skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Collin Sekajugo is a very exciting artist in Kigali, and he believes passionately about the role of creativity in building a nation. His workshop and gallery where he and a small cohort of artists work and display their art is on the side of one of Kigali's hills. He named it Ivuka Arts Studio, meaning "rebirth."
The artists paint on the back porch in a cool breeze overlooking the city, and display their art in the gallery.
These young people come to Ivuka with raw talent, and Collin works with them to improve their technique and help them find their visual voice.
They work in all mediums, including oil, acrylics, water color, sculpture, and jewelry.The jewelry is actually made up of very fine strips of magazines rolled tightly and them dipped in clear glue. The colors are bright, making the necklaces eye-catching.
Collin recently had a show at a local club. This large piece, entitled Legends of Legends, is about music and musicians and captures the struggle and hope of music to understand pain and rebirth.
It's about Ivuka. It's an unusual piece. I'm afraid I couldn't leave it in Rwanda.
After a full day of meetings with government officials
and site visits of entrepreneurs here in Rwanda, what better way to end the day than with a dance performance.
Collin Sekajugo is a fine artist and founder and director of Ivuka Arts Center, a cooperative of 15 artists in Kigali. He also founded the RwaMakondera (Rwandan Horns) Children’s Dance Troupe, an amazing group of young children that Collin found begging on the streets. He taught them traditional Rwandan dances and brought them into an artistic community where they could find a sense of belonging and a place to develop their own self-expression.
These young children ages 3-12 crowded into their small outdoor rehearsal space and performed for us non-stop for an hour. It was a joyful time, and many other kids from the neighborhood crowded around us. Before long I had many three and four year olds on my lap, hanging on to my arms, and learning what all the buttons on my Nikon D90 do.
I shot no less than 170 images.
Yesterday at the Making Vision a Reality entrepreneur workshop here in Kigali, an administrator from the Rwandan Tourism Institute came up to me and requested that I come and speak to his school the next morning. It seemed like a reasonable request, and we slipped it into our schedule.
This morning, Chris Hills and I arrived at the school to learn that they had called a mandatory assembly, and all 200-300 students were crowded into two different halls. I spoke about entrepreneurialism and Chris talked about adventure tourism (his undergrad degree). I was amazed at the intensity of the student's attention and the depth of their questions. Every question had to do with how to start a business.
Like many countries around the world, Rwanda realizes that it has a poor record for customer service. But from the passion and clarity with which these students articulated their dreams, it is clear that they will be a positive force for the Rwanda tourist experience.
I bumped into the US Ambassador to Rwanda, Stuart Symington, and his wife on the flight from Brussels to Kigali last Saturday and got reacquainted. Knowing that we were hosting seven Americans in Rwanda, he invited us all to his residency for cocktails. He also asked us to invite several of our Rwandan entrepreneurs to join us.
We all sat on his garden terrace overlooking the downtown hills and talked about our experiences in Rwanda. He was very curious about our US entrepreneurs, and even more interested in the stories of our Rwandan counterparts. It was a rich discussion about the challenges and opportunities and hope that is present today in this unique country.
A topic that one of members was struggling with was the balance between justice and reconciliation. Is justice served by reconciliation? Stuart Symington's reply was clear: the future in more important than the past. This doesn't mean that the tragic events of 1994 should ever be forgotten or minimized. One of the slogans in Rwanda is "never again." But Rwandans have also made clear that they don't want to be defined by the past.
The future of the country and its people is more important than the past.
Today was the first of a series of quarterly workshops we are producing for entrepreneurs in Rwanda. The workshop is called Making Vision A Reality, and it's focused on using the experiences of American entrepreneurs and a set of specialized entrepreneurial tools to help Rwandan business owners build their business, leadership, and technical skills.
We struck a very generous agreement with The Strategic Coach and its owners, Dan Sullivan and Babs Smith to use several of their most important strategic planning tools in our workshop. It was amazing to watch these Rwandan entrepreneurs experience the same personal and professional breakthroughs that their counterparts in the Strategic Coach Program experience in the US.
