World Street Children News

KEN WILLIAMS / Monitor staff Myles Matteson and his wife, Dominique Dodge, will be playing in a concert to benefit Rwandans on Thursday in Brookfield. Zoom Purchase Photos Online

"I was kind of like, ‘You want to go where for our honeymoon?’ " Dodge recalled asking her new husband at the time.

For five weeks, Matteson interned with Rwandan prosecutors, working on extraditions of people charged in the country’s civil war. Dodge taught English and music classes in Kigali, the capital, and volunteered at a shelter for kids, many of whom had lost their families.

Now, back home, the New Hampshire natives hope to raise money for Rwandan children by playing in concerts next week in Brookfield and Vermont.

"We don’t have a background in development," said Dodge, a graduate of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, Scotland. "The first thing to occur to us is, ‘Let’s do a benefit concert.’ "

Tickets cost $10 for adults and $5 for children. The Brookfield concert, at Tumbledown Farms, will be Thursday at 7:30 p.m. They’ll also play in Shelburne, Richmond and Charlotte, Vt. Some proceeds from the Brookfield concert will go to Ninealone, a charity to benefit the Hermanot family of Sanbornville after its eight children lost their father to a brain aneurysm this month. The rest will go to the Street Kids of Rwanda, a nonprofit that provides food, shelter and schooling to needy children, many of whom had lost their parents in the war.

The Rwandan civil war, fought between ethnic Tutsis and the Hutu-led government, started in 1990 and lasted four years. In 1994, Hutu forces killed an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus.

Dodge and Matteson, who live in Epsom, are serving as the American representatives for Street Kids. Dodge volunteered for the group while in Kigali, taking photos and making videos of the children for a promotional website.

During her time there, Dodge would ask the children, "How do you like life?" They told her that it was much better now that they were getting three meals a day, after scrounging for food in garbage on the streets of Kigali, she said.

Street Kids of Rwanda helps about 365 young people, who range in age from 6 to 20. It gives shelter to about 75 of them and feeds nearly all of them. For these kids, finding food is their biggest concern, said Dodge, 24. Rwandan diets mostly consist of rice, beans and vegetables.

Street Kids, which currently has two shelters owned by its Rwandan founder, hopes to find a larger location to accommodate more children. Matteson and Dodge have started a website to ask for donations. They held a benefit concert in Vermont before Christmas that raised nearly $1,000.

Dodge and Matteson, 23, met seven years ago while taking music classes in Canada.

They decided on Rwanda after Matteson, who was home-schooled on an Epsom farm, obtained an internship there. Matteson hopes to become a prosecutor and had interned with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia before he entered Wheaton College in 2000. He wrote his thesis on the judicial systems of the post-war Balkans and Rwanda.

This summer, Matteson will be interning in the state attorney general’s office, and in September, he will leave for Oxford University to study law on a Marshall scholarship, which pays for U.S. students to study in Britain.

Dodge plans to pursue her music career, as a teacher and a performer, in England. The couple plan to return and settle in New Hampshire.

But they hope to remember Rwanda.

"We have been incredibly lucky with the people who supported us and taking us in and showing us what Rwanda is like," Matteson said. "That connection helps keep the motivation in place to remember that the work we do here can have a huge impact over there."

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By WALTER ALARKON

Monitor staff