Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village: Cultivating a Brighter Future

[Rwanda] [Jean Claude Nkulikyimfura] [Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village Director] You couldn't imagine what most of our children have gone through. We have many kids whose mothers have been raped, whose parents have been killed, and they were found on the side of the streets. Some were left in hospitals because of the trauma that their mothers have undergone. Some do not even know where they come from in Rwanda. [Anne Heyman] [Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village Founder] Many of them are actual genocide survivors. They have found themselves living, if they're lucky, with a relative that's taken them in or perhaps a neighbor, but many of them live in what they call child-headed households where a bunch of kids who survived together are living together. [Nkulikyimfura] We have many children who on their own identity card they invented their date of birth, because they didn't have anybody to tell them that. When they come here, it becomes a place of healing. It becomes a place where they can start to live, where they can reclaim their childhood, where they can reclaim their adolescence. [Heyman] People often ask me, "Why a youth village, and why in Rwanda?" And really for me it was sparked by the genocide connection. After the Holocaust, Israel had an influx of orphans. I knew that they had built these things called youth villages, and really they were a mechanism to not only heal the kids from the trauma that they had suffered but teach them life skills and actual job skills. I feel like we have an obligation because we've been through it, because we've come up with solutions. It's really our obligation to share them with the world. Our mission at Agahozo-Shalom is to take kids who have been traumatized, give them the chance to heal emotionally, give them the skill set to be able to support themselves and their family and understand how important it is to be contributing members of society. Much of our philosophy in the village is based on what we call tikkun repair. We talk about 2 levels of tikkun. Tikkun halev, repairing the heart, and in addition to that, we have tikkun olam, repairing the world, and that's a program we have in the village where all the kids are required to go out into the community and do community service. Lives are changed here. Lives are transformed. We have a youth that is becoming responsible and accountable for themselves and for others. [♪ music ♪] [The Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village] [Change a life.] [www.asyv.org]