A senior advisor to US President George W. Bush’s is due to arrive in the country tomorrow a month after his boss visited Rwanda during a five-nation African tour. According to a statement from the US Embassy in Kigali, Jay Hein, who is the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI), is accompanied by among others, the United States Malaria Coordinator, Admiral Tim Ziemer. During there four day visit, the US delegation will hold a conference at Kigali Serena Hotel aimed at highlighting and advancing ‘innovative models that place faith-based and other grassroots organizations at the centre of the fight against poverty, disease and other ills in Africa, reads the communiqué. It added that President Paul Kagame will open the conference due to begin on Monday. Ziemer is the overseer of President Bush’s Malaria Initiative, which runs programmes in Rwanda. The March 31 conference will also be attended by best-selling US author, Pastor Rick Warren, an international preacher who launched his global initiative to fight five giant problems facing the world from Rwanda in July, 2005. Warren, the senior pastor of Saddleback Church in California, launched the initiative, best known as PEACE – an acronym that stands for Plant churches, Equip servant leaders, Assist the poor, Care for the sick and Educate the next generation – at Amahoro National Stadium in the presence of thousands of Rwandans including President Kagame. Meanwhile, Warren is tomorrow scheduled to launch what has been called Forty Days of Purpose from the same venue where he launched his PEACE plan. Organisers say the campaign is based on Warren’s book called ‘Purpose Driven Life’, which he has helped translate into Kinyarwanda.Ends
