Last Meeting’s Program: Last Week: Amahoro: Promoting Sustainable Peace and
Development in Burundi

“Amahoro” is the Kirundi word for peace. Dr. Bill Timpson shared his vision of Amahoro for the Burundians in Ngozi. Burundi is one of the poorest countries in the world. They have survived colonization and forty years of violence. Even with unrest in the surrounding areas, the region of Ngozi has remained peaceful. The Amahoro project is committed to educate the people of Ngozi by infusing peace studies with an emphasis on critical and creative thinking in universities as well as the public elementary and secondary school systems.

With help of CSU, Rotary and the University of Ngozi (UNG), the Amahoro Project is focused in the pursuit of sustainable peace and development. The key projects and focus areas aimed achieve this goal are:

Build a new curriculum that emphasizes appropriate technology and participatory case-and project-based learning.
Infuse UNG’s existing disciplines: health, agriculture, communications, law, business, computer sciences – with new curricula that emphasizes content mastery and peace building.
Using sports equipment, build on what we know about cooperative learning to create multi-tribal teams and showcase the benefits of friendly competition for unlearning hatred and prejudice.
Rotary International and their commitment to Peace and Conflict Resolution, business and community leaders can be partnered with educators to infuse peace studies.
Promote community health through innovative education and social work.

This project has been supported by Rotary. Robin Steele reported that our club contributed $50,000 towards this and other projects and thanks to the matching funds from RI and others, this has turned into a total support of $760,472.