The Optimist Daily · 10 hours ago

Prince Bashangezi Turned Personal Loss Into Peer Tutoring for Refugee Students | the Optimist Daily

When COVID lockdowns closed schools at Tongogara Refugee Camp in Zimbabwe, Prince Bashangezi and a handful of fellow A-Level students did something quietly radical: they kept teaching anyway. They founded TWEENS - Together We Educationally Empower Non-privileged Students - a peer tutoring program built on the one resource they still had, which was each other. What made it work wasn't outside expertise or institutional backing, but proximity: these were tutors who lived the same disruptions, studied under the same impossible conditions, and understood, as one nominator put it, what it means to turn "personal tragedy of losing his family during war into loving service for others." More than five years later, TWEENS has grown to include an A-level program, a girls' book club, and ongoing homework support - outlasting the lockdown that sparked it by years. Prince now studies computer science and economics at Pomona College, but the program he helped build from inside a displaced community continues to run, a reminder that the people closest to a problem often carry the clearest understanding of how to meet it.