HAMBURG SCHOOLS
Hamburg schools seek partnership with Rwanda village
So much for summer vacation. A group of Hamburg school administrators is headed to Africa this week to lay the groundwork for a program they hope will change the lives of their students, as well as those who live on the other side of the world.
Embarking on the two-week journey today to Rwanda are five members of the Hamburg School District, including School Superintendent Mark Crawford and School Board member Gregory Wichlacz.
Crawford said he hopes the trip will foster a long-term relationship with Gakoni High School and its 1,000 students in a poor village in eastern Rwanda.
He said the purpose of his first meeting with school officials there is to develop contacts, cement relationships and, in the process, find out what Hamburg can do as a district to aid its impoverished counterparts in Gakoni on educational and humanitarian levels.
Eventually, Crawford said, he would like to welcome exchange students from that African district and, if conditions are considered safe, allow students from Hamburg to travel there.
“We would like our high schoolers to be aware and have an understanding of what’s going on in Third World countries, the social injustice, the poverty,” Crawford said. “I want students here to know that they can make a difference in the world.”
Grants, including $15,000 from the Hamburg School Foundation, are funding the trip, with additional financial support provided by Churches in Action. Buffalo for Africa, a nonprofit group, has helped with cultural guidance for the trip, as has Carl Wilkens, the only American who stayed in Rwanda during the 1994 atrocities when nearly a million people were killed by warring tribes in 100 days.
Crawford said the trip is an extension of the Summer Institute for Human Rights and Genocide Studies that was held for the first time at Hamburg High School last year. The weeklong lecture series was headed by national experts on genocide who spoke to students, and survivors gave personal accounts.
This summer, the institute, open to students from all districts, had been expanded to two weeks, July 27 to Aug. 7.
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