Oliver blog

Irakoze story: Byiringiro Olivier Discovering a Voice Without Words In a small, quiet neighborhood on the edge of Kigali, there lived a girl named Irakoze. She was 14 years old, and very silent. Not because she had no voice, but because words didn’t come easily to her. In class, she hardly raised her hand. At home, she kept to herself. People assumed she was shy, or even strange. But Irakoze wasn’t silent because she lacked something—she was silent because she saw things differently. One rainy afternoon, while exploring her late uncle’s old belongings, she found a dusty camera at the bottom of a wooden box. It was scratched and half-broken, but something about it felt alive in her hands. She took it home. No one paid much attention. At first, she took photos of flowers and insects. Then she started taking photos of people: her mother cooking, her little brother sleeping, her neighbor sweeping the road, street kids playing with a plastic ball, an old man looking out a window. Ev...

  A Story of Passion and Possibility In the quiet village of Rubaya, there was a boy named Elie. He was 15, shy, and always curious. While other boys played football in the fields, Elie spent his afternoons digging through old electronics behind his father’s house broken radios, dead phones, even shattered cassette players. No one taught him how to fix anything. He just tried . He’d take broken radios from neighbors, pull them apart, examine the wires, and experiment. Sometimes he got lucky. Sometimes he made things worse. But every failure was a lesson. Every spark or click told him something. People laughed. “Wasting time on junk,” they said. “He should be doing something useful.” “None of those things will ever work again.” But Elie didn’t stop. His hands were always stained with dust and solder. He didn’t care about praise—he just wanted to understand how things worked. One day, during preparations for a village wedding, the local community center’s big public radio sy...

When the Lights Went Out A Night That Changed Everything It was just after 7 PM when the power went out. story by Byiringiro Olivier At first, no one paid much attention. Power cuts were common in the small town of Nyagasambu. People assumed it would come back in an hour or two. But as minutes turned to hours, the silence began to stretch. No music from radios. No buzzing of televisions. No lights flickering through windows. Just darkness and quiet. Phones were dying. Fridges were warming. Boredom started to creep in. But something strange happened that night. An old man lit a charcoal stove outside and started boiling tea. A neighbor, curious and tired of sitting in the dark, brought a chair to join him. Then came another. A group of children, free from screens and homework, began playing hide-and-seek by moonlight. Soon, the entire neighborhood seemed to spill out of their homes. Someone lit a fire and roasted maize. A young woman began singing softly. Another picked up a gui...

Environmental Healing A Story by BYIRINGIRO OLivier In a dry, dusty village where the earth cracked under the sun and the trees were long gone, people had learned to live without shade or rain. It hadn’t always been like this. Years ago, the land was rich, green, and full of birds. But slowly, the trees were cut down first for firewood, then for farming. No one planted anything back. The rains grew less and less. Streams dried up. And eventually, so did people’s hope. Except for one man. His name was Mzee Gasana, a quiet, retired teacher in his late sixties. Every morning before sunrise, he would walk out with a shovel, a jerrycan of water, and a small sack of seeds. He would dig, plant, water—and leave. Every single day. At first, people laughed. “Why waste your time, old man?” they said. “Even God has left this place dry.” “You can’t plant trees in dust!” But Mzee Gasana didn’t argue. He kept planting one seedling at a time. One tree at a time. One morning at a time. Seasons...