A Breakfast Story, and a day in the life of Agahozo Shalom

Breakfast in the village is served at 7 am each morning. According to the schedule, that is. To have any hope of receiving your fresh bread rolls - baked in the wood burning oven - and your mug of steamy African tea with milk (no refrigerator in the village, but milk is delivered fresh each morning from nearby cows owned by one of our staff), you had better arrive early. On Monday, January 12, the first day of school, kids were so excited they couldn’t sleep and arrived at breakfast at 6:30am so as to be up the hill and ready for school half an hour before classes began. To my surprise, the early breakfast pattern hasn’t wavered, and neither has the kids’ excitement for school. And their passion for learning continues long after the doors to school close and the stream of kids flows downhill towards the village.

The village is a separate entity from the school, a part of the Yemin Orde (Israeli youth village that ASYV is modeled after) philosophy of creating distinct home and school environments. While the kids are busy learning biology, chemistry, physics, math, English, French, Kinyarwanda, history, and more, the informal education staff (myself included) are busy preparing and managing life in the village.

Moments after school ends the village transforms into a bustle of energy and action! First begin the after-school activities, and kids fill the volleyball court and football field. The Art and Music Center, where I teach art classes, can be heard from across the village, with sounds of drums from “itorero” class, guitar lessons, and songwriting. Sewing, basketball, traditional arts, modern dance, drawing, cooking, karate, athletics, and music theory are only some of the many electives kids can choose to participate in twice a week.

At five o’clock the doors to the Learning Center swing open and soon it is filled with kids eager to learn computers, read books in the library, and get help with their homework. It is common to find kids pouring over atlases and chemistry text books, not for school but just to satisfy their thirst for knowledge. I host open studio time in the Art Center three evenings a week, and kids are free to try their hand at papermaking, drawing, and jewelry making, or at keyboard, guitar, and recording in the music studio across the hall.

The busy daily schedule calls for wake up at 6 and bedtime at 10, though at least a few of these teenagers push themselves even harder. Take Angie* for example. Angie is eighteen years old and, like all the other Agahozo kids, is beginning a catch-up year before Senior 4, the equivalent to beginning American high school. She knows her cousin of the same age is preparing for university, but she hasn’t been quite as lucky. As an orphan, Angie has faced many difficulties that children with parents who can provide for them have not known. Orphans in Rwanda often face teasing from other children and are discouraged from attending school, and often much worse. They live with the memories of their families being killed, and the hardships of the years since. Many don’t make it to secondary school at all, but those who do have a fierce determination. As acceptance to Agahozo Shalom is measured by a combination of vulnerability and completing a certain level of schooling, the kids here are a self selecting group of incredibly motivated individuals.

“I know I have a great opportunity now,” Angie told me, “and I am going to get everything I can out of it.” For Angie that means waking up at 5am and going to sleep at 11pm, while using every moment in between to learn as much as she can.

And for me, it means getting out of bed if I want to catch the early breakfast!

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Art Update 2

The Art and Music Center, now in a temporary location until the permanent building is built, is a hub of color and sound. I teach two weekly art classes, and our first project was sketchbook making. The young artists personalized book covers with colorful materials and sewed pages to make unique books that they can use to hold the many drawings they will compose throughout the year. The kids pursued the project with diligence and precision, making sure to cut every piece of cardboard to exactly the right size and make every line straight. But not without a little rap music to keep us going, and the occasional hip hop dance move!

I hold open studio time in the Art Center from 5 to 9, three evenings a week. During this time kids are free to come and use whatever materials they like. We have made our first sheets of handmade paper using paper recycled at the village, a hand mixer, and a makeshift sieve. Self portraits are another common Art Center activity, and the kids love to use mirrors to draw themselves as realistically as possible.

In the Art Center I work together with the house mothers, parental figures who live with the children, and they bring expertise in traditional Rwandan crafts such as basket making and decorative beading. They are wonderful women, and I am excited not only to work with them and learn from them, but hopefully to paint their portraits as well.

