About Us
COME AND SEE RWANDA
Since 2006, CASR has been a Rwandan government approved non-profit inter-denominational Christian organization with deep roots in the south Rwandan community. Just four years after the genocide, Dr. Kim Foreman, a professor of instructional technology at San Francisco State University, visited Rwanda for the first time. In 2001 she persuaded her pastor husband Chris to accompany her for a second visit. They found that the Spirit of God was blazing like a wildfire across East Africa and their hearts were captured. Over the next decade they returned once or twice every year. As they made friends and established continuing relationships with trusted indigenous pastors, ministers, and university students, they saw a great need at the National University of Rwanda in Butare; Rwanda’s second city in the south.
The needs of Africa seem overwhelming. God has called many to minister to the poor, the sick, and the outcasts on the continent. But what the Foremans saw was a need to reach the future leaders in Africa. They discerned a core problem throughout Africa as being “bad governance”; political, business, and tribal leaders who covet power as a means of personal gain and lead corrupt and immoral lives. Billions of dollars in well-intended aid have flowed into countries such as the Congo and Somalia. Yet the social symptoms of bad governance continue and even worsen. Money is not a solution to what ails Africa.
Perhaps because of the severe trauma of the genocide, Rwanda seemed especially open to God’s answers to their intractable problems. The Foremans saw a hope that Rwandans could create a Rwanda free of foreign aid. In Rwanda, there is only one former national university. Nearly all of the future leaders of Rwanda will pass through it. The University was also one of the centers of the racist Hutu ideology that triggered the genocide. Rather than focusing solely on the suffering children, they saw another long-term hope for Africa. A hope to save widows and children by preventing a future genocide.
Several of the local pastors that they had grown to love had ongoing ministries to the university. They found many college students asking questions about the Bible and very open to Christian answers to their country’s problems. So in 2005, the Foremans formed Come & See Africa (CASA) in order to further fan the flames at the university. They rented a house a short walk from the university to be their headquarters for ministry teams from America and as a year-round Christian student center.
In 2006, the Rwandan Pastors (Frank MURENZI and David NAHAYO) decided to start Come and See Rwanda and registered the organization with the Rwandan government as a non-governmental organization which works with all Christian denominations, student ministries (both university and higher school students), local government, and the private sector for changing the lives of people spiritually, socially, and physically (economically) through preaching and teaching the Word of God and compassion ministry (helping needy people).
In 2008, the Foremans decided to help Come and See Rwanda purchase a vacant lot and build a university ministry center of its own. The property was once occupied by the house of the president of Rwanda during the 100 days of the genocide in 1994. He had been on the university faculty prior to his ascension to the presidency. God chose to redeem this plot of land from the hate of the genocide to the goal of preventing future genocides through planting the love of God deep in the hearts of the university students. Over the next year, the foundation was dug and the plans were made. However, when the great recession hit in 2009, the progress on the building slowed considerably.
