After a very full and blessed day with David and Comfort Rwanda, I met with Clement from Good News International and spent some time with the students at the Joy Centre VTC (Vocational Training Centre) the next day.
The aim of the Joy Centre VTC is to equip and prepare young people from disadvantaged backgrounds with the skills they need to acquire employment and secure a hope for the future. The current courses include sewing, welding, and ICT. In the near future, they also hope to start a carpentry department. All students study the level one programme, which is taught for 6 months, including 5 months of theory and practice and 1 month of internship. As well as vocational training, the centre provides a hub for community activities and sports and leisure. Young people, children, adults, those with disabilities, survivors and seekers are all invited to be part of the Joy Centre community.
I was really struck at the Joy Centre by the attentiveness to learning their trade the students have. They had amazing focus – despite me wandering round with a couple of huge cameras. One of the students I met, Helena, was pregnant when she started her course, and had given birth just a few weeks before I met her. Helena was so keen to not fall behind, she was back at the Joy Centre after a few days and told me that her teacher and fellow students were all helping her out with her baby, Nziza, so that she doesn’t fall behind at all.
Some of the students I met told me about their life before becoming a part of the Joy Centre; they said they felt hopeless, listless in life, often not knowing how they were going to feed themselves. Through the Joy Centre, they all feel a sense of hope in their life and can already see the change in their lives and in how they feel. It’s hard not to be inspired by the determination of the students, to have experienced hard times and yet not let themselves be dragged down by the way life has been beforehand. They showed a huge amount of resilience. They all pointed to God as the reason that their lives had turned around. One of the students, Samuel, told me that God has restored hope in him and that since starting at the Joy Centre he has a reborn sense of worth in his life.
As plans often do on trips like these, those I had for the rest of the day fell through, which gave me a chance to head back to the Good News Guesthouse and start working through the videos and photos created over the past 2 days. The Guesthouse is a fantastic place to stay in Kigali, and the amazing wildlife that visits the grounds is only slightly distracting…
