Pawcatuck Middle-Schooler Helping Rwandan Genocide Victims Heal with Project LIGHT

Zoe Banks is your typical happy, carefree 12-year-old. Then again, maybe she's not so typical.

When the Pawcatuck Middle Schooler learned that the brother of a Sandy Hook School massacre victim, in order to help in his own healing, was helping to raise awareness and money for the families of Rwandan genocide victims, she was moved to act; she had no choice: “My heart was so touched, I knew I just had to help. I had to.”

Zoe’s mother, Julie Banks, is a certified EFT (emotional freedom techniques, or tapping) practitioner. According to Banks, EFT is a technique that helps people deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and other emotional issues. 

EFT was the basis for the "Project LIGHT: Rwanda" for orphans of genocide victims. Banks was one of a small number of practitioners chosen to participate in the "Tapping Solution for Newtown: Stress and Trauma Relief" project created to help survivors coping with loss following the mass shooting at the Connecticut elementary school in December of 2012.  

One boy, named JT, was having real trouble coping with the trauma. As part of  EFT  he was put in touch with a Rwandan boy who benefitted from the therapy as he coped with his own unfathomable loss. The boys related to each other, and the relationship moved JT to found "Newtown Helps Rwanda" and create bracelets to help raise money for the Rwandan victims’ families. 

When Zoe’s mother returned from her EFT trip to Newtown, she shared the story with Zoe.

“I told her about how the horror, the tragedy in Rwanda — and the people there (benefiting) from EFT was helping in Connecticut — that Rwandans were helping Connecticut kids ... she was really affected,” Julie Banks said.

“I was,” Zoe said. “It really touched me and made me want to do something.”

So she did. She took the bracelet idea and broadened it, creating "Project LIGHT: New England helps Rwanda" on Facebook late last month: “I thought, ‘I can do that,’” she said.  

She designed the bracelets, which are multi-colored and feature ‘New England Helps Rwanda’ createglobalhealing.org, and the family ordered 2,700 bracelets.  As of today, just two weeks into selling them, she has already raised $1,087.  She hopes to raise, ultimately, more than $8,000, enough to send one Rwandan teen to college for four years.

Zoe is marketing the bracelets via Facebook, and she’s been going door-to-door at local businesses in and around Pawcatuck and Westerly.  She’ll be selling the $3 bracelets Aug. 3 and 4 at the Westerly McQuade’s Marketplace and at the Donahue Park concert slated for Aug. 9. 

And she hopes to be even more visible and spark a bit of local competition between businesses: she’s posting a photo of every business owner who purchases bracelets on her Facebook page;  a pretty savvy marketing idea. 

“I’m pretty sure people will like that idea,” she said.

Indeed, Mark Gervasini, of Gervasini’s Barber Shop in Westerly, was one of the first to get on board.

“We’re really proud of her,” her dad, Scott Banks, said.