About the Rwanda Project USVI
See the Rwanda Return Trip 2010 Video
Rwanda Project USVI began in the Spring of 2008 when a group of Ivanna Eudora Kean High School students asked their teacher and advisor, Barbara Young, to help them find a way to go to Rwanda to meet the 9-year-old orphan they were sponsoring.
Victoria "Vickie" Umuhoza was about to be forced to leave the boarding school she was attending because she could not pay the tuition when the IEKHS World Religion club learned of her plight and decided to raise the money to cover Vickie’s school fees. Not long after raising enough to cover Vickie’s school for two years, they approached Ms. Young about the possibility of going to Rwanda.
Realizing that it would take more than bake and t-shirt sales and car washes to raise the money and the consciousness of the students, Young reached out to first lady Cecile deJongh for help.
See the Rwanda Trip 2008 Video
Together with Young’s friend, photographer Sonya Melescu, the fund raising and planning for the trip began..Young and deJongh understood that for the trip to be meaningful and worthwhile the youngsters would need to do more than meet Vickie. And they did!
The group of 11 Virgin Islands teenagers painted, hauled rocks, dug in the dirt, served meals, played with and read to impoverished children and dug some more at several orphan centers around the country. As they watched with amazement at the connections being made between the V.I. teens and the Rwandan children Young, deJongh, and co-founder Shaun Pennington, knew the project had to be ongoing. And not just because of the connections between the children, but also the connection between cultures and values.
The teens had quickly made other connections; connections about what is important in life, and about what brings happiness. Connections about what it means to have nothing materially, and still have joy. They experienced a country and the people that in 14 short years had risen from the dead. And they were changed.
