This is Reverend Canon Japhet Ndoriyobijya. He pastors at Murambi Church and St. Steven Cathedral in Kigail. He is currently working on his doctorate in theology at Fuller Seminary. He is also Director at the CEFORMI Vocational School where we visited him and some of the students who are diligently learning skills in a variety of trades.
When Japhet met Greg and Tracy Stone, founders of Rwanda Partners, he was working for African Evangelical Enterprise running “self help groups”. Currently his students are making some of the cloth bags that Rwanda Partners sells in Costco. The vocational programs he oversees have been highly successful, so Japhet has been asked to help train students at some of the other schools RP is partnering with.
Visiting CEFORMI Vocational School was, in every way, fun. Japhet, who lives with his family on the school grounds, greeted us with enthusiasm and eagerly walked us through some of the classrooms where students and teachers were focused on making things with their hands like stools, window casings, handbags, brick pillars and electrical circuits.
In each room, bright young men and women would smile at us briefly then continue working, eager, I think, to cast small visions for us of the lives to which their hands and minds were leading them – lives of stability and accomplishment, free from hunger and want. And the blue of their jumpsuits sang the same song – like the open sky above us.
God, bless these students by the work of their hands.
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