John Nsabimana, regional youth ambassador for UNICEF, chatted with kids at affluent Caulfeild elementary about being a kid in Rwanda. Daniel Pi photo

KELLY MCMANUS North Shore Outlook, Oct. 23, 2008

How many people have cars in Africa?” Richie Warke wants to know. The Grade 7 student fires out questions with three other students at Caulfeild elementary.

“Are there any stores or malls?” asks Gabrielle Vecchio.

“How many crops are there and are they all (growing) on hills?” adds Kenny Schultze.

John Nsabimana, the UNICEF regional youth ambassador, a former Rwandan refugee now studying in Canada, receives their questions patiently. His visit is part of Caulfeild principal Brad Lund’s efforts to “make connections,” for his students – to emergencies beyond the quiet streets of Caulfeild. Today, he hopes to help the kids understand what it’s like to be a kid in Rwanda and Malawi. According to UNICEF, over four million children in those countries combined can’t go to school because of disease, poverty, conflict or all of the above.

“They’re trying to make comparisons,” Lund explains of the Grade 7’s questions. “That’s what we try to do here. We try to make as many connections as we can… anything we can do to make kids think.”

Those connections are tough for the kids to make. They live in a community where the average home is worth a million dollars, where half of the population enjoys an average family income above $90,000. Today they struggle to imagine life in a country where over one million children are orphans and half the population lives on less then $1 a day.

Nsabimana talks about what it’s like to be a kid in Africa. Not many people have cars, he explains, because “you need education to get a job to buy a car.”

The students nod, leaning closer.

“We have a lot of local markets, and people tend to do their shopping outside.”

As for the crops, land is precious in Rwanda, he explains, “and some people don’t have land.”

And then Richie Warke steps in, maybe a little nervous to ask, “When you were a boy in Rwanda, what was your dream to be?”

Nsabimana, 22, fled Rwanda during the genocide in 1994 that left nearly a million people dead, displacing millions more. He was seven years old. While Caulfeild kids might dream about becoming an astronaut, a rock star or doctor, Nsabimana, like so many kids from his country, just fought to stay alive.

“I was living in the bush, walking day and night.”

The kids’ eyes go wide.

In 1994, Nsabimana was separated from his two brothers, who escaped to other countries.

As an orphaned refugee, eventually ending up in Uganda, Nsabimana attended some elementary school classes through UNICEF.

“My first school was tents and seating under the trees in a refugee camp with the UN,” he explains. Later, he received a refugee scholarship to study at Victoria’s Lester B. Pearson United World College in 2004. He graduated two years after that and went straight to the Social Development program at UVic. He’s now specializing in child protection.

“My life wasn’t good until I had the opportunity to start studying,” he tells the kids, explaining that he hopes to pursue graduate work before finally returning home. “I’m going to Rwanda. I want to see myself helping, building the country again, educating – the same that UNICEF is doing, make sure we get as many kids to school. My dream is to see myself on the ground helping as many children as possible.”

Making Connections

“How many people have been on a beach on a really hot day?” asks Brad Lund at a Caulfeild school assembly. Four hundred or so hands shoot up into the air.

“In Rwanda, in the dry season … you always have to walk on the grass so you don’t burn your feet” says Nsabimana, explaining what it’s like for kids walking to school in Rwanda. “I didn’t wear shoes until high school.”

A low buzz takes the gym as the students process this idea.

Lund compares green hills in Rwanda to the green hills of Caulfeild, flipping through projected slides at the front of the gym. He even relates recent black bear sightings to the possibility of encountering poisonous snakes on a walk to school in Rwanda.

These visceral connections are crucial for getting the kids engaged, says Lund.

“When you do something, anything, physical with the kids, the physicality makes it real,” he explains in an earlier interview.

Case in point: Lund’s Water Walk program, a school excursion in West Van that spurred a national UNICEF campaign. In 2006, Lund, then the principal at Irwin Park elementary, took 400 kids on a walk from the school, two and a half kilometres down Marine Drive to Ambleside and then back. He repeated the effort from Caulfeild in 2007. The objective was to connect kids with a Rwandan child’s day in the life – hours-long walks to far-off wells in search of water.

West Van Parks left Lund and his kids old drums full of dirty water which they collected and slogged back to the school.

“They were shocked that kids couldn’t just turn on water and get water,” says Lund. “They realized some people don’t have it as good as they do here in West Vancouver.”

In the first year, Lund’s students raised $7,000 for UNICEF, making them the top school fundraiser in Canada with the organization. The second year they gathered $15,000 for UNICEF, raising the most funds across B.C. and the second most in Canada. That year, they also raised an additional $10,000 for an organization called Little Feet that also supports schools in Rwanda.

While previous UNICEF policy prevented donating schools from funneling funds directly to specific sites or projects, Lund and his students appealed to connect with a school north of Kigali, Rwanda called Kinyinya.

This year, the Caulfeild kids will complete a six-week read-a-thon, with a fundraising target of $15,000 to go directly to Kinyinya’s renovation program. The read-a-thon coincides with UNICEF’s Trick-or-Treat campaign (the successor to the little orange coin boxes) that sees every participating school setting its own fundraising events.

The class with the highest donations will create a friendship package for the kids at Kinyinya. Lund and Caulfeild parents even have an eye to an outreach visit with 10 or 20 students in 2011.

The kids cheer when they hear this news. But Lund doesn’t want them focusing too much on “rewards,” he says.

“This is about getting us to think about helping people elsewhere in the world.”

Amakuru

As the students learn about their next fundraising challenge, Nsabimana teaches them to say “Good Morning” (Mwaramutse) and “Hello” (Amakuru) in his language, Kinyarwanda.

“The opportunity people have given me to go to school,” he tells them, explaining the importance of maintaining their new relationship with the kids at Kinyinya, “Now I want to give back to what people have done for me.”

He tells them about his hopes for the future of Rwanda: “Tutsi, Hutu, that was the past government. You don’t ask about tribes. People are Rwandan first, living together.”

kmcmanus@northshoreoutlook.com

Story: Kelly McManus

Photos: Daniel Pi

Read the story on the North Shore Outlook site.