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- March 23, 2006
Refugee helps war-scarred youth
by Nicholas Keung
Immigration/Diversity Reporter
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A
victim "of history and politics," Patrick Ntare Sharangabo never gave up his
hope of attaining the university education so many fellow war-scarred
Rwandans were denied.
Now in his third year at the University of Toronto — where he has become a
serious student of history and politics — he juggles studies with a
full-time job. But that minor struggle is nothing compared with what the
recipient of the 2006 New Pioneers Youth Award endured during the genocide
that gripped Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
Sharangabo was only 12 on the morning of April 9, 1994, when classical music
began playing on the family radio — an omen of the Hutu killers' arrival to
his village near Kigali. "I knew something was wrong but didn't know what it
was," he recalls. "But my father said he remembered that's what happened
before the mass killings in 1973 — they started playing classical music on
the radio before killing everyone."
Soon truckloads of Hutus began arriving and raiding Tutsi homes. His father
and uncle were killed.
Left unconscious after being struck in the head, arm and leg with a machete,
Sharangabo was thrown into a mass grave and left for dead in the darkness.
"I lost a lot of blood and I was losing my mind. Then I opened my eyes and
saw the moon," he recounts. "I struggled to get out of the hole and I ran
away."
Sharangabo made it to Canada as a government-sponsored refugee in 1999, but
found his dreams thwarted.
Now 24, he recalls the sting of being told by a high-school guidance
counsellor that a university education was not for him. Unfamiliar with the
Canadian school system, Sharangabo discovered too late that the
applied-level courses he had taken would not lead him to the program he
wanted.
But he continued to chase the dream after graduating. While working
full-time as a customer service representative, he found the University of
Toronto's transitional-year program, designed for adult learners.
"I never gave up because I always had this dream to get a good education,
something many of my generation were denied because of wars," he says.
As a volunteer, Sharangabo helps youth from Rwanda who are now in Toronto to
deal with the emotional scars of war and teaches traditional Rwandan dance
and language to community children. He also gives speeches about the
genocide in high schools, community centres and colleges.
Sharangabo's story has been the subject of an exhibition at the Harbourfront
Centre that documented the lives of Rwandan refuges, and he has been
honoured previously with the university's Rona Abramovitch Award.
When admitted to U of T, Sharangabo had no hesitation picking his major — in
African and Aboriginal studies, along with political science.
"I'm not interested in a program that pays you well when you graduate. We
are victims of history; we are victims of politics," he notes. "I'd like to
contribute to the learning of history. It's the only way we can learn not to
repeat it."
