These past three days we’ve been training with the whole staff here to get ready for the village to open on Monday. Yesterday, our founder Anne was taking questions after one of the sessions and time was running a little short. She said she’d take one more question and called on Eddie:
Eddie: To save time, I have two questions.
Anne: Only one question.
….(long pause)….(Eddie is thinking about this)
Eddie (with a proud smile): OK. I have one question with two parts.
In September, I had the chance to accompany Jean-Pierre, the Director of Informal Education at ASYV, to interview some of the candidates for the village. Jean-Pierre has spent the last month or so traveling to schools in all corners of Rwanda to interview these orphans; on this day we went to the south of the country. First to a school in the royal capital, Nyanza, and then 25 minutes along a bumpy dirt road beyond the city of Butare to Runyinya and a school whose population is 90% made up of Genocide survivors.
Below is a story of one of the kids we met. I’ve omitted his name to protect his privacy.
It was at the first school that we met one young boy. His father died in 1990; his mother was killed in the genocide. When we asked him where he lived, he couldn’t tell us. He said he has been rejected from homes many times and he has trouble finding a place to live. When school lets out for the holidays and everyone returns home, he doesn’t know where to go.
Despite this lack of permanent residence, he’s found the time to both sing and compose. The song he sang for us was called “C’est comme ca dans la vie,” or “It’s like this in life.” The lyrics are a compelling riff on life from a orphaned survivor of brutal genocide. He sings:
It’s like this in life/
In this world we cannot live without problems/
Some people have friends and some people have enemies…
Maybe it’s just a song he wrote – I shouldn’t read too much into it – but its simple sentiment is piercing. “In this world we cannot live without problems” - problems which include genocide, war and poverty – is a sober reminder of just how much these children understand the imperfect world we live in. “Some people have friends and some people have enemies,” he sings. It’s reassuring to know that for a people that have come to know so many of their enemies, so many friends like ASYV keep showing up.
We surely cannot live without problems, but we know that there are problems that we are capable of living without. Hopefully soon, ASYV may be able to make it so living without a home is no longer one of those problems with which he must live.