First Tribulation, Then Triumph
Religion professor’s work on Rwanda genocide helps net prestigious award for organization helping children orphaned by warfare.
USC Newsroom5/26/2006
http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/12459.html
By Eddie North-Hager
When he was 10 years old, Naphtal Ahishakiye found refuge in a tree as he watched his father’s murder.
For the next three months, he first hid in a river and then the forest, eluding the bands of hunters who killed his entire family and 800,000 other men, women and children. The unspeakable was over in 100 days, but there was little help for the 100,000 orphans that remained.
Twelve years after the Rwandan genocide ended, Ahishakiye was in a much different place.
He was in a castle in Sweden accepting $40,000 on behalf of AOCM, which, loosely translated, stands for the Association of Orphan Heads of Households.
He started the association as a way to organize orphans to help each other during the worst time of their lives and it’s still helping them as they raise a generation of parentless children.
The international recognition that AOCM is getting likely would not have happened were it not for the determined Donald Miller.
Miller, a professor of religion in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture, met Ahishakiye three years ago when he spoke about his 1993 book “Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide” at a conference on genocide in Rwanda.
Ahishakiye’s tale and his triumph touched Miller deeply.
“There was a need to deal with a sense of moral responsibility to those kids,” Miller recalled.
Miller soon returned to Rwanda with tape recorders so the survivors could document the tragedy. On another trip he brought a photographer. Recently he even took a small cadre of USC professors to see for themselves.
Last year he and his wife, Lorna Touryan Miller, director of the nonprofit New Vision Partners, compiled a book that put the photographs next to the orphan’s own words of survival, loss, heartache and hope. He sent the book to government officials, social activists and scholars around the world.
One of the recipients in Norway told Miller about the World's Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child. With nothing to lose, Miller nominated the AOCM, which was awarded the honor last month in Sweden.
The prestigious award, voted on by an international jury consisting of children who used to be child soldiers, debt-slaves, sex slaves, war victims and street children, was first bestowed in 2000. It is supported by Sweden's Queen Silvia, former South African president Nelson Mandela, East Timor President Xanana Gusmao and Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson.
“The children’s award to us strengthens the children’s fight for their rights in Rwanda,” Ahishakiye stated in a press release. “The award is also important for the reconciliation process in our country after the genocide. It has also given people worldwide more knowledge about the orphans’ situation today in Rwanda.”
More than 6,000 children orphaned by the genocide are a part of the association and help each other with food, clothes, schooling, housing and healthcare.
The prize money likely will be used to rebuild homes that were destroyed in 1994.
"I'm ecstatic about the potential multiplying effects of the prize," Miler said. "It gets worldwide publicity. We planted a seed and now we let it grow."
The other two prize winners were Jetsun Pema, the Dalai Lama's sister who has worked for 40 years for the rights of Tibetan refugee children, and a Canadian child rights campaigner who set up the Free the Children organization when he was 12.
Miller’s mission in Africa isn’t finished. This summer he’ll return to Rwanda for the ninth time in four years to conclude a study on how nongovernmental organizations are assisting genocide survivors in Rwanda as part of a grant from the Templeton Foundation through the Metanexus Institute.
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