Turi Kumwe

“WE ARE TOGETHER”

The seed of Turabizo began as an idea for a short visual documentary, in the winter of 2021. As the project morphed into a longer, character-driven narrative, additional space was created for development in April of 2021.

A team began to form, bonding over food and playing tennis at the local athletic club, and strangers became family. Through the athletic club, we met four kids collecting scrap metal and invited them to play with the coaches and have tea and chapati with the team.

In October 2022, we found one of the kids with a gnarly wound above his eye that required several doctor visits and medication three times a day for two weeks. With the support of his mother and school headmaster, we got him ready to go back to school and he started coming to the house everyday to take his medicine and share a meal.

At the end of the two weeks, he’d finished his medicine and together we’d created a routine. We didn’t want to stop, and neither did he, which is how the mentorship program began.

As time has passed, more kids have joined the program, more artists have come to workshop in our space, and we’ve experimented with a variety of other community-based projects. To support our initiatives, we’ve designed several revenue projects based on the curiosities, passions, and skills of our existing team, including adding guestrooms for other people to share in our environment.

We now have a team of ten member-owners, nine students (eight at the local primary school and one recent graduate of an international secondary school), four dogs, many chickens, and an expanding network of special connections throughout Rwanda.

The creation of Turabizo has been a steady accumulation of ideas, consideration, decisions, and actions. We’re proud of where we’ve been and excited about where we’re going. We love what we do, who we’re doing it with, and who we’re doing it for.

If you feel inspired, we hope you’ll reach out and join us. We welcome new ideas, mentors, collaborators, donors, and affiliates. And a special thanks to Janvier Byiringiro and Anne Marie Buron for planting the seed before the seed.