village on Friday.
“[Jews] have a collective experience with the Rwandans, having come through genocide,” said Will Recant, the JDC’s assistant executive vice president.. “We’re very much invested in the long-term, sustainable commitment to make this happen.”
The village will provide Rwandan orphans, many them with HIV/AIDS, with a “safe, structured environment with a rich community life where children are exposed to all elements of parental and familial normalcy, thereby providing wholeness in the wake of destruction,” the JDC said in its overview of the village.
Agahozo, Kinyarwandan for “the place where tears are dried,” is modeled after the Youth Aliyah Village of Yemin Orde that housed Holocaust orphans in 1953.
Recant said numerous high-ranking political and business leaders are supporting the village, which is slated to open in 2009.
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Ethiopian Israelis provide training for Rwandan youth village
By Stephanie Freid
December 25, 2006
Israel21cJean-Pierre Nkuranga was twenty in 1994 when he hid in the bushes outside his home in Rwanda and watched helplessly as Hutu militiamen ruthlessly attacked his family members. He lost four siblings and both parents in the carnage that was later known as Rwanda’s genocide.
“Children heads of household were common – some as young as ten. The kids would put together households of other kids and live in the streets or build tent camps with leaves and mud.” Nkuranga said.
The 1994 Rwandan genocide left over 800,000 Tutsis dead. One of the most devastating aftermaths of the tragedy was the approximately 1,200,000 children – almost 15% of the Rwandan population – who became instant orphans and lost their homes forever. Nkuranga became the parent to his four remaining siblings in the aftermath of the violence and he eventually took in six additional neighboring children.
Overcome by the enormity of loss, Nkuranga vowed to help build a future for the children orphaned in Rwanda. And today, he’s beginning to achieve that goal with the help of Israel.
Nkuranga was part of a ten-person delegation of Rwandan youth experts who recently spenta week at the Yemin Orde Youth Village south of Haifa in order to gain tools for opening the Agahozo-Shalom Village in Rwanda, which will be modeled after Yemin Orde.
[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]