EDUCATION | Driving tomorrow’s achievements
11 April 2008
Heading for 2020 Amid Echoes of the Past
U.S. students bring IT training to Rwanda
U.S. young people with high-level computer skills are selected to join an exchange program that sends them to Rwanda to help other young people learn more about computers. American and Rwandan young people are in sync when it comes to teaching and learning, but putting them together requires backing from universities and nongovernmental organizations that want to help African governments create a better future.
It's a digital world, except where it isn't … in underdeveloped nations that haven't been able to get with the program on information technologies (IT). The Center to Bridge the Digital Divide (CBDD) on the campus of Washington State University works to help countries grab hold of the IT express and catch a ride into the future. The center is in business to help ordinary people around the world improve their access to and use of modern information technologies. Who better to pitch in on that effort than young people who have grown up in the IT era?
Since 2005, CBDD has sent groups of young people to Rwanda to help other young folks like themselves get up to speed on information technology know-how. With this program, the center is helping Rwanda achieve Vision 2020, a national-level policy that seeks to create a skilled IT workforce and transform Rwanda into the information hub of Africa.
CBDD's Youth 4 BIT (Business Information Technology) Initiative helps secondary school students in Africa and the United States develop real-world skills. The curriculum goes way beyond computer games. It includes upgrading and building computers, hard disk maintenance, and trouble-shooting. Rwandan students in the program are also learning about diagnostic software and computer operating systems. The students graduate from this program with highly marketable skills to enter the IT workforce just as it is beginning to expand in Africa.
The graduates also pass on their knowledge, working in other Rwandan schools and youth institutions to upgrade the IT skills of other young people.
These aspirations and investments for the future are made in a country still tending the raw scars of the 1994 tribal genocide between Tutsis and Hutus. That bloody power struggle left 800,000 people dead and caused 2 million to flee across the borders. The nation strives toward reconciliation and pursues one of the continent's most ambitious agendas to improve its information technology capabilities.
But young Americans who went to Rwanda as technology trainers in Youth 4 BIT kept hearing echoes from the tragic past, as the following stories illustrate. First, Brian Newman, a 22-year-old from Renton, Washington, who is majoring in information systems at Washington State University, tells how casual talk at the lunch table led to a better understanding of others. Then, Leah Rommereim, a 21-year-old from Pasco, Washington, who recently graduated from the University of Puget Sound, recounts how a memorial march taught her about courage.
Brian: Lunch in Rwanda
When I think back on my trip to Rwanda, most often I think about having lunch with the students I was teaching about computers. Lunchtime was the time that we really had to talk and share stories about out families, our countries, and our cultures.
Remembering those lunchtime talks leaves me overwhelmed by the joyfulness and friendliness of the people of a country that has seen so much pain.
I was amazed that even though many of these students want to go to college in the United States or Europe, most of them want to return to Rwanda after graduation to help rebuild their country. Many of the students whom we worked with in Rwanda were wondering if they were choosing the right subjects to study in college. They were the same kind of thoughts I had before I went to college. Hearing about their families sounded like me talking about my own family.
Sometimes, though, a conversation could take an unexpected turn.
One day while talking about different languages with a student at FAWE* (Forum for African Women Educationalists), I asked what language her parents spoke. She then told me that her parents were killed during the genocide. As she told me about her parents, to her it seemed as if it was nothing unusual that her parents were killed and that she was now living with other family members. I found it horrifying not only that her parents were killed, but that it was treated as such a common thing in Rwanda.
Hearing these stories of the genocide never ceased to rattle me. I've visited their country, I've talked and laughed with young people who don't seem so different from me. But to this day, I cannot fathom living through what they lived through.
Before going to Rwanda, I thought it would be hard to connect with the students since their culture was so different from mine. They had lived through things I could never imagine.
In the end, I learned that they are really not so different from me. By the end of the trip, I realized I had a whole new set of friends halfway around they world who were pretty similar to me.
*FAWE is one of four Rwandan schools participating in Youth 4 BIT. The others are Apred Ndera, Kagarama, and Lycée du Kigali.
Leah: On the Memorial March
The rainy season floods many of the roads in Rwanda. They run with mud, and the mud dries to leave bumpy, rutted roads behind. We bounced down one of these roads early on a Saturday morning toward a small church to join a Genocide Awareness March with students from Kigali.
This church, my Rwandan friends had told me, was one of the locations where refugees were offered safe haven, but were murdered instead.
The memory of death clung to the place, but life still blossomed. Once all the students arrived, it was an awesome sight. Some were in school uniforms, others wore shirts with the names of their heroes: Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King. Some wore regular street clothes and looked like students you find anywhere.
My whiteness was a constant source of interest for the other students in the crowd. I did stick out like a sore thumb. It made me feel like an outsider, but once one of my Rwandan friends began pulling me through the crowd and introducing me to others, that feeling disappeared. I was no longer someone there just to observe, but I was there to be involved. It changed the way that I was approached: not as someone to look at, but as someone to interact with.
The march began with a fanfare by the national marching band, and we walked along the streets of Kigali forming quite a spectacle on a Saturday morning. We were headed for the Genocide Memorial and Museum. Along the way, I met so many students with different backgrounds, faces, and smiles. We talked about movies, music, the education system in Rwanda, and what we wanted to do with our lives. It was similar to many conversations that I've had with my own friends back in Washington State in America.
Once we reached the memorial, the mood became somber. We gathered around the graves of the newly found dead. Rebuilding in the city is turning up the bodies of more genocide victims, and giving them a proper burial has become part of the reconstruction process. Looking across the graves at my new friends, I tried to imagine what it must have been like growing up in a society where nearly half of the people had been murdered. Many of the students moved to other countries with their parents during the genocide. Others stayed and lost one, even both, of their parents, along with numerous family members and friends.
These intelligent, talented, and amazing people had been through so much, and on that Saturday morning, they still stood tall. I was honored to be accepted into their community and considered a friend.
The opinions expressed by Brian Newman and Leah Rommereim do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
Editor's note: The Center to Bridge the Digital Divide hosted a blog of Brian and Leah's 2006 trip to Rwanda. It's available at http://cbdd.typepad.com/bit/. Brian posted a photo-blog of the trip, available at http://picasaweb.google.com/achievingslacker/Rwanda.
