The Future We Will Build

At the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village (ASYV), each of our students finds a home—and starts a journey. “My life before ASYV was very complicated. I wasn’t having any hope for the future,” says student Emmanuel Singeniyo in the below video. “When I joined ASYV, I just glanced up my eyes and looked forward.” 

Now in his fourth year in the Village, Emmanuel doesn’t just have hope, he has confidence he can help build a better future for himself, his country and the world. “I have a dream to be a real journalist.” Fellow fourth-year student John Kelly Rukundo adds of his own ASYV journey, “The structure of ASYV is very transformative. We can doubt ourselves. We feel inferior. We feel small. But we are bigger than we can think.” 

The video’s director, Ngabonziza Libens, ASYV Class of 2018, couldn’t agree with his younger ASYV siblings more. Before coming to the Village, he had never dreamt of a career in film. Today, he works as the official cinematographer at Envision, an arts and media collective in Kigali. “My younger siblings stories' are deeply personal to me. I have walked the same path as them, and I understand what ASYV means in our lives," says Libens. "I tell these stories not just to inspire others, but to honor the place that made me who I am—that welcomed me, opened my eyes to a world of possibilities, and gave me the freedom to choose my own path."

Libens also led the creation of the below music video—performed, arranged, directed, and produced entirely by our students and alumni using skills and passions they developed at ASYV. As our kids sing in the video, “We are the people we’ve been waiting for. The streets of Rwanda to the world, we’ll build it better than we did before.”

That’s the power of our family.