{{As part of their 2nd Annual Solidarity Festival Hope Academy donated to Kinyinya Village}}
A representative team of faculty, parents and students from Hope Academy visited the widowed and orphaned Genocide survivors of Kinyinya village in Kinyinya Sector.
Clamoring into the Project Umubano Kinyinya building, representatives from TIGO Rwanda along with the administrative team from Hope Academy gave welcoming words to the villagers.
Later the, teams of students, teachers and school parents were busy to visit numerous families and homes and distribute to those families bags of foodstuffs to ease some of the villagers’ hardships in finding food.
Each family was given numerous kilos of meat; sacks of rice, beans, and kawunga flour, in addition to condiments of sugar, salt, tomato paste, and oil; as well as a monetary gift.
Each of the families visited, around fifty in all, were given these donations on behalf of the school.
The funds used to pay for the aforementioned donations in their entirety were fundraised by students and their respective classrooms throughout the month of March and April.
This fundraising project was a part of Hope Academy’s annual Festival of Solidarity which aims to enhance students’ sense of compassion and thankfulness, as well as to improve and help disadvantaged Rwandans to develop themselves.
The visit to Kinyinya village took place in the late evening and all of the families visited expressed their exceptional gratitude, even stopping to take a few photos with some of the teachers and students in attendance.
The students felt very grateful after the trip and were happy to have seen their efforts used so altruistically.
The whole team at Hope Academy would like to thank TIGO Rwanda, as well as Kinyinya Sector, for helping to make our efforts and donations with this 2nd annual Solidarity Festival such a success.
We can only hope for greater involvement and impact in the community in our future fundraisers as our own student body expands and increases its interest in giving back.
In his speech, the headmaster of Hope Academy, Mr. Isa Yilmaz, said: “We came with the message of peace, with the message of respect, tolerance, understanding and dialogue.
We came with love and care, more valuable than our humble gifts. We promise, as Hope Academy administration and staff, that our students will grow with this culture of respect, tolerance, dialogue and love in our school.
Hope Academy is a new school. When we came to visit you last year, we were only three of us. And as I promised we came again, now we are tens. We promise this is not the last time.
The bigger the school community grows, the more of us will come to visit you to share our love since we are your brothers, sisters, children, grandchildren. Hope Academy is committed to raise GLOCAL (globally minded, locally based) leaders.
Therefore, we engage our students in such community services so that the unwanted incidents of the past will not repeat again. 20 years ago, we were all small children, but now we have a say, too.
Now, to remember –honouring the memory of those who died and offering support to those who survived, we went to memorial sites.
Additionally, we are organizing such visits to genocide survivors and widows, we are coming here to unite –showing that reconciliation through shared human values is possible.
And to renew –humbled to share our experiences and learn from others, we do and will take initiatives to start more and more projects, do more activities to humbly contribute to creating a brighter future for Rwanda and all human beings.”
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