STORY BY TARA GUAIMANO
ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE CARLYLE
When Charlotte Uwimana was 10 years old, her father told her to “act like a boy.”
“In my village, they don’t value education for girls,” Charlotte said. “My dad kind of has a different way of thinking about it. He told us, ‘I don’t have a lot for you, so education is the only thing that I can give you.’”
From there, she helped to rewrite the history of her family’s hardships amongst high social tensions facing the developing world today. Come May 2020, she will be one of three women in her village to finish university, alongside her two older sisters.
Charlotte was born in the Benaco Refugee camp in Tanzania in 1995, where her family fled to during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. She was raised in Mushongi Village, a rural community in the Eastern Province of Rwanda, that just received access to electricity in 2017.
Charlotte is one of six siblings, with five sisters and one brother. Today, she uses a portion of her earnings from working on-campus at the Card Services desk in Donnelly Hall in order to pay her brother’s annual school dues.
Other adults in her village told her father that sending his five girls to school would be a waste of money. “I grew up thinking that there is nothing a boy can do that I can’t do,” Charlotte said. “I see myself and my sisters being role models. Many parents are now sending their girls to school. Before, they would just get married.”
Out of the 19 students in her class at Mushongi Primary School, Charlotte was the only one to pass the national examination. “My dad would say, ‘I understand you are the first in your class, but why don’t you get a 90?’ Target higher than what you can achieve.”
Despite her family’s relentless value in education and faith in the future of their children, finishing school was extremely difficult. One of the biggest challenges was having access to the classroom in general. In 2003, a new government policy and district change forced her to attend a primary school that was two hours away — on foot.
Aggressive cattle ranchers and desolate, dirt roads made the commute extremely dangerous. “You had to make sure you go as a group,” she said, as her eyes widened and her seemingly perpetual smile disappeared. “It was not really safe because we had to pass through a big forest. Sometimes the ranchers used to come and beat us.”
Long days at school would end in stressful evenings spent doing work around the house or gathering vegetables from her family’s farm. Oftentimes, she’d stay at school after hours to complete her homework, as nightfall in the village without electricity would pose ample challenges. “Studying at home was really hard, because when you get home, your parents tell you to fetch water, or something else, and there is no time to do anything,” Charlotte said.
After high school, she took a gap year through Bridge2Rwanda, a scholarship program designed to help students from Sub-Saharan Africa who excel in academics to earn scholarships to African and American universities.
Charlotte has lived most of her life working to defeat odds set out for women in Sub-Saharan Africa. She remembers feeling like an outsider during her official interview for Bridge2Rwanda, with only one Rwandan on the panel.
Charlotte’s first days in the program were challenging without knowing how to speak English. “I was crying and felt that I did not belong, I called my daddy to tell him that I wanted to drop out, he told me, ‘You went there to learn what you do not know, you did not go to learn what you know already.’ This motivated me throughout the program until I got my scholarship,” she recalled.
During her gap year, she learned about the MasterCard Foundation scholarship program, which pairs high-achieving African students with a university abroad, leading her to pursue education in the United States.
“I didn’t know about Marist until the program assigned me a school,” Charlotte laughed.
She began her first semester as a medical technology major. “The hardest part was my major with the pressure of my parents and my siblings. Everyone at home expects you to do medical stuff, or science stuff.”
Eventually, she changed her major to finance. “I said, ‘God help me, I don’t want to regret this,’” Charlotte cracked up again, revealing her contagious smile. “Back home, the government gives you whatever they want. It was a big challenge just having a choice.”
Since then, she’s been on the board of the Emerging Leaders Program at Marist and has achieved 10th IBM Completion. “I want to show people in my village that education for women is very essential,” Charlotte said. “That’s what I have been fighting for every single second, every single day — I wake up in the morning saying to myself that I can do it.”
Earlier this year, Charlotte purchased her own piece of land at home in Rwanda that she plans to build up to use for commercial development. “I am getting there — to being an independent woman,” she smiled.
“I can say that there is a change happening in my village because of where I am right now,” Charlotte said. “I feel like that is what it means to be a leader.”
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