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Posted: July 2nd, 2010 Greg Lacour

On Sunday, most of us were grilling out and setting off fireworks, or watching other people set them off.

But that day, six students in The Echo Foundation’s Student Ambassador program boarded a plane bound for a country as removed from national celebration and affluence as you can imagine: Rwanda.

It’ll be the second foundation-sponsored trip to the east-central African nation, one that’s recovered astoundingly well from a 1994 genocide that left an estimated 800,000 people dead. Since then, the nation has made tremendous strides in government, infrastructure, economic growth and education.

It’s the last category that the student ambassadors will tackle; the country is far from a full recovery. For two weeks, the six students will help complete a children’s library at the Nkondo 1 Primary School in Rwinkwavu, a village near the Tanzanian border, and deliver books and other supplies to the school.

The trip is part of the foundation’s Footsteps Global Initiative, which offers intensive study and trips abroad for Charlotte-region students. The initiative was born out of a summer 2007 European trip that retraced the journey of professor, human rights activist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who helped found Echo in Charlotte after a 1997 visit.

During the trip, students began piecing together the connections between the Holocaust and modern-day genocides in Rwanda and Darfur in neighboring Sudan, said foundation Director Stephanie Ansaldo.

But a Darfur trip would be too dangerous. Through a friend, though, Ansaldo learned about Partners In Health, an organization that works to provide health care for the poor in developing countries.

PIH helped the foundation adopt the Nkondo School. Echo sent 12 student ambassadors to Rwanda in 2008 with badly needed school supplies and building materials. The foundation wanted to send another 12-student group last year but couldn’t raise enough money in a recession.

“It became clear that Rwanda was a beautiful example of a country that has had a genocide but is rebuilding,” Ansaldo said. “They have made a commitment to heal the country.”

That’s part of what fascinates Janie Urbanowicz, who graduated from Myers Park High School in May and plans to enter Tulane University in New Orleans in the fall. Urbanowicz said she wants to major in pre-med with an emphasis on public health, and she strongly wanted to see firsthand the challenges of health care in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 20 million people in the region are HIV-positive, and thousands every year die of diseases – dysentery, yellow fever, malaria – largely unheard of in the West.

This will be Urbanowicz’s first trip outside the United States.

“The thing to me is that a lot of these diseases are curable or at least manageable by medication, but there's a disconnect,” she said. “So I really wanted to learn more about that and maybe not aggravate the situation but one day do something to help it.”

The other five students all are students at, or recent graduates of, Myers Park High: Kainee Aguilar, Joseph Biernacki, Izzy Francke, Sazzy Gourley and Nikki Iacopetti.

Francke said she’s more interested in human rights and international relations than medicine; she’ll be starting her freshman year at UNC Chapel Hill in the fall. She’s traveled overseas, mainly in Europe and the Caribbean.

“I’ve seen poverty, driven around and interacted with people … but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the scale I’m going to be seeing in Rwanda. It’ll probably be shocking, but a good shocking,” she said. “I hope it inspires me to go on with this kind of work.”

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