The seven American entrepreneurs that we brought to the country were scattered among the 25 Rwandan entrepreneurs in attendance. By the end of the afternoon, the entire room was electric, and you could tell by the stories and the faces that this group of entrepreneurs had succeeded not only in putting together a detailed three year strategic plan, but they had achieved a new level of confidence in their ability to reach their goals.
Out of this incredible bonding experience, the Rwandan entrepreneurs will be organized into small groups of seven that will meet monthly to hold each other accountable. The level of intimacy and willingness to be accountable to one another that was achieved today was wonderful to behold.
This morning, I took our team of US social entrepreneurs over to the US Embassy here in Kigali for a briefing from USAID. It was eye-opener for most of the team. Despite the perceptions of lackluster progress in much of Africa, Rwanda enjoyed a 11.3% GDP growth rate in 2008! The rate of HIV/AIDS is down from an estimated 10% to 3.1%, and 70% of those with the disease have access to ARVs (the highest rate in Africa).
It is clearly a country on the move. As one USAID official commented, a national initiative that would normally take a year to complete in any other country is given a 3-month time table by President Paul Kagame. He is in a hurry to bring Rwanda into the middle-income ranking of per capita income. He looks at the Asian "Tigers" of Singapore, Tiawan, and South Korea and wants Rwanda to become the first African "Gorilla."
And as he said in South Africa over the weekend, he doesn't want to do it with outside aid; he wants Africans to do it themselves.
By the evening of the first day in Rwanda, everyone is always stunned when they realize they’ve been in the country for only 24 hours. They have had so many rich experiences, engaged in deep philosophical discussions about morality and justice and reconciliation, and have seen so many amazing images of urban and rural life, death and hope, the prosperous and poor, that they feel they’ve been here a week.
After experiencing the Kigali Genocide Memorial, one of the most profound and moving museum experiences I’ve ever had, we take our guests on the road south of the capital about 30 kilometers. Within minutes of leaving Kigali, the land becomes lush with flowers, banana trees, and rolling verdant hillsides. The highway is lined with people walking or pushing bicycles laden with sweet potatoes or bamboo. People are quick to smile and wave.
Just on the edge of a small town called Nyamata, 
we take a right hand turn down a dirt road to the catholic church. It’s now a genocide memorial, and the pews are lined with stacks of the clothes taken from the 6,800 people massacred inside this church where they had fled for refuge. The ceiling is pocked with holes from bullets and grenade shrapnel. We were met by Charles, a 23 year old who was 8 years old at the time of the genocide. He was one of the seven people who survived the massacre in the church. He hid himself under the dead body of his twin brother until the genocidaires left. Back behind the church are two mass graves. Charles speaks in a quiet voice, sometimes struggling with his English, sometimes with the story.
No matter how much you know about the genocide, nothing prepares you for this experience, and our social entrepreneurs were overwhelmed. It was a quiet ride back to our hotel.
After a two hour break, we met again for dinner. Our guest was a man who has become a good friend of our family. Sandrali is an architect (he designed the Kigali Memorial) and his wife, Immaculate, is a physician. He told his personal story, which starts with exile, returning right after the genocide with the country destroyed and bodies still on the streets, and moves through grief, reconciliation, and now hope. He was the perfect facilitator for our group’s questions, and we ended our day with a sense of the great potential that is this country, in the context of its very real recent history.
Tomorrow morning we go to the US Embassy for a briefing on USAID’s mission in the country and ways that we can help.
Time for bed...
I arrived in Rwanda Saturday night safe and sound with seven US entrepreneurs in
tow. Everyone geeked up about the week ahead of us, despite the 20 hours it takes to get here!
Chris Hills, GRDP’s president who now is located in Kigali with his family, has set up a great week of activities and meetings.
It’s a gorgeous Sunday morning. Need to wear sun screen. Off to show my team the Kigali Memorial Center. Will be a sobering day.
The artists paint on the back porch in a cool breeze overlooking the city, and display their art in the gallery.
These young people come to Ivuka with raw talent, and Collin works with them to improve their technique and help them find their visual voice.
