July 22, 2010 Update
Project LIGHT: Rwanda
World's First International Youth Healing Center

for next week's Video Update re: August miracles.

Project LIGHT is beginning in Rwanda because the resilient young people I work with there have so much to teach us about how world healing can unfold. The fact that these young people, who have faced the worst of human tragedies, are willing to do the toughest work of healing and forgiving so they can find hope in their lives and help to rebuild their country, means that young people all over the world can change the course of history.
 
Petronia is one of those resilient genocide survivors. Connie and I first met Petronia (photo 1: lower left) after travelling to a town in southern Rwanda near the Burundi border where many survivors hid in the woods pictured here for three months to escape their families’ murderers. Just 8 years old when her family was murdered, Petronia became an Orphan Head of Household left to care for her sister as they fended for themselves all these years.

We were there to give gifts of fruit trees and vegetable plants to begin a community garden and to listen to their stories – a whole village of survivors gathered that day and Petronia told us her story long after our camera ran out of recording space. Terror, loneliness, hunger, and abuse filled her childhood and had left her, understandably so, hopeless, angry and despairing of her future.

In 2008, your donations funded Petronia’s high school education. In 2009, your donations funded Petronia’s participation in our trauma healing program. Photo 2 is Petronia speaking to me last summer about her life now and her hopes for the future.

She and her sister care for a friend who is dying from AIDs she contracted when she was raped as a child during the genocide. They have no food, no money and work is hard to come by but she says, the training has helped me help myself, my sister and my friend. I hope to counsel other people. It isn’t easy but I have hope because God is using you to help people like me and I thank Him everyday for that.

Petronia, and other young people like her, will be given a chance to heal, to help others, to work and to lead when funding for our Project LIGHT center comes through.

LIGHT = Leadership, Inspiration, Global Healing, Transformation

Be the LIGHT, Spread the LIGHT, Live the LIGHT!
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To my heart-centered supporters,

The miracle of Project LIGHT: Rwanda is being birthed because I made a commitment to follow my heart and you provided the wings to take me there. 

It is a miracle born because our hearts are connected – orphan genocide survivors, US students, our volunteer humanitarian team, and you.

 




Lori Leyden, PhD
Lori@CreateGlobalHealing.org