Africa bond: Student, mentor impact each other

Graduate student defies geography, history and expectations to achieve dream

FIU faculty and staff positively influence the lives of students every day. Many go beyond the classroom and their jobs to guide young people in any number of life-impacting ways. This article is the first in a series that explores the mentoring relationships that encourage students to graduate and pursue meaningful careers.

Sometimes beating the odds means finding the right people to help you get there.

FIU’s only current student from Rwanda knows that well enough. He has sought out and embraced mentors on a long, sometimes painful and certainly winding road that a lesser man might have chosen not to walk.

Fiacre Bienvenu overcame a childhood of great poverty, survived the horrific genocide that traumatized his nation and persevered in the face of overwhelming barriers to study outside of his native land.

“He’s got incredible determination and persistence,” says John Clark, a professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations in the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs. “He wouldn’t have come out of those circumstances and be here and have developed as much as he has if he wasn’t incredibly determined.”

By the time Bienvenu and Clark met in person—at Miami International Airport, when the professor collected the incoming graduate student on his final leg of a cross-Atlantic excursion—the two had already communicated intermittently via email for two years. In that time Bienvenu labored over GRE and TOEFL exam-prep books and, with long-distance help from the mother of an American co-worker, developed a list of U.S. graduate programs to which to apply.

FIU made the cut largely because Clark had taken the time to reach out.

“The beginning of mentorship is when somebody writes you and they’re interested in the university,” Clark explains of his commitment to guiding prospective students. “You have to respond to that. You need to encourage them to apply. There’s an investment that you need to be prepared to make.”

On Lake Kivu: (from left) Professor John Clark, graduate students Zachary Karazsia and Fiacre Bienvenu and Assistant Professor Erin Damman shared time together in Rwanda over the summer. Behind them is the shoreline of the neighboring Republic of Congo.

And once the two connected online, FIU looked ever more promising to Bienvenu. Having improved his GRE scores by retaking the test—not surprising, Clark says, given that the exam draws heavily upon American literary and cultural history and is administered in English, Bienvenu’s fourth language—he eventually received admission and funding to pursue a master’s degree in FIU’s African & African Diaspora Studies Program, with which Clark is affiliated. Upon his arrival in the United States, the young man immediately found mentors in the program’s director, Jean Muteba Rahier, as well as in Clark, who today serves as his Ph.D. dissertation advisor.

“He has been very close to me,” Bienvenu says, recalling the first course he took with Clark, during his first semester at FIU. “I was terrified. I felt really stupid. I remember the first book”—about constructivist theory in comparative politics—“the language is very hard.” Yet Clark’s support—in emails, through comments on papers and tests and during one-on-one conversations, often over coffee or lunch—assured the young man that he was up to the challenge.

A new life

“The shock is enormous,” Bienvenu recounts of his arriving in South Florida in August 2010. Having once resided with his five siblings in a 370-square-foot house with no indoor plumbing or kitchen facilities—a tin-roofed dwelling that he himself built by hand—he found taking up residence in a modest apartment in Miami something of a luxury.

Born of poor, uneducated parents in one of the world’s least developed countries, Bienvenu nonetheless consistently maintained the highest grades in his school, each semester ranking either no. 1 or 2 among his peers academically. Then in 1994, when he was 14, a tragedy of unfathomable proportion rocked his homeland. With a civil war already raging, the government sanctioned the massacre of as many as one million Rwandans over a 100-day period as part of a calculated ethnic genocide. Bienvenu spent more than two months in a U.N. refugee camp, separated from his family. While his parents and siblings survived, he lost nine relatives, among them cousins and uncles.

Bienvenu eventually completed high school, but he declined a college scholarship to care for his siblings after his parents’ deaths from illness. For the next ten years he found steady employment with several of the many U.S.-based NGOs that came to Rwanda to provide humanitarian relief and assist with reconstruction. He also went on to attend evening school to earn an undergraduate degree in sociology, likely making him one of only two people from his village to have ever pursued post-secondary education.

Surrounded at work by Westerners who took an interest in him and offered both job training and general advice—Bienvenu considers a few of them important mentors—he kept alive the dream of one day studying in “the America of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris and Harrison Ford.”

The joy of mentoring

Without question, Clark has exerted a great influence upon Bienvenu, who is among 11 doctoral students overall, and one of four from Africa, for whom he has served or is currently serving as major professor. Clark has taken him to conferences and even connected him with leading American authorities on Rwanda. (Clark is an expert on the Republic of Congo.) Bienvenu’s research focuses on the potential of the country’s very active community associations—groups of concerned citizens united to solve problems at the local level and often holding their own organizational elections—to effect positive changes in government at the national level. “The belief was that aiding civil society,” as NGOs and various foreign governments did after the genocide, “will help bring about democracy,” Bienvenu explains. “It hasn’t worked so far.”

And while Clark, now in his 25^th year at FIU, clearly revels in helping young people reach their full academic potential, he likewise relishes what he receives in return.

“You feel a lot of pride and satisfaction. But also, as a scholar, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about Rwanda from this guy,” he says. “[He] tells me things about his country in a sophisticated way, about the civil society or the politics, that an ordinary Rwandan wouldn’t be able to express. I’ve learned a lot from all of my African students about their respective countries.”

Growth of a program

Until three years ago, Clark served as the sole Africanist in his department. The arrival of Assistant Professor Erin Damman, however, has added immeasurable value for students.

“The challenge of mentoring is eased so much when you have others who are helping you,” Clark says. “[Damman’s] presence has so enriched and complemented my ability to mentor Fiacre. I still love having one-on-one conversations with him and helping him, but when the three of us are together it’s so intellectually exciting. And for the four of us to be in Rwanda is like a pinnacle of my career.”

Clark is referring to a remarkable trip he took this past summer with Damman, Bienvenu and another doctoral student, Zachary Karazsia.

Clark and Karazsia attended a conference in Nairobi and then met up with Bienvenu and Damman, who were each separately doing research in Rwanda. Well traveled in Africa, Clark nonetheless had never before visited the small country. The four were joined by Damman’s husband and two young children as they explored the mountains of the western province. Back in the capital of Kigali, Clark and the students paid their respects at a church that serves as a memorial to genocide victims and took long walks through the city. Stopping at his undergraduate institution, Bienvenu even introduced Clark to a former mentor and the university president.

In the end, Clark believes that whatever good Bienvenu and the others have reaped from attending FIU, and from the relationships he has fostered with them, they have returned tenfold to the university.

“I felt that it was special to be over there,” he says of his trip to Rwanda, “not just for me but for FIU. Africa has come of age here [at FIU]. Now I feel, with Erin’s presence, with the presence of these doctoral students, that this is a legitimate place to study Africa. This is not just your second choice or a place that you come because John Clark answered your emails. It’s a place where there’s a community.”