I have not written in a long time. I have no good excuses, but I do have a funny story and some photos from the last four months, so enjoy!
Story:
The other day, one of the volunteers, Tanya, was wearing her rain boots when one of the kids, a young boy, came up to her and said “I like your…how do you call them?…boobs.” The Rwandese can be real slick operators.
Photos:
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?
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.”…
.
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.
…wait, “cult”?
Me: Uh, so what exactly do you mean here when you write cult?
Mor (Israeli Volunteer): You know, like instead of church. We didn’t want to say church because we didn’t want it to seem mandatory.
Me: Do you know what cult means?
Mor: It’s like a nicer way of saying church.
Me: Not really.
Mor: So it’s bad?
Me: Yea. Maybe we should just use church.
A journalist named Nicoe Kallmeyer visited us last week and wrote an article on the work we are doing.
Rwandan 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…
They even interviewed me, but, alas, nothing I had to say seems to have made it into the article. I’ll have to work on becoming more interesting.
In the meantime, you can check out her full piece here.
One of the volunteers, Benna, has been tutoring one of the kids here in English. On Friday, he came up to her at dinner and asked her a question he had obviously been practicing for a while:
“Benna, do you think we can really change Rwanda?”
“Yea”
“I think so too.”
Well, the liveblog thing didn’t really work out today, but the kids are here nonetheless. I tried, but I wasn’t able to get stuff up (See: Internet at the Village). Either way, the are here and it’s totally amazing, if not also completely overwhelming. I’ve been juggling so many different things trying to get the village ready, I’m can barely think straight at this point. In the next couple of days I’ll be posting some more about these first days, but for now I’m off to bed.
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.
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.
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.