Media Coverage

Clergyman Dedicated to Refugee Welfare Wins $1 Mil Prize
Nov. 9, 2007

Brother Constant Goetschalckx was awarded the $1million OPUS prize Thursday morning for his work educating refugees in Africa.

Goetschalckx, commonly known as Brother Stan, is the founder and director of the AHADI International Institute in Tanzania, which has operations in Burundi, Congo and Rwanda.

Goetschalckx began his career as a classroom teacher, but in the early nineties, a calling led him in a different direction.

"The local bishop and local congregation asked me to abandon my job as an academic officer to go work with the refugee camps," Goetschalckx said during a speech Tuesday.

Goetschalckx's work, he said, put him in danger many times, as he and the refugees were often forced to relocate. After being attacked in Congo, Goetschalckx followed the refugees, who originally lived in both Rwanda and Congo but were forced to flee to Tanzania.

"It was a very new and strange environment [but] God is never far away, so we adapted and we started working, secretly in the beginning, because [education] was not allowed in the refugee camps," he stated. "Secretly we started creating schools for refugees in the camps."

At the refugee camps, people with outside money or acquaintances were able to flee, but those who could not, turned to Goetschalckx for help.

"We [made] a firm decision to stay there and work for those who were left behind," he said.

Since then, AHADI has made progress with the refugee camps. They now educate about 25,000 students a year, who are working to gain their high school diplomas.

"We are also developing partnerships with different universities and different higher institutes," he said, and because of that, "different universities have offered their programs to the refugees."

Not only have they helped refugees earn college degrees, but Goetschalckx and his organization have also started treating mentally ill patients as well. AHADI plans on building a mental hospital in the near future.

"The award honors an unsung humanitarian - either an individual or an organization - whose driving entrepreneurial spirit and abiding faith are aimed at solving persistent, large-scale social problems," states the University on their website. OPUS works with different universities in hopes to not only support charitable organizations, but to inform and involve university students in the organizations themselves.

"It is good to know that people who had no hope at all, whose only solution [was] to join the military movements and join all kinds of rebel movements…that through education, they have found hope," Goetschalckx said.

The two other candidates, Reverends John Adams and Norbetro Carcellar, are each receiving $100,000 for their organizations. Adams is the president of So Others Might Eat, an organization based in Washington, D.C. and Carcellar is the executive director of the Homeless People's Federation in the Philippines. Both organizations work with the homeless.