The former West Indies captain explained his involvement in the project in a column in Britain’s Spectator newspaper.
He wrote: “Every evening when I turned on the TV (in 1994) there were images of the genocide in Rwanda, and the contrast with my own feelings of euphoria haunted me.
It wasn’t until 2009 that I actually visited Rwanda, but when I did I knew I had to help in some way, and hearing the story of a young cricketer called Audifax Byiringiro helped me start to realise what I should do.”
He wrote of Byiringiro: “In April 1994, as I was gearing up for my golden summer, Audifax Byiringiro was a six-month-old baby in Rwanda. Audifax and his family—his mother, father and three siblings—sought refuge from the violence as nearly a million Tutsis were killed by their Hutu countrymen.
For more than a month they faced death daily at rebel road blocks as they fled from the brutality, but by June his father and three siblings had been murdered and only he and his mother remained.
One day in the same month, on a field in a school in Kigali, 2,500 Rwandans were abandoned by UN peacekeepers and attacked by local militia with machetes, grenades and guns. The massacre took just a few hours, and by nightfall all but 50 were dead.”
Today, the scene of that bloodshed is the site where a 14-year-old Audifax played his first cricket game. The sport had been brought to the country by Rwandans returning from exile in Kenya and Uganda.
Lara first met the young Rwandan there on his first to the country in 2009.
“I was struck then by the way that cricket had changed Audifax’s life,” Lara wrote in his piece.
“He spent hours honing his skills with bat and ball before and after school, and it gave him focus and discipline. Over the next few years, he became a fixture in the national team, and in 2011 he was even asked by a cricket club in Cornwall to be their overseas professional for the season, although his visa request was turned down.
He now coaches in schools, orphanages and universities across the country, sharing his love of cricket with Rwandan boys and girls from all different backgrounds while excelling in his own studies (his most recent exam results were the highest in the country).”
Lara added that, “in 2011, I and a group of cricketing evangelists from England formed the Rwanda Cricket Stadium Foundation (www.rcsf.org.uk), in partnership with the MCC Foundation, to build a high-quality permanent home for Rwandan cricket….
Once built, the new ground will provide a place for the national team to train, for schoolchildren to be coached, for people who have never seen the game before to become hooked, the same way both Audifax and I did. There will be accommodation for visitors from around Rwanda and touring teams from abroad to stay.”
According to the piece, the Foundation is more than halfway towards its target of raising £600,000 to lay two wickets and build a small pavilion.
Yesterday, to aid with fundraising, Lara was due to lead an Invitational XI against a Warwickshire CCC 1990s XI, led by former skipper Tim Munton at Wormsley, England.
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