Umubano

The mission of the Umubano program is to empower students in the US and Rwanda to cultivate sustainable cross-cultural relationships with the goal of increasing global awareness, compassion, critical thinking, and grassroots activism.

A new Program Chapter Director has joined the Umubano team!
Noah Gehling from Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Umubano program at CKS began back in March of this year, when Marie Berry, Joe Stockton, and myself did a presentation for the 4th-8th graders about our trip to Rwanda in 2007 and the Umubano program. The students decided that Umubano was a program that they wanted to participate in, and quickly started writing letters to their partner school, Mburabuturo Primary School in Kigali, Rwanda. The CKS students were then able to hear the Director of Rwandan NGO Amani Africa speak at school to talk to them about students their age in Rwanda. The CKS students soon began a school supplies drive when they found out that schools in Rwanda many times don’t even have simple supplies like pens and paper. These supplies were taken to Rwanda this last summer.

In the last month, CKS students received their response letters from Mburabuturo Primary School and were led in a discussion about what their Rwandan pen-pals had to say. Based on these letters, and their own ideas about partnering with their sister school, the CKS students will be planning their activities for the Umubano program for the rest of the year. Future activities include a scrapbook exchange, where both sister schools will exchange scrapbooks they made about their interests and experiences, as well as an art workshop where CKS students will look at drawings by Rwandan students and use these as inspiration for their own art creations which they will then send to their sister school.

As I (Melissa) prepared for our first discussion about the letters that I would have with students at Christ the King School, I wondered if it would be difficult to get the students excited about hearing what their pen-pals had to say. I wondered if they would think they were better than their pen-pals because their pen-pals’ English wasn’t as good as their own. I wondered if they would just laugh at the letters and throw them away. Boy was I wrong! The students savored every word that their pen-pals wrote, exuberantly discussing with their classmates about about how their pen-pal loved chocolate just like they did, or how they both were the oldest in their family. One girl told me, “I love to travel and see new places, and so does my pen-pal!” The students and I discussed questions that they might ask their pen-pal in their response letters. Another student said “I would like to learn what kinds of things my pen-pal likes to draw and write about, because I like to draw draw and write.” The students were amazed at all the things they had in common with their pen-pals and how their pen-pals were just normal kids like they were. The Umubano program seeks to bring these commonalities to the surface early on in our own lives – humanizing nameless faces of people across the world that both countries see in their textbooks and the media. The more students who become involved in the Umubano program, the more awareness we can create and relationships we can form!