Video 10: Gemini and Geraldine

ORI, Funding Higher Education
Photography & Music
by Kasia Romanska
Written & Produced
by Parker Snyder
Translation by
Jennifer Schechter
In support Dr. Allen Snyder
This year, 1550 young men and women wrote handwritten applications and walked them to one of five country wide collection points. With an acceptance rate more stringent than Harvard, Orphans of Rwanda selected 68 students to enter University.
In January they'll start their classes and ORI will foot the bill for tuition, housing and a living stipend.
What makes this class of talented young people unique is that they all, largely by cause of the genocide & HIV Aids, are single or double parent orphans. Some suffer from headaches after being injured during the genocide. Others eat once a day because they are 1 of 10 people living in the same house. Some even take charge of the household.Getting a scholarship is easy compared to the difficulties some face after entering University. The instruction is in English, French & Kinyarwanda. Some have bounced around considerably and academic skills have suffered. Still others leave behind a household full of children for whom they are the primary care givers.
But these scholars are Rwanda's future leaders thanks to ORI, founded by two young men from the United States who bought Christmas gifts to an orphanage one year and afterwards decided they needed to do something about all the talented young people condemned to an unfulfilled life.
University education is one way to promote unity in a society set adrift by ideological differences based on perceptions of ethnicity which in reality are hard to define after years of intermarriage. In a modernized market economy jobs are given to the most qualified, and as more and more people go to college, Hutu or Tutsi will cease to matter.
For that reason ORI is Promoting Unity among the Rwandese, one of the 12 Caring Habits.

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Tags:

• 80percentangel
• university
• gemini
• geraldine
• genocide
• education