By Hope Lourie Killcoyne

Sharon Saul Davis, modest and soft-spoken, never set out to win any awards. She didn’t even plan to become an architect, let alone a global role model. Nonetheless she has done all of the above, her thoughtful design work having positively affected the lives of thousands of women.  

The women in question live in Rwanda, a nation ripped apart by Genocide. For having designed The Women’s Opportunity Center, Women For Women International (WfWI)—a global NGO that helps women in war-torn areas rebuild their lives—bestowed upon Sharon the 2010 Active Citizen Award.

Just how did her life shift so dramatically?

Sharon chose her own path, cutting a swath from Chevy Chase, Maryland, through New York and across Africa to one of that continent’s smallest and most densely populated countries. When Sharon reached Rwanda, the then-48-year-old had, for over 20 years, been a mother, a financial analyst and a leader at various charitable organizations. She had been an architect for only three years.

In the process of interweaving her long-held people skills with her nascent architectural talents, powers and prowess she would have never predicted emerged. Sharon learned and then taught the craft of brick making. She designed time- if not life-saving water-filtration systems. Ultimately, she created a community center that empowered women to change their own lives for the better. 

Start at the beginning 

Sharon Saul was born on the outskirts of Washington, DC in 1960. As a teenager, she attended The Madeira School. Founded in 1906, in its earliest days, students raised money for the Armenian Fund. This focus on helping others became a core value of the institution. Indeed, Sharon credits Madeira for her commitment to work on behalf of others: “We had classes four days a week; every Wednesday we had a volunteer job. Freshman and sophomore year you worked as a teacher’s aide or a candy striper at a hospital. Junior year—because we were outside of DC—you worked on Capitol Hill, like in a congressional office. Senior year I worked at the Smithsonian in exhibition design.” 

Sharon then attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, graduating with a Studio Arts degree in 1982. There she met and fell in love with her first husband, Peter Bain. Among the luminaries in attendance at their storybook wedding were two Supreme Court Justices: Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O’Connor. The newly married couple left the party in a horse-drawn carriage. It was the stuff of which dreams are made. The carriage didn’t take them all the way to New York City, but that’s where they moved.

The Fresh Air Fund

Soon after settling in Manhattan, knowing that Sharon wanted to do volunteer work, one of Sharon’s best friends and classmates at Madeira, Susan Morgenthau (wife of Bob Morgenthau), told Sharon about The Fresh Air Fund. Established in 1877, the goal of this not-for-profit agency is giving poor kids from New York City free summer vacations outside the city, either at camp or with a host family. Over 100 years later, Sharon succeeded in helping to vastly enlarge the fundraising capacity of the charity. “They were just starting a volunteer committee at that point. There was a board of directors, but they didn’t have any events or anything like that,” says Sharon. Thus in 1982, star-studded galas became a huge source of funding. 

With a clear knack for things financial, by 1989 Sharon had earned a Masters Degree in finance from New York University. Also during the 1980s, Sharon and Peter had two children: a daughter, Willoughby, and a son, Ian. Though Sharon and Peter divorced ten years after they wed, they remain close. Then, in 1994, Sharon married Chris Davis. 

Charity begins at home

In 1996, two years into their 20-year-long marriage, the Davises themselves became a Fresh Air Fund host family, taking in eight-year-old Johnathