22-year-old Joselyne Nzisabira, a writer and poet, is not sitting back and watching the illiteracy rate escalate among students without doing anything. It’s her desire to use her knowledge and skills to cause an impact to society through offering writing training to learners. Through her program ‘Write and Inspire Series (WIS)’ that she started in November 2020, as a tool to amplify the voice of writers, poets, essayists, and anyone else interested in using literature as a means to impact lives, she has been able to reach out to a great number of people so far. On Wednesday 18, she launched a program titled, ‘WIS-For students’ that aimed at imparting writing and public speaking skills to primary students all over the country and creating writing clubs to spur learners who would love to start learning creative writing or wish to be tremendous writers in the future. “We thought about this project after realising that most students don’t get serious to learn public speaking and writing until they are in secondary school, which will also depend on how exposed they are. This long-term project will start with one school per province and spread to the rest of the country,” Nzisabira stresses. The program that kick- started at Kigali Harvest school-Kimihurura entailed discussions with primary five and six students about creative writing, and academic writing, the essence of writing to primary learners and tips to become good readers to spark writing. While addressing the students, Nzisabira with her team highlighted the opportunities necessary to inspire writing, and also participated in fun writing games, which later concluded with inaugurating a public speaking and writing club. Learners were also urged to take career paths that they are interested in but also ask for assistance from their teachers and parents even before making a decision on what they want to pursue in the future. The team also had conversations with teachers and the headmistress, Renata Ufitinema on how to guide the learners to practice and make the most of the training lessons to obtain results. According to Nzisabira, the program is targeted to fabricate a spirit of writing and speaking among primary students, introducing writing as a form of cultural preservation, equipping them with writing opportunities, and creating writing and speaking clubs to build self-confidence. “So far we are receiving applications for Rwandan volunteers who want to be part of the initiative to create a team that will help in building the zeal for writing among Rwandan primary students,” she notes. The writer notes that the reason she chose to start with this specific school is because it offered her a great foundation while she was a student in primary school. But also, the knowledge she acquired allowed her to be a much better student in secondary school. The schools that will benefit from Nzisabira’s program are those that don’t get the writing opportunities or participate in writing competitions, especially government and rural schools that are not exposed yet. She believes that most private schools have such writing opportunities. “We request for permission from school heads to fit us in their programs. We can reach out to more schools at least one per month or even twice when we happen to get permission from schools in time,” she says. We shall be reviewing the progress of the writing clubs of students, and offering them reading materials that will assist them to advance. Nzisabira is a Rwandan writer and author pursuing her degree in Medical health (MBBS/MGH) at the University of Global Health Equity (U.G.H.E) in fourth year. She has published a book titled, “Urukundo Nanze”, which loosely means, “The Love I Despised.” She has also written poems such as “Niwe nabaye”, “Kuki njye”, “Enlightened by Mom”, “That child”, “She took her life for it”, and many more.
