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| A Ways to Go... |
| Written by Jeff Komant |
| Tuesday, 14 July 2009 00:00 |
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The occasion of having friends come to visit Rwanda for the first time gives me a wonderful opportunity to look back and consider just how far Rwanda has come since I first came in 1998. It is neat to see the amazement in other people’s eyes as they see the life and hope in a country that most of the world remembers exclusively in light of the horrors they saw on television in 1994. I remember what Rwanda was like when I first came to this country 11 years ago. It was a tough place to be with an active military confrontation going on in the north of the country, many hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Rwandans, and a people just trying to come to terms with what they had been through a few years prior. I saw so much pain in people’s eyes, and for the first time experienced the hate of some people who obviously felt so betrayed and let down by the international community that my white skin represented to them. I remember the economic scarcity, the bullet riddled buildings and how few people there were from around the world who seemed to care about Rwanda’s plight. But in the middle of those circumstances I remember reading Rwanda’s vision for its future as outlined in Government documents. I remember speaking with Rwandan Christian leaders who saw the potential for creating a beautiful future. Theirs was an outlandishly optimistic dream to emerge from the ashes and build a new country against all the odds. It wasn’t too long before we got Wellspring started on our own seemingly impossible journey to work alongside our Rwandan brothers and sisters to empower a new generation of Rwandan leaders through high quality, Christian values based education. I remember when the Wellspring Academy was little more than “a sketch on a napkin”. I remember the humble beginnings of our efforts to train Rwandan teachers when all we had was a vision and a single dedicated voluntary member of staff. Rwanda has come an awful long way over these few years. Not only is peace restored, but I’m probably safer here in Kigali than I was when I lived in Surrey, BC. There are shops and restaurants and businesses that offer an increasingly broad range of goods and services that we wouldn’t have imagined a few short years ago. Where in 2000 there were two dysfunctional coffee washing stations in the country, there are now more than 46 to help Rwandan farmers access the benefits of this huge global business. Over 60% of Rwandan schools have been built since the genocide, and university attendance has more than quadrupled since that time along with the creation of multiple public and private universities. The country dreams of a prosperous future and their “Vision 2020”. We dream of the transformation of the lives and the school communities that will make “Vision 2020” happen. As I take our friends around this hopeful little country in the heart of Africa and show them what Wellspring is up to in this context, I’m reminded that we may still have a ways to go…. but, wow, have we come a long way! I’d like to extend my invitation to you to come see this unfolding miracle with your own eyes. |
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