Lizzy King guides Charles Mugisha, an orphan who lives with Paulin Irankunda, a 22-year-old graduate of Project Independence, which offers job training for young people orphaned by AIDS. Charles is fascinated by Lizzy's camera and takes dozens of pictures. (Riccardo Gangale photograph)
American Students Struggle
With Stark Differences
By Sonia Scherr
Valley News Staff Writer
Part Two
Kigali, Rwanda —Basketball will have to wait, at least until her novelty wears off.
Kylie Butler, a 16-year-old Thetford Academy student, has been invited by a Rwandan girl to join some young men playing a pickup game on a rough cement court at a primary school in Rwanda's capital. But as she leads Kylie toward the court, a group of children abandon their nearby soccer game and form a tight circle around Kylie and classmate Lizzy King, 17, clamoring for attention.
Set apart by her fair skin and sandy-blond hair among dozens of black faces, Kylie feels a wave of frustration that is becoming familiar during her first week in Rwanda. She wants to blend in with the Rwandan teens, but the differences remain painfully apparent.
For Kylie, Lizzy and Rebecca Young-Ward, a junior at The Sharon Academy, the first week of their 10-day trip to this remote East African country has been filled with this contradiction: While at times they're making connections with Rwandan youth that are almost magical in their spontaneity, they are also contending with stark differences of skin color, language, culture and socioeconomic status. As they try to reach across that divide, the trip has become not just an outward journey, but also an inner one that's compelling them to see themselves and their society in new ways.
All three are active in Operation Day's Work-USA, a nationwide student organization that raised money this spring to launch a job training program for AIDS orphans in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. The Upper Valley students are in Rwanda to meet with young people in the program, called Project Independence; I have been sent by the Valley News to document their experience.
Today we're here for a "life skills" workshop for children affected by AIDS, including many of the students in Project Independence. Kylie attended part of the workshop's first day while the rest of our group was on a field trip, so she was eager to mingle with the Rwandan students and teachers. But as the incident on the basketball court showed, it's not as easy as she hoped to interact naturally. "They wouldn't treat us like we were one of them," she says later, referring to the knot of children that surrounded her.
Eventually, however, Lizzy and Kylie cease to be the center of attention as more and more of the younger children gather on the court with the teenagers for group singing led by a teacher.