Here is a great story about one of our Rwandan students that appears in the current issue of SYNC Weekly.

The Prez

Building bridges

Arkansas college program helping to transform Rwanda

By Spencer Watson

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

LITTLE ROCK — Fifteen years after a systematic genocide led to the deaths of an estimated 1 million people, or around 20 percent of the population, in the small landlocked country, an Arkansas-based program is helping that nation to rebuild through education.

“The program was actually started by President [Paul] Kagame himself in 2006. The concept was that Rwanda would identify its best and brightest students in science and arrange to have those students educated abroad in other countries,” said David Knight, vice chairman of the Hendrix College board of trustees, who was on a visit to Rwanda in 2006 when he heard about the program launching at Oklahoma Christian University and contemplated how Hendrix could get involved.

Ultimately, the agreement was that a group of U.S. educators would travel to Rwanda and interview the students who scored highest in math and sciences on the country’s post-high school national examination. The very best of those would be offered scholarships, could earn a degree here, and would return home afterward to help rebuild their country. The focus on math and sciences, said Knight, was the choice of Rwanda, which lost many of its leading minds in the genocide. And unlike business or finance, advanced education in most sciences takes work in labs that just aren’t available in Rwanda.

So in the fall of 2007, a pilot group of four students came to the Conway college to study under the Presidential Scholars Program. They were so successful academically, Knight said, that last year 25 more students came over — and by then four other schools in Arkansas and one in South Carolina had joined the program. This summer, 52 more students have come and will start in the fall. At the same time, the number of participating schools has grown to 12 — a mix of both public and private universities and colleges — in five states. Since the students are educated in French, they first come to Arkansas for an intensive multi-week course in English before spreading out to their respective schools.

While the key to growth has been making it easy for schools to participate by handling all the program administration through Hendrix, Knight said, the key to success has been the students themselves. Collectively, at the end of last fall the group had a grade point over 3.7. Twelve of the 29 students here then had a perfect 4.0.

“Absolutely I’m a believer that this is a two-way bridge,” said Knight, who pointed out that while the students and their home country will benefit greatly from their American education, the schools themselves benefit from having these minds on campus. “They’re extremely intelligent, diligent and hard working.”

Photo by Shannon Sturgis

 

 

Alex Mugengana, Philander Smith College

Alex wants to help people. Studying chemistry, he hopes to be able to take his studies further into medical school and become a doctor, something that isn’t always available back home.

“People have to travel abroad from Rwanda to get medical care. There is not enough,” he said.

So coming here was “a great opportunity. We have colleges and universities back home, but they cannot compare with universities here,” he said, pointing to differences in labs, which actually allow you to practice what you study, and closer interaction with professors. And then there is the library where he works. An avid reader, he notes how accessibility to books is so much greater here.

But he hasn’t spent all his time reading. Like a lot of 20-year-old college students, he loves the Wii and has become a fan of TV’s 24 and Prison Break. He also has taken a liking to American football and basketball. Baseball, not so much.

The fourth oldest of nine children, Alex was not actually born in Rwanda, but in Tanzania, where his parents had fled in 1959, when the civil conflicts that persisted into the ’90s began. They moved back to the capital city Kigali in 1995, the year after the genocide, an event Alex doesn’t talk much about.

“It was a disaster for us,” he says, simply and sadly.

Being separated from his family is probably the hardest part of being here, he said, but he keeps in touch with them — less frequently the longer he’s here, not unlike most American college students.

“They are very proud of me. They encourage me to work hard,” he said. “It is a privilege to come and study abroad and get an advanced degree.”