There is someone you need to meet...his name is Sam

From right to left: Sam with me, Charlotte, and Shaughan of the Debate Camp Rwanda team in December 2014 

I still remember the day I met Sam. It was just over two years ago at a debate I was hosting at Regent’s University. My partner, Alexandra, rushed up to me excitedly just as were finishing up for the night and said: “There is someone you need to meet. I don’t know how, but I have a feeling he is going to be a very important person in your life. His name is Sam”.

Two years later, I count him as one of my closest friends and the inspiration for a life-changing project that has taken me from the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf to the schoolhouses of Kigali to work with some of the most gifted and driven young people I have ever met. He has changed my outlook on the world and shown me how I can help to make it a better place. Now, Sam needs my help so that he can realise his dream, but there’s only so much I can do. So, I humbly ask that you read my story because I have a feeling that he is going to be a very important person in many people’s lives in the years to come and this is your opportunity to be part of that story too.

Returning to that night in 2013, once Sam and I had been introduced, he explained that he had just arrived in London the day before to take up a scholarship to study Economics. I was impressed at how quickly he had found out about our debate club, only to learn that it was no coincidence. Sam had recently set up a charity back in his native Rwanda, in partnership with a small group of dedicated students. Their mission; to use debating to give young Rwandans a voice and teach them how to resolve conflict through dialogue. They called it iDebate Rwanda.

After painstakingly building a network of debate clubs in schools across the Rwandan capital, Kigali, they began building a coalition of supporters across the world. The team viewed their pupils as leaders in waiting: of their schools; of their communities; and of their country, and wanted them to learn how to think creatively about complex problems by exposing them to different cultures and ideas. So, when Sam came to visit the Central London Debating Society (as we were known before we changed our name to Debating London), he came not just as a curious visitor, but as an ambassador for a movement that he wanted us to join.

That very night, he asked me if I could put together a team of trainers to fly out to Rwanda to teach 150 young people everything they needed to know about British Parliamentary debating. His plan was to bring together all the schools iDebate worked with for a two week retreat during the Christmas holidays, culminating in a giant competition. It would be called ‘Debate Camp Rwanda’. I asked how far along he and his team were with their preparations; they hadn’t even started yet. It was still just an idea and I honestly didn’t expect it to go any further.

A month or so later, I received a phone call. Sam had a state of the art venue ready to host the camp, the buy in of over 30 schools across the country, and he had personally secured a grant from the Goethe Institute in Rwanda to fund it. All he needed was a team of debate trainers. I asked him if he would be part of my team, but he wouldn’t even be able to attend the camp he had worked so hard to set up as it clashed with his first set of exams at university. It was always so easy to forget that this inspirational entrepreneur and visionary was also a 20 year old first year student still acclimatising himself to life in a foreign country.

Three months later, following a mammoth team effort to raise £1500 in four weeks to pay for our flights, I found myself boarding a plane with three of the finest people I have ever worked with on our way to Debate Camp Rwanda and THIS was the result.

We achieved so much at that camp that a year later we did it again, except this time we included a train the trainer course for the most advanced debaters –  most of whom were still no older than 18 – so that they could lead the way in teaching their peers how to follow in their footsteps. Since then, Ivan (the boy who features in the opening shot of the video above) has joined iDebate as a full time member of staff; Jean-Michel has led a team of Rwandan debaters on a tour of the United States, taking on Harvard’s finest on their own turf; and three iDebate graduates have secured university scholarships in the US - one of them at Wiley College, the home of the Great Debaters.

When I look back at that night in Regent’s University, I place it in the context of what was an incredibly turbulent year for me with far more downs than ups. Simply playing a small part in the inspirational story of iDebate Rwanda, though, gave me a sense of purpose and perspective that made 2013 a year to remember, instead on one to forget.

And I owe it all to my friend Sam.

Now it’s my turn to do for him what he did for me. Find out here why Sam is fundraising and how we can help him.