Kaze’s Connection
Martin and Claudette (Kaze’s parents)
We first learned about Kazeneza Didacienne through a GoFundMe she had launched to help raise funds for Kaze to complete her A1 diploma in electrical and electronics engineering. She needed $1400, and a former Allegheny College professor, Nicole Gross-Camp, and her students had raised only $400.
Our president, Cheryl Hatch, taught journalism in the public interest at Allegheny for four years. She saw a need where Women’s Education Initiative could help. We offered to pay whatever they could not raise for Kaze’s fees.
We helped fund Kaze’s studies, and she graduated from Integrated Polytechnic Regional College TUMBA in Kigali, Rwanda, on Oct. 25, 2019.
We asked Nicole, an environmental social scientist, to share her story about how she met Kaze. We share her words here.
In 2002, I traveled to Rwanda to conduct my graduate research on chimpanzee seed dispersal in the Nyungwe National Park in southwestern Rwanda. My husband, Simon, and I lived in a small house in the park and spent long days in the field tracking my study subjects. We decided to hire someone to help cook and maintain the house; this person was Martin Nsengimuremyi. Martin is approximately 10 years my senior and was born and raised in the town of Gisakura on the park’s periphery. His family, including his parents and grandparents, lived in Gisakura as subsistence farmers producing bananas, plantains, avocado, papaya, beans, tomatoes and potatoes. Claudette, his wife, was a teacher in the primary school.
The three of us would pass the evenings learning about one another’s lives. My husband and I were captivated by Martin’s stories as a young man, before the paved road was built bisecting the park’s interior, when people would regularly encounter forest elephants - now extirpated. He also shared his own deeply disturbing experience of the 1994 genocide, when he and his heavily pregnant wife, Claudette, fled into the neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Martin described the challenges of living in refugee camps and their decision to flee once again into the Congolese forests with their newly born daughter, where they would ‘drink’ water from the dew that formed on leaves. The hardships they endured were humbling; to do so with a newborn, extraordinary. The small baby girl born in exile was Kazeneza, her name roughly translates as ‘good welcome’ and indeed, she was.
I have only met Kazeneza on a handful of occasions; I ‘know’ her best through her father and my friend, Martin. In the many evenings we passed together in the park, our respect and affection for one another grew. Martin was particularly curious about my own family dynamics; I was studying for my doctorate but my husband only had a high school diploma. Was that not odd for the wife to be better educated? Martin openly admired Simon’s and my mutually loving and respectful relationship. He, too, had deep respect for his wife and was proud that she was a teacher whilst he stayed home, tending the farm and caring for their children.
Rwandans, as in many other cultures, put a lot of expectations on their children, especially their firstborn. Martin was no different expecting Kazeneza to accomplish great things. We began to support Kaze’s studies in high school and were thrilled to learn of her success in securing a place at university. Only students that pass a series of national exams are offered a place at Rwandan university, and it is then up to them to come up with the funding to support their studies.
It is at this point in the story that the Women’s Education Initiative entered. Through serendipity, I connected with Cheryl Hatch; and, well, the rest is history! Supporting Kazeneza’s studies go beyond her as an individual; her success is undoubtedly tied to her family, bringing them greater social capital; and, hopefully, one day, financial security, too.
