The Girl With the Camera

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.

Every picture held a feeling. A message. A story.

Irakoze started printing her photos and hanging them on the wall of her room. Her mother saw them one day and cried. She saw herself in the picture, strong, focused, full of dignity. She had never seen herself that way before.

Soon, a teacher noticed her talent and helped her submit some photos to a local youth exhibition. To everyone’s surprise, Irakoze’s work was selected.

Her collection was titled:
“Things You Don’t Hear, But Should See.”

It told stories of ordinary people doing ordinary things, but with such quiet beauty that viewers were deeply moved.

Visitors came. They asked, “Who took these?”
And when they saw Irakoze standing silently in the corner, holding her camera, they understood:
She didn’t speak loudly, but she spoke clearly.

After the exhibition, Irakoze was invited to join a youth arts group. She got her first digital camera donated by a local foundation. She started teaching other silent kids how to capture emotion through photography.

She even launched a small Instagram page called  https://www.instagram.com/__be_ll__a___?igsh=dzBxNDY3ZHJocmNi&utm_source=qr, where her photos gained attention from all over the world.

Irakoze never stopped being quiet.
But now, she never needed to explain herself.
Her pictures spoke.

Not every voice is loud. Some voices shine through stillness, through light and frame, through emotion.
Irakoze’s story reminds us: you don’t have to talk to be heard: just find your way of speaking.

The Boy Who Fixed Radios

 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 system broke. It was the only one loud enough for music during the event. Panic spread. Hiring a technician from town was too expensive.

Someone, half-joking, said, “Why not give it to the radio boy?”

People hesitated. But there was no other choice.

Elie sat quietly with the giant radio, opened it, and studied the inside. After two hours of silence, sparks flew, wires sparked... then suddenly:

Music played.

Clear. Loud. Perfect.

The elders stared. The neighbors gasped. And just like that, the “radio boy” became Elie the Fixer.

 What Happened Next

Word spread. Radios, torches, and even TVs started showing up at Elie’s door. He opened a tiny shop under a mango tree with a sign that read:

"Nta gikoresho kiza gupfa burundu: Nothing is too broken to be fixed."

Years later, Elie started teaching younger kids what he had taught himself. One of his students even won a national science fair. Elie didn’t just fix radios, he fixed people’s belief in possibilities.

 Moral of the Story

Talent doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it whispers through sparks, wires, and effort. Elie’s story teaches us that even when no one believes in you, keep working. The moment to shine will come—and when it does, let your passion speak for you.

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 guitar. A mother brought her baby outside to cool off and ended up chatting with someone she hadn’t spoken to in years. Laughter echoed. Stories flowed. Strangers became friends.

For the first time in a long while, people really saw each other.

There were no bright screens, no background noise just human presence.

Some elders told stories of their youth, when there was no electricity at all. The younger ones listened, fascinated. A teenager took photos in the moonlight, saying, “This is the most alive this place has ever felt.”

The power came back at 11:43 PM.

Lights blinked on. Phones buzzed. TV volumes rose again.

But nobody moved.

They stayed outside just a little longer. They had remembered something that had been lost in the noise of modern life: connection.

 Reflection

That night, the darkness revealed a kind of light no bulb could offer. It reminded the people of Nyagasambu that while electricity powers homes, it’s human bonds that power hearts.

The Man Who Planted Hope

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 passed. Some trees died. Many survived.

By the third year, something strange happened: birds returned. Then came butterflies. Then came the rain just a little more than before. The small green patch that Mzee Gasana had started was growing, and people started noticing.

A young boy followed him one day. Then another. One woman offered to carry water for his trees. Soon, others joined. What was once a joke had become a movement.

By the tenth year, the dry hills had transformed into a greenbelt. The air was cooler. The stream flowed again. The soil was richer. And the children had a place to play under the shade of mango and avocado trees.

One journalist from the city came and wrote an article called “The Man Who Planted Hope.” His story spread across the country. He was invited to speak at schools, churches, and even international conferences in not for money, but to share one simple message:

“When you plant a tree, you don’t just plant wood. You plant hope.”

Mzee Gasana didn’t seek recognition. He didn’t want fame. He just wanted life to return to the land.

And thanks to him, it did.

Reflection/Call to Action:
What if each of us planted just one tree? What if we chose to create rather than complain? This story is a reminder that change doesn’t need to be big to be powerful it just needs to begin.