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The Journey to Kyangwali

“I don’t remember very well how Kyangwali became my home.”

Our families were brought to Kyangwali in big lorries. The first time I arrived in Kyangwali, I had been on a lorry for two days.

I am originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was born in the eastern part of the country in a village near Bunagana town. I left my home country for Uganda’s Kyangwali Refugee Settlement when I was six years old.

I remember coming in with my family and the vehicle entering the Bugoma forest. Kyangwali was in a thick, green forest near the equator. Baboons were all over. It was my first time seeing baboons, actually.

It was a terrifying experience.

When we first came, we were put in old school buildings. We were really worried.

Are we going to have a life here?

At first it was very, very hard. Every day, we heard the news, so-and-so has died, so-and-so has died. The ambulance siren scared everyone. Today, even when I am miles away from Kyangwali, my heart is troubled by the sound of a siren.

That’s when I decided to work very hard, to do whatever I could to change my situation. And my priority was to focus on my education. I worked hard in school.

A map of Kyangwali Refugee Settlement, as imagined and drawn by the artists of New Roots studio.

A map of Kyangwali Refugee Settlement, as imagined and drawn by the artists of New Roots studio.

Creating Community: The Spark behind CIYOTA

It was around December 2005 when my friends, Benson Wereje, Daniel Muhwezi, and Bahati Kanyamanza, brought forward an idea: together, we can start a youth group that can help us to encourage each other, support each other.

Everyone brought their passion, everyone brought their talent to make this happen.

It was the coming together of COBURWAS, which would eventually become COBURWAS International Youth Organization to Transform Africa (CIYOTA).

At first, when the idea came, we wanted it to be a Congolese students’ association. But we realized that there were others in Kyangwali, from other countries, who were having the same problems. And we thought, we will make this program inclusive, a shared connection among the people.

And so we made it COBURWAS — which stands for Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, and South Sudan — to represent those countries, so that every youth, every child feels that he or she is an equal member of this program and shares in whatever solution we come up with.

In Kyangwali, refugees were given a piece of land to farm their own food to eat. Later, when we established ourselves as a youth organization, we were able to request land to farm and to build a youth centre, the COBURWAS Learning Centre.

So we farmed and raised money. We did tutoring programs, and then, slowly, many things happened. We registered students so that they could continue their secondary studies and opened a hostel program for students to access secondary school in the nearby town of Hoima. And we built COBURWAS School for Kyangwali’s children with our own hands, applying the mud and plaster onto the school walls in 2007.

Involving Community, Raising Incomes

While focusing on putting children in primary school and secondary school, we realized that there are so many barriers to the education of children in Kyangwali. That’s when we decided to add what we call “community-building” to our programs, to help families to increase their income through small businesses while also creating awareness of the importance of education and an entrepreneurial mindset and skill set for children in the community.

By involving parents, by involving the community, we were able to start feeding children at COBURWAS School and to have money to pay teachers.

These programs you are seeing in Kyangwali — whether it’s the anti-violence tailoring project, the small business training for out-of-school girls, the computer literacy training we are supporting, or the micro-loans we are granting — for us, we call it community-building. This work is the result of our realization that the community needs to have a certain level of income to be able to support education.

Read more about Joseph’s story ❯

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