Stephanie Nyombayire, 21
Swarthmore College

by Tina Peng // Northwestern University

Today, Nyombayire is deeply involved in the movement to end the genocide in Darfur. She has helped found a national anti-genocide activism organization, speaks regularly at conferences and rallies and plans to work in international human rights after graduation.

"We can't just keep saying ‘never again' over and over again," she says.

Nyombayire doesn't cut an intimidating presence: she's slender, wears dangling gold earrings, speaks softly and stops to say hi to almost everyone she passes on Swarthmore's campus one March afternoon. But she's breathtakingly eloquent and self-possessed, and when she speaks, she can make you feel very, very small.

Nyombayire and her family moved back to Rwanda shortly after the genocide. There, she says, an educational system that had been instrumental in cultivating separateness is now focused on teaching students to overcome the past and rebuild their country. "[School] was now about all of us, all Rwandans," Nyombayire says. "This was about making sure genocide didn't happen again, that the history of discrimination would end."

Though she attended a private high school in Connecticut on scholarship and then was admitted to Swarthmore, Nyombayire has always known her future was in Rwanda.

"I knew that I wasn't coming here forever," she says. "The sustainable development of our country is our responsibility. If [my friends] left, they left with the understanding that they will go back and make Rwanda what it can be, which is a nation that isn't developing but a nation that is developed."

That passion has guided her college career: She's majoring in political science (she plans to be a human rights lawyer) and psychology ("I've always been interested in trauma counseling"). She's spent summers at home in Kigali, working with children orphaned by the genocide or HIV/AIDS. And during her freshman year, Nyombayire and a few other Swarthmore students founded the Genocide Intervention Network, a nonprofit organization that now has more than a thousand student chapters aimed at creating an informed, active constituency. The network's efforts have resulted in federal anti-genocide legislation and in 24 states cutting financial ties with companies involved in Sudan.

"It's passion combined with a very strategic and results-oriented approach," says Mark Hanis, executive director of GINet. "She doesn't tell people to just care about Darfur. She demands that people translate that information, that knowledge about the failure to stop genocide, into the need to take a stand."

Nyombayire, who plans to take a year off after graduation before applying to law schools, now spends every other weekend away from school, speaking at conferences or making appearances at fundraisers. After a few days in Miami for spring break this year, she flew to New Orleans to be a panelist at the Clinton Global Initiative University summit. That wasn't her first high-profile appearance, either: in 2005, she flew to Chad to interview Sudanese refugees for an MTV documentary, "Translating Genocide." There, she met teenage girls who had been raped in the Chad camps and she saw hundreds of thousands of innocent people struggling to eke out an existence. She remembers those people as she continues to talk to students and community members about taking action against genocide.

"More can be done, more lives can be saved, more pressure can be put on the United States government," she says. "But change is slow, and any substantial change has to happen over a period of time."

Nyombayire, of course, isn't one to equate slow change with inaction.

"I didn't want to watch another genocide happen," she says. "I didn't want to be part of the people who choose to stand by."

 
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Photo by K. McCurdy // University of the Arts