Adrift in a Sea of Rolling Hills
My time in the Pays des Mille Collines
Archive for News
January 5, 2009 at 3:43 pm · Filed under News
Another week, another round of press for ASYV. This week it’s Tina and Tanya in the limlight.
From the the New Jersey Jewish News, Tina pitches for the village:
“A youth village is not an orphanage,” [Tina] Wyatt insisted. “The idea behind it is to recreate the rhythms of these young people’s lives.
“You and I get up every day and have breakfast and go to work. These kids don’t have that. It has been taken away from them forever. But we teach the kids that what happened to them in the past does not have to be their legacy.”
And in the Missourian, Tanya is all the rage:
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.
So I’m here 4 months and nobody seems to notice. Tanya is here two weeks and she makes the news (the reall news even, not some local Jewish paper). It’s true, I must doing somehting wrong.
Doesn’t anyone want to write a story on me?
December 30, 2008 at 5:55 pm · Filed under News
The founder of ASYV, Anne Heyman, was interviewed recently on Rwanda TV about the project. I think it’s possible this is the transcript of that interview. It is also possible it is the transcript of another interview. Either way, it gives the most complete understanding of the history and philosophy of the village you’ll get short of talking to her yourself:
…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.”…
For the full interview, click
.
And there’s more. Here are two links to a story by DJ Siegel about the village. She visited with the other journalist
, who I linked to last week. Alas, though DJ also interviewed me, I wasn’t good enough for her story either.
December 15, 2008 at 9:47 am · Filed under News
Today is the day, as 125 orpans will start arriving any moment. I will try to post photos and updates throughout the day. Stay tuned to this “liveblog” of sorts as the kids come home again to ASYV.
December 12, 2008 at 9:26 pm · Filed under News
I wanted to share with you a recent piece by the Ugandan independent journalist Andrew Mwenda. He’s responding to someone’s accusation that he is justifying restrictions on free press in Rwanda. He reminds us before we tell people how they are supposed to act, to think about their unique history which shapes their society:
A nation’s laws are shaped by its experience and history. If you form a Jihad in Palestine or Afghanistan you would be seen as a liberation fighter. If you formed a Jihad in New York, you would be smoked out by the FBI as a terrorist. If you said that you wanted to commit suicide just before boarding a plane at Entebbe, officials there would laugh at you. If you did so in Los Angeles, you would be whisked off for questioning by the FBI.
Only 14 years ago, Rwanda lost nearly a million people in genocide. The mobilisation for the genocide was conducted using the mass media. The victims of the hate campaign were the Tutsi who now lead the government in Rwanda. Their experience with the mass media is not as an instrument of democracy but of extermination. It is that psychology that shapes their stance on media freedom. To ignore this reality – their experience – would be naive. In Uganda, the media has historically been an instrument of democracy. That is why press freedom enjoys broad national support. Not so for Rwanda because its experience is different.
The full piece is here.
October 16, 2008 at 12:09 am · Filed under News, Observations
While bankers in New York learn that what goes up must come down, it’s easy to feel somewhat inoculated here in Africa from the global financial unraveling. Indeed, without a major stock index on the entire continent (Apologies to Johannesburg, but you’ll need a market capitalization of at least $1 trillion to play in the minor leagues. Double that and we can talk about the Big Leagues.), doom and gloom don’t seem to be running wild here like other places around the globe (Zimbabwe’s 531 billion percent inflation excepted - though that seems to have little to do with sub-prime mortgages.) While there’s still plenty of regular doom and gloom abound, no one should be jumping from tall buildings any time soon (at least not in Kigali, where tall buildings are something of a rarity).
According to The Economist, arguably the world’s most important newspaper, Africa’s prospects are actually looking pretty good. It seems China’s still buying, Africa’s over-regulated banks were never allowed to invest irresponsibly abroad anyways, and the aid money and direct investment keeps flowing from governments (Japan, China, Malaysia, India, and the US, Europe, and Gulf States) eager to court Africa’s vast resources. Watch TV here and you see commercials for tax-free cities in Dubai and burgeoning stock markets in Poland - it’s bizarre.
Reports The Economist, even adjusting for the global slowdown, the IMF still expects something around 6% GDP growth for the continent. It was less than 1% at the beginning of the last decade. Prices for commodities will certainly fall, but even tempered demand will still be high. The US wants 25% of its oil to come from Africa by the next decade and China is an unscrupulus driller.
So maybe Africa is’nt such a bad place to be.
I asked one of my Rwandese co-workers why she cared about the US election. She said she just cares about the economy and someone fixing it. I told her the good news, that Africa is doing pretty well. So we (myself included) don’t have to worry, I told her. She reminded me that we work for an American organization. America goes down, we don’t have jobs. Not so un-inter-connected after all.
Oh, right.
September 8, 2008 at 12:46 am · Filed under News
The New York Times reported today on a new study by Tulane University on rural Rwandan orphans aged 12 to 24 caring for others in child-headed households. Their findings are compelling:
- 40% said life was meaningless
- 76% said their community rejected orphans
- Over half suffer from depression
- 77% are Subsistence Farmers
- 93% had less than six years of school
- Almost half had eaten only one meal a day in the last week
The study concludes that the number of Rwandan orphans “overwhelmed” the capacity of the country to adequately take them in and “large-scale interventions would be necessary ‘if the next generation of youth is to thrive.’”
The full study, from The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, is here.
