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 By Brook Comer
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| The tiny African nation of Rwanda, bordered by the Congo, Uganda and Tanzania is known for its dry hills and bloody wars. It’s a far cry from the peace and quiet of Los Olivos, where civic rebellion is fought not with bullets, but in town hall meetings, over issues and zoning laws. But for Jean-Luc Ngabo, a Dunn School sophomore who came to the Santa Ynez Valley two years ago, Los Olivos and his native Rwandian city of Kigali have something in common; they’re both “home.” Kigali is a large, modern city where Jean-Luc lived with his family until he was ten. He and his younger sister Joyce were the sole survivors of a massacre that killed their mother, another sister, most of their relatives and members of their church congregation; their father, an auto parts distributor, moved his children first to rural Tanzania, then to Kiserian, an even more remote area in Kenya, to keep them out of the range of gunfire. Kiserian “was like living in the middle of nowhere,” says Jean-Luc. “It was like being on another planet.” His father tried to send his children to school in America, “but we couldn’t get visas,” Jean-Luc recalls. “We tried about eight times.” At his son’s urging, Jean-Luc’s father made one more attempt to get visas was finally successful. Jean-Luc and his sister were sent to school in the Philippines, which gave them exposure to the English language and to a culture outside of Africa. English was difficult at first for Jean-Luc, who grew up speaking French and Swahili, but he quickly mastered it and is now studying Spanish. A family friend in Chicago helped Jean-Luc apply and be accepted to Dunn. To help him acclimate to American culture, he was sent to summer school at North field Mount Herman School in Massachusetts, where he had relatives nearby. “People at Northfield Mount Herman were very friendly, a lot like the people at Dunn,” he notes. But he likes Dunn’s smaller size, which makes the school more intimate, more like a family. “It’s friendlier in other ways too,” he says. “At my school in Rwanda, we wore uniforms, we weren’t allowed to speak in class and physical punishment was the rule.” “I was looking forward to playing soccer again,” says Jean-Luc, who’d begun playing at age four and had to stop when he moved to the Philippines , where soccer was not part of the sports curriculum. “And I was surprised when it didn’t come right back to me. It was like learning to play all over again.” At Dunn he discovered a passion for basketball, his new favorite sport. Food was another adjustment; “everything was so different, and I didn’t like it at first. I called my aunt and told her I was going to starve to death.” But his tastes quickly changed; “I remember when I had my first bean and rice burrito. I thought it was so strange! I thought, what IS this? Now I love burritos.” Not everything in America is different for Jean-Luc. His favorite rapper from childhood, Tupac, is popular here, and he’s now added Dr. Dre and R&B star R. Kelly to his list of favorites. He’d like to go to college in America and become a doctor, or a film producer, and he’s currently writing his life story, assisted by Jason Whitney, a Dunn English teacher. He’s writing his memoirs “because so much happened there, and people know nothing about it. I need to tell my story.” “I want to go back to Rwanda and help people there,” says Jean-Luc. “It’s not safe yet, and I want to make it better. There are still children who don’t have food.” Los Olivos, in comparison, is a peaceful place and Dunn is more than a school; “I just call it home,” says Jean-Luc. “That I was able to come here makes me feel like I am the luckiest person in the whole world.” |
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Copyright 2004, Inside Santa Ynez Valley Magazine, All Rights Reserved |
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