A Water Story

From First weeks at Agahozo Shalom Have you ever noticed how much water it takes to flush a toilet? How about to wash the dishes? It wasn’t until I had to carry all of the water I wanted to use for the day in a bucket on my head that I realized just how precious water is. “Amazi,” Kinyarwanda for water, might be the most important word at Agahozo Shalom. Though running water is in the plans for the very near future, it has been a scarce luxury thus far. In case you should find yourself in a similar situation (perhaps water frequently stops running in University City, Manhattan, or Waltham) you may find the following very helpful, so feel free to take notes. One must join the line of kids at the water tower in the center of the village and attempt to make conversation using all of the Kinyarwanda you know, which limits my conversation to “good afternoon,” “do you want to dance,” and “I like cows,” (cows are a very important part of Rwandan culture and are featured in most songs, dances, poems, and friendly greetings). Then fill up a bucket and somehow manage to get it back to your house (I prefer to carry it on my head though I am always subject to much pointing and laughing- look at the “muzungo” (white person) carrying her bucket with water helplessly sloshing over the sides…). Now you can boil some for drinking (though we also bring drinking water from a nearby spring), you can shower with it by standing in the bucket and pouring it over your head with a cup (donated by Urban Outfitters!), and you can wash your clothes by scrubbing furiously with a bar of soap only to find that you have somehow created more stains than you have taken out. Be sure to save the leftover soapy water and pour it into the back of your toilet so that it can flush. Now will you think twice before leaving the faucet running while brushing your teeth tonight? Though water from the tap is scarce, water from the sky has been very plentiful. Most days start out enveloped in thick clouds of fog but are clear and sunny by the time activities begin at 8am. Nonetheless it is quite common for dark clouds to roll in unexpectedly and pour out rain furiously for a short 10 minutes during which no one dares step outside. The rain echoes loudly on the roofs and turns the red earth into soupy clay rivers. Moments after the rain the sun is back and the distant hills are clearer than ever before with green patchwork fields and glistening tin roofs visible for miles. The lack of running water might be surprising to you or me, but only 10 out of the 125 kids had running water back home, and even fewer had electricity. At Agahozo Shalom, they receive three plentiful meals a day (almost always rice and beans with the occasional pineapple treat), all the school supplies they need, and new clothes, not to mention the soon to open educational and extracurricular facilities. And they don’t take this opportunity for granted. The kids here are truly exceptional and have already blown me away with their musical and artistic talents and their thirst for knowledge. They know they have been given a once-in-a-lifetime chance at Agahozo, and they have big dreams for themselves. At a fantastic four hour New Years celebration organized by the kids, many shed tears of happiness as the clock struck twelve and a new year of promise dawned. From First weeks at Agahozo Shalom “Sometimes it was so hard, I never thought I would reach the year 2009,” one girl told me. “And now I am here, at this village. I feel like I can do anything. It is like a miracle.” I think we’ll live without the running water. :-)

Art Update 1

From First weeks at Agahozo Shalom

The past three weeks at Agahozo Shalom have been jam-packed with games, sports, art, and music- summer camp style. I have prepared daily art activities which I share with the eight counselors (one for each house of sixteen kids) at a daily meeting. The counselors lead the kids in these activities while I hop from house to house, admiring the kids’ creativity and giving pointers on using materials and developing ideas (an important part of ASYV philosophy is building capacity in the Rwandan counselors to lead and run the programs).

On “Environment Day”, the kids created earth sculptures out of natural materials such as soil, sand, rocks, and grass. One group made a gorilla, one of the most prized Rwandan animals, and another made a traditional Rwandan shield to show that in their new home they are always protected. They made collages about themselves, imaginary creatures out of beads, wire, and cupcake holders (donated by Martha Stewart!), newspapers about the village, and friendship mobiles to hang in their homes. They also began to sketch ideas for a large wall mural that they will paint this month.

This week marks the beginning of school and with it the opening of the Art and Music Center. In addition to teaching two weekly art classes after school, I will host open studio time in the art center three evenings a week for kids to draw, paint, sculpt, and create. Let the art making begin!