Finding Way to Bridge 7,000 Miles
Rwandan nun and students learn together in South Boston
by Jill S. Gross, Boston Globe
February 2, 2024

With the help of a Rwandan nun, a small classroom at the Paraclete Center in South Boston has been transformed into a learning laboratory in which middle-school students are researching the troubled African nation.

The students gather information on the currency, languages, and history of Rwanda as one of many projects they participate in at the center, which provides academic help and educational enrichment for urban youth in grades 5-8.

But on this project, Sister Anna Beata, headmistress of a Catholic school in Rwanda's Butare Province, offers the students a living lesson from a nation ravaged by civil war and a 1994 genocide that killed as many as 1 million people.

For Beata, spending six months studying at the center provides a chance to sharpen skills and gather ideas that her community and her students, including 400 orphans of the genocide, need to help their nation rebuild.

For the Paraclete Center students, many of whom have little experience outside South Boston, Beata offers a glimpse of life in a country 7,000 miles away.

''It is very difficult to expose youth to the wider world without a very personal, concrete connection, and that's what she's providing,'' said Sister Ann Fox, the Paraclete Center's executive director.

During a recent class, students peppered Beata with questions about her school and students: What sports do they play? How long is their school day? What subjects do they study? What languages do they speak?

''I wish I could visit,'' Kemi Pham, a fifth-grader at the Michael J. Perkins School, said later, as she composed an e-mail message to students at Beata's Sainte Bernadette school in Rwanda. ''I want to see how they're doing, get to know where the place is, and learn more about their school.''

The exploration of the African nation is one way the center is teaching its 100 students both subject matter and skills through projects such as designing advertising materials for real businesses and building robots for competitions.

The Paraclete Center, which was organized in 1996 and is funded through individual and corporate donations, also offers English and math courses to students who need to catch up on lessons, get assistance with homework, and prepare to apply to the city's exam schools.

Beata's visit highlights a growing connection between the center and Rwanda. The relationship began when Rwandan participants in a peace conference visited two years ago. Fox forged a friendship with one of the participants, now governor of Kigali-Rural Province in central Rwanda. Last summer, Fox traveled to Rwanda, where she met Beata.

Now, the center's high-school students are creating an official website for the Kigali-Rural Province. The teenagers are sifting through pictures, deciding on color schemes, and developing content. The site will probably include tourism information that the younger students find in their research.

Fox also hopes to help establish a center in Kigali-Rural Province similar to the Paraclete Center, possibly sending members of the center's volunteer teaching corps to help start the program. Eventually, the Paraclete Center would like to have a hand in building a girls school there, Fox said.

Beata said that the educational enrichment the center provides in South Boston is badly needed in Rwanda, where many families survive by subsistence farming and jobs are scarce.

Students in Rwanda must pass national exams to be admitted to high school or college, and there are few opportunities for the majority who fail the examinations to learn skills needed to find work, she said.

''We want computers as a tool of learning,'' Beata said. ''We want to have centers like this for extra-hours education. People want to learn.''

During her stay at the Paraclete Center, she is learning computer English and keyboarding skills. She plans to return to her students knowing word processing and spreadsheet programs.

Although her 800-student school has only one computer, Beata sees the technology she is learning as a means to make up for insufficient resources, including a shortage of teachers and a lack of money for science laboratories. Additional computers and software could help bring science experiments to life and offer students a chance to learn other material independently.

Fox said a Paraclete Center could open in Kigali-Rural Province as soon as supporters can raise the $75,000 to $100,000 needed to build it and outfit it with computers and supplies. A member of the center's volunteer teaching corps already wants to make the journey to Africa.

''We created Paraclete thinking others would want to copy it,'' said Fox, who expected another center would pop up some place nearby, like Dorchester. ''It was Rwanda that was the first.''

Beata said that her visit and the potential to continue sharing ideas and resources offer great hope to her nation as it tries to recover from past conflicts and jump from a largely agrarian economy to the information age.

''We need schools. We need computers. We need friendship,'' Beata said. ''Education is the field to focus on in building the future.''

This story ran on page B9 of the Boston Globe on 2/2/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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