FAYETTEVILLE – He’s 8,000 miles from home, but Janvier Masabo is finding a little bit of home at St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish.
Masabo is one of 52 students from Rwanda, each of whom won prestigious four-year scholarships to American universities. After completing their degrees, the students are required to return home to help rebuild their country, still recovering after brutal genocidal attacks of the 1990s that resulted in the deaths of as many as 1 million people
Like many of his fellow scholars, Masabo is Catholic and in high school he attended what he and his friends refer to as “junior seminary.” For those young men with religious vocations, the junior seminary does provide them with preparatory programs to enter regular seminary. For others, it’s simply best place to get an education, Masabo explained.
While he thought “a little bit” about becoming a priest in his third year, Masabo decided a religious vocation was not in his future. Now, through the Rwandan Presidential Scholars Program, he’s studying chemical engineering at the University of Arkansas and singing, as his studies allow, in the choir at St. Thomas.
Hendrix College in Conway is administering the scholars program and all 52 of this year’s freshmen spent several weeks in Fayetteville this summer, polishing their English skills through the UA’s Spring Institute. In August, they went their separate ways to colleges throughout the state and in Texas, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina.
This is the third year for the scholar program. The first year, four students were chosen to participate. That grew to 25 last year, ballooning to 52 this year.
For those Catholic students studying at the UA, they’ve found an American who knows a great deal about their country: Jay Carney, a campus minister at St. Thomas and a doctoral student at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. His dissertation topic concerns Rwanda’s violent history in the context of the Church, and he hopes to visit the country in the next few months. He visited Rome earlier this year for part of that research.
“There are three Catholic students at least, maybe even five, and several other Rwandan students at the (UA),” Carney said. “A couple of them have been involved with Domus a Domus,” a parish ministry (the name is Latin for “house to house”) for international students.
Obviously more knowledgeable about Rwanda than most Americans, Carney said the nation is often referred to as the “most Catholic” of African countries. The Catholic population is estimated at 47 percent.
Ignace Mugabo, another of this year’s freshman class, is studying at University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
“I’ve been surprised with how people are nice,” he said at the group’s summer picnic in August. “Everyone smiles at you, welcomes you, in the U.S.”
He had already noticed that the Catholic population of Arkansas was less than at home.
“We’ve seen not too many Catholics,” he said.
He, too, attended junior seminary and was accustomed to attending daily Mass back home.
“My father asked me many times if I wanted to be a priest,” Mugabo said, and he prayed with his family about the subject. But, “I didn’t feel the vocation to be a priest.” He planned to study civil engineering instead.
Mugabo, like his fellow students, is excited about studying and serious about his commitment to return home and rebuild Rwanda.
“My parents were refugees,” he said, who left Rwanda in 1976 and returned years later. “Sometimes, it’s kind of like a miracle: Rwanda is a poor country where everything was mowed down.”
The chance for an education is “the light of hope.”
