PORTLAND, Ore. – Intern Kamali Muhire sat next to a Portland Timbers staffer and observed as the staffer went about his daily routine. Questions began racing through Muhire's mind: How does this staffer use his software? What are his daily tasks? What are his biggest challenges?
But Muhire is not your average intern.
Muhire is currently in the U.S. as a part of the efforts of Portland-based These Numbers Have Faces organization. The global education organization works with companies to invest in African students to lead and empower their countries. Muhire, who is studying accounting, was sponsored and first interned with Delap LLP, the Lake Oswego-based accounting firm, He later spent time earlier this fall with TMT Development in Portland.
Muhire was connected with the club after TMT reached out to arrange an internship via These Numbers Have Faces to get involved in the team's accounting department. The Timbers had worked with These Numbers Have Faces in the past with previous organization scholars meeting with former player Steve Zakuani.
Muhire's path to Portland, however, was far from simple.
When he was still a child in the Democratic Republic of Congo, barely old enough to go to kindergarten in the States, Muhire's entire life changed overnight.
In 1996, some two years after a devastating genocide ended with nearly one million Rwandans killed, Rwandan forces had pushed resistant Hutu militants across the border and into the DRC.
Far from dispersing peacefully into the Congolese countryside, the Hutu militants continued to threaten, assault, and murder even as they traveled deeper into eastern Congo.
Fearing for their lives, Muhire's parents gathered their children together, left behind their cattle, their land, their home, and fled. Muhire spent some of his most formative early years constantly on the move, traveling from camp to camp, avoiding the Hutu rebels who saw Muhire and his family as targets.
When Muhire and his family finally reached the refugee camp in Gihembe, Rwanda – a sprawling encampment of houses made of mud and tin – their problems, which they thought were behind them, were only just beginning.
Caught in a no-man's land between two nations and refused recognition from either the DRC or from Rwanda, Muhire and his family faced the very real prospect of an entire lifetime spent in the refugee camp, one without any hope of upward mobility. All Muhire could do was study, even as the goalposts were constantly moving away from him.
“When I arrived in high school...I had to sit for the national exam, but the government [in Rwanda] changed the policy. They said, ‘For you to qualify for this college scholarship you have to get 100 percent [on the national exam],’ which was really terrible. I was very discouraged. To get 100 percent is really hard,” Muhire said.
This was a shocking development and one that devastated Muhire, who felt that he had worked hard enough to pass the exam and enter college on a government scholarship.
But when he broke the news to his parents, Muhire got a lesson in perspective.
“Dad, you didn't go to school, that's why you're saying it is not hard,” Muhire remembered telling his father. “You don't know how to study. It's very hard to get 100 percent.”
“You are smart,” his father replied. “You see cars here. You see airplanes. You see people building roads. You see so many things, do you think that getting 100 percent is more difficult than building cars or building airplanes, setting up a computer? Those are hard things, but people struggle to get it. What they did was dream big and stay focused on their purpose and they transformed the world.
“If you even put in your mind that you're not going to get 100 percent you may even fail your exam, but if you take it easy, then 100 percent, you're going to get it.”
That advice stuck with Muhire, who recommitted himself to his studies and vowed that he would pass the national exam with a 100 percent score. At one point, Muhire was even briefly suspended from his school for quitting soccer – a tough decision for the “massive” Arsenal fan – and he was only readmitted when he explained what he was doing to his school director.
But Muhire persisted. He spent long days studying with whatever books and materials he could get his hands on, sometimes waking up as early as four or five in the morning to begin his studies.
That persistence paid off. Muhire got a 100 percent score on his national exam. He was college-bound. Only there was another hitch.
The Rwandan government decided that refugees were not able to qualify for scholarship because they are not citizens. Once again, Muhire thought that his dream was finished.
A stroke of luck, however, came in the form of These Numbers Have Faces. A friend submitted Muhire's name to the organization and, to Muhire's astonishment and delight, he was chosen for a scholarship.
Muhire is now in his fourth year of university studies, completing a degree in Business Administration and preparing for a career as an accountant.
Obstacles still stand in Muhire's path, but as he's always done before, these are obstacles that he knows he can overcome.
Muhire has spent the past several months in Portland with the past week interning with the Timbers, seeing how an MLS organization is run from the inside.
But it hasn't been all business though.
Muhire, the Arsenal supporter and long-time soccer player, got the chance to not only watch the Timbers play at Providence Park, but also the chance to take in a training session at the adidas Timbers Training Center in Beaverton.
“I loved the moment [of the game],” he said. “It was my first time to be in a big stadium like this one, hearing some screaming, some voices of the Timbers Army was really, really amazing. I was thinking, 'Oh this is great!'”
And on Friday, Muhire was on hand as the club was recognized as the most philanthropic medium-sized company by the Portland Business Journal at the 2015 Corporate Philanthropy Awards.
Soon Muhire is hoping to run a business of his own in Rwanda, but for now he's just focused on enjoying this great American adventure.
