MwanaNshuti Education Center
Mwana Nshuti Center
Mwana Nshuti is an education program for street youth, orphans and other vulnerable children. This program seeks to transform the lives of individual children. It works not only on giving children knowledge and skills, but also seeks to develop a sense of self-worth and community involvement that will be necessary for them to integrate as full members of Rwandese society. We do this through mentoring and through walking alongside the students in their lives.
Mwana Nshuti means ‘Child, my Friend.’ It was started in 1998 as a response to the problem of street youth who congregate around the city dump in our neighbourhood. While it still targets these youth, it has expanded to include other local vulnerable youth and orphans. The first step is working with youth is to find them families to live with, if they are on their own. This can either mean overcoming the problems which drove them away from their families in the first place, or discovering if they have any extended family to live with, or finding a local family that will take someone in. During the time of the program we meet with families to overcome problems of integration/reintegration to ensure that our students will continue to have a place to live and that their family situation will not make impossible the students fulfilling their responsibilities as students.
Academic and Technical Training
There are two primary streams for children: academic and technical. The academic stream looks for scholarship opportunities to help place students into regular primary and secondary schools. While the Rwandan educational system is supposed to be free, there remain hidden extra costs which become barriers for students to attend regular school. For example, most schools require uniforms, which is a cost. All schools require that the students have notebooks, pencils and other scholastic materials, which is a cost. Some schools require that students pay school fees, which is a cost. And if a student does exceptionally well they could win a place in a publically supported boarding school, which incurs a number of costs. What these costs add up to can make the difference between being able or unable to attend school. This is especially true for young people living on the street or students who come from poor families, families that do not have enough resources even to get by. Additionally, these decisions can be made along gender lines, where if a family can manage or sacrifice enough to enable some of its children to attend school it will choose the boys over the girls. The scholarship program seeks to eliminate these barriers so that vulnerable youth can get an education and join their peers at school. We continue to mentor the students who go on to university even after they are outside the scope of our program.
The technical training program is held at the schoolhouse on the Friends Peace House compound which includes a classroom for academic instruction, a sewing room where students learn to sew, and a studio for welding and other instruction. This program targets older youth and provides them with technical training so that they can be quickly employable. We are currently running a sewing program which trains students to be tailors and lasts for one year. While we have the students at the centre we include in their regular curriculum social and life-skills training as well as English training. We have vegetable gardens that cover most of our grounds and the students are expected to work in them. This way they gain skills in being able produce their own food and become able to feed themselves. Also when the centre has needs we use these as opportunity for instruction. When we do construction, the students learn how to make bricks so that they can build their own houses in the future. When we get the materials students learn how to do fabric dying and hairstyling so that they could start up small businesses. For the students who face literacy challenges we find a suitable past student to train that group in literacy. The students are also trained in conflict resolution and mediation as a way to overcome and problem solve for themselves the continuing daily challenges that they will face with others. This allows them to develop socially appropriate strategies to deal with the people in their community. Social education also includes developing a sense of self-worth and strategies for success, so that students will understand how to develop themselves and their businesses further once they gain a little success.
