RAUW Member Profiles
Stephanie Nyombayire
2009 Projects Convener, Rwanda Association of University Women
Service Delivery Officer, Orphans of Rwanda
By Edward Guthmann
 At first glance, Stephanie Nyombayire looks like a fashion model. Tall and slender and pretty, she wears her hair in an asymmetrical cut and looks like she stepped off the page of a glossy magazine. An image is only a fraction of a person and, in Stephanie’s case, the wealth of accomplishments, idealism and resolve that run beneath that image is extraordinary.
Stephanie, a 2008 graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, is one of the newest and youngest members of the Rwandan Association of University Women (RAUW). In 2005, she won international recognition when she and six other American university students created the Genocide Intervention Network, an NGO aimed at drawing attention to the Darfur tragedy in Sudan and raising funds for the protection of civilians.
In March 2005, when she was only 18, Stephanie spent a week touring Darfurian refugee camps on the Chad/Sudanese border. Two other college students, one from Boston University and one from Georgetown University in Washington, DC were also on the trip, which MTV filmed for Translating Genocide, a documentary that premiered on MTV in March 2006. It can be viewed at www.mtvu.com.
“I didn't want to be part of the people who choose silence in the face of genocide,” Stephanie said in March 2008 at the Clinton Global Initiative panel on student activism. “So we decided, as students at Swarthmore College, that we were going to break the silence that surrounds genocide, break the impunity that surrounds genocide.”
Stephanie turned 22 in December 2008. Soft-spoken and modest, she seems embarrassed when I praise her work and mention the acclaim she’s received for her humanitarian work. “I’m not that big a star,” she says.
Many would argue. In March 2007, Glamour magazine named her Hero of the Month for her work on behalf of Darfur. In the same year Glamour magazine included her among the top ten college women in America. She was also honored by Rwanda’s First Lady Jeannette Kagame for her efforts against genocide and abuse.
Today, Stephanie is living in Kigali after seven years in the US – three years at the private school in Connecticut where she won a scholarship; four years at Swarthmore College, where she majored in political science with a minor in psychology. She’s living with her parents. Her father is a retired banker and her mother owns a Rwandese restaurant in Kigali called La Planete.
During a conversation at the home of RAUW founder Shirley Randell in Kiyovu, Stephanie spoke about Darfur, her career aspirations and her new job with Orphans of Rwanda (ORI). An American-based NGO, ORI provides university scholarships along with health care, housing, emotional counseling and job placement to Rwandese youth. Many were orphaned by the 1994 genocide, some by the HIV/AIDS and malaria epidemics.
“My focus has always been on younger people,” Stephanie says, “and a lot of Rwanda is made up of people who are very young. A lot of them don’t have parents because of the genocide and a lot of them had to raise younger siblings from the age of 10. So, for the next two years or so, I’ll be trying to focus on youth and opportunities that will move them forward.”
Growing up, Stephanie was always reminded by her parents that she was privileged. “It’s always been very present in my mind that I can’t really waste the opportunities that I’m given”.
Clearly, Stephanie has a brilliant future and the potential to affect change on a global level. She plans to work two years with ORI and then enroll in a US law school. She has become such a prominent symbol of the struggle against genocide that in July 2005 she was asked to introduce former President Bill Clinton at the Campus Progress National Student Conference in Washington DC. In her opening remarks, Stephanie encouraged the audience to “always follow our words with action.”
Clinton, in the keynote address that followed, praised Stephanie for her work and apologized for the United States’ shameful lack of intervention during the Rwandan genocide. He called it “the biggest regret of my administration.”
It was her own family story that gave Stephanie her passion against injustice. She was born in 1986 in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where her Rwandan parents, both Tutsis, were living in exile. At the time of the genocide, she was 7 years old.
“I lost one hundred of my family members,” she wrote in a 2005 letter to student activists. “My grandparents were shot and many of my uncles and aunts were killed along with their children. In 100 days, Hutu extremists armed with machetes or any weapon they could find, slaughtered half of the Tutsi population as the international community not only chose to stand by and watch, but also pulled out all peacekeepers.”
Like thousands of exiled Tutsis, Stephanie’s parents returned to Rwanda almost immediately after the killing stopped. It is that huge wave of returning exiles – from Uganda, from Burundi, from Kenya, Tanzania and Europe, estimated at more than 750,000 -- that has helped to rebuild the country. “The whole idea was that people fought for us to come home, died for us to come home,” Stephanie says. “So there was a strong sense of, ‘We finally have a place of our own to come back to. We finally have a place that is our home’.”
The memory of the genocide never leaves. When Stephanie traveled to Chad to see the Darfurian refugee camps, she wrote, “I met one young girl whose story I will always remember. At 15 years old, she had seen both her parents getting killed before she was raped by the Janjaweeds (Darfur-based militia). She then had to walk for 50 days across the desert to reach safety in Chad. She is now living on her own in a refugee camp with no hope that tomorrow will be a better day”.
“Her story is only one in millions. We must refuse to let Darfur become another Rwanda.” |
