BB&N Students Make a Rwandan Connection

THE RWANDAN

CONNECTION

by Morgan Baker ’76

Mr Z in Rwanda doing what he does best, help others.

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In 2011, several students overheard Berhane Zerom, BB&N Sixth Grade teacher, talking with a colleague on the Lower School playground about students who were unable to return to school because their sponsors had backed out on them.

The Sixth Graders were horrified and wanted to help.

Mr. Z, as he is known, reassured them, these were not BB&Ners. They were students in Rwanda, one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in Central Africa, with more than 11 million people in 10,000 square miles.

It didn’t matter. The students still wanted to support their peers at Crimson Academy.

Impressed with their enthusiasm, Mr. Z took it as an opportunity to do a global math problem. His class was working on conversions, so he asked the students to figure out how much a BB&N education costs per day.

They did the math and discovered that one day at BB&N would cover 14 kids at Crimson Academy for a year, at $21 per student. After solving the problem, the students were even more eager to help.

Crimson Academy is in Gihara, a tiny village in the province of Kagina—a very bumpy 45 minutes from the capital of Rwanda, Kigali. The school was founded in 2011 by Phillip Haynes, a classmate of Mr. Z’s at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Approached by Haynes in 2011 to be on its board, Mr. Z accepted with reservations. “I didn’t have the time,” he says. Originally from Eritrea in Africa, Mr Z now lived in the United States, and had a full-time job and a family.

Then came the math problem. Mr. Z didn’t know it would evolve into a six-year relationship between BB&N and Crimson Academy and that some of those sixth graders would visit Crimson as Upper School students.

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Mr. Z met with Rebecca Geary (then Assistant to the Lower School Director), who made it clear parents could not be approached for this project. The students could be pen pals and that was that. “A letter was not going to get those kids into the classroom,” Mr. Z recalls thinking.

“We needed to be creative,” he says. He then spoke with Charlie Ruopp, former Assistant Head of School, who asked Mr. Z how he was going to fundraise. “I told him I’m going to leave it up to the students,” says Mr. Z, “but I would not accept money that came directly from mom and dad.”

The BB&Ners had to figure out a way to sponsor the students on their own. Two students who had just received their babysitting licenses donated their earned money to the project; another shoveled snow, and one did pet-sitting and other odd jobs.

“That first year we sponsored 60 kids and each BB&Ner got a picture of their student, a bio, and periodically received their school record,” says Mr. Z. Crimson started as a four-room school with 180 students. Today it has seven rooms and is almost 400 students strong, most of whom come from the Batwa tribe of potters, the lowest of the low in Rwanda. Mr. Z says when the Tutsi tribe slaughtered the Hutus in the mid-1990s, they didn’t even bother with the Batwa; they weren’t worth the effort. Their artwork, however, is magnificent according to Mr. Z. Three years ago, Mr. Z, and his son Alex Berhane ‘21 (children take their father’s first name as their last in Eritrea), then a BB&N rising 6th grader, visited Rwanda and the school.

“We spent two weeks and my role was primarily to be in the classroom and to help teachers with curriculum planning and designing.

One math teacher had just finished ninth grade and one had finished high school. They were not teachers by training,” he says.

“Alex was also in the classroom. He was in the third and fourth grade assisting teaching and pulling kids out and helping them with their math homework. He loved it,” says Mr. Z. “It was amazing,” remembers Alex. Amazing is a word that crops up again and again in reference to Crimson Academy.

When not in the classroom, father and son recall fetching water down a wooded hill and carrying it back in yellow 5-10 gallon Jerry Cans. The young children there were so used to this, they ran back and forth while it took Alex and Mr. Z 20 minutes to complete the task and Alex couldn’t feel his legs at the end.

“It was a great experience for him because most of the time he doesn’t pick up his plate after dinner,” says Mr. Z. “The trip had two purposes—to go and help, and as a parent, selfishly, to provide an opportunity for Alex to see home is not the only world. There’s a broader world and we shouldn’t take for granted what we have here. I think that it hit home.”

It did.

“I didn’t know how much I took for granted,” Alex says. “I used to shower for about a half hour. Now I take a five-to-ten-minute shower. Now I eat the broccoli I used to hate. I stopped taking things for granted.”

Alex says, “They have less than I do, but they are cheerful, happy, and don’t care that much.” Often the kids there only had one set of clothes, he says. They lived ten people to a three or four room mud-brick home, their fields were so bumpy that soccer balls would pop easily, and at school their books were worn out or beat up and often there weren’t desks for students to sit at.

The first trip was so transformative, Mr. Z and Alex returned this past summer, this time accompanied by two Upper School students, Brooke Shachoy ’18 and Mia Maginn ’19. Mr. Z, however, was a bit apprehensive about how the teenagers would react to being in that part of the world and whether they would be homesick. His fears weren’t realized. “It was amazing,” he says. “It was just amazing. They were part of the community from day one.”

Alex says of his return there, “They remembered me. They were happy to see me again.”

This year, the group worked in classrooms for the first week. Because the children there hadn’t been to school before Crimson’s existence, many classes don’t line up chronologically with the same classes in the United States. A fourth-grade class could have an 8-year-old in it, just as likely as a 14-year-old. As more children start from the beginning, the ages will begin to correspond properly with their grade levels.

In addition to working with Crimson students, Brooke met Benise, the student she’s been sponsoring since sixth grade. “I didn’t want to leave her in the dust,” says Brooke. “It was amazing,” she says. “She’s really shy. She wants to be a doctor. I’m a junior and I don’t know what I want to do. She’s fourteen and she’s always known what she wants to do.”

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Mia Maginn ’19 in a Crimson Academy classroom

Brooke Shachoy ’18 enjoys a tender moment with a baby 27

In seventh grade, Brooke had sent Benise a care package but it wasn’t until Mr. Z went to mail letters from the Rwandan students back to BB&N that he discovered the package still in the post office, waiting to be picked up. He delivered it in person.

During their second week, the group helped build a house for a five-person family whose current one-room mud-brick home was falling down.

“The community came out to help,” says Mr. Z. Children, pregnant women, women with babies, everyone came out and helped dig the foundation, create the mud bricks by laying mud inside molds, and then build the walls of a four-room house.

Brooke says, “Their sense of community was so cool…women with babies on their backs with four bricks on their heads helped.”

“It’s unlike Boston,” says Mia. “They ask you to hold their babies. They’re nice and friendly.

They’re soft-spoken and hold your hand.”

Mia learned about the Rwandan genocide and how the country has moved on from it. There is no revenge. It’s all about forgiveness, and those who did the killing have been known to apologize to the families they harmed.

“It gave me a broader perspective. I don’t sweat the small things. We live in a sheltered community,” says Brooke. “They use every inch of their notebook papers to take notes. We brought four bags of supplies and we left all our clothes for them.”

“I think students should go. They won’t know what’s outside their comfort zone,” says Alex.

“I want to go back,” says Brooke. “I think it’s really important to see the world and see the different communities out there.”

“The level of privilege we have here is absurd,” says Mia. “I want to go back every year.”

Back at BB&N this fall, Brooke and Mia started their own club, The Rwandan Connection, in the Upper School. Mia explains that after sixth grade, the interest dies down. People get busy and distracted. “We wanted a presence in the school, an awareness…. It’s about building connections,” she says.

The mission of the club is to build a relationship with Crimson Academy by sponsoring more students. They want to establish a connection writing letters, Skyping, or FaceTiming. They are planning on doing clothing and supply drives.

Brooke says, “It will give us a sense of Rwanda in our daily lives.”

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Alex Berhane ’21 among his many Crimson Academy friends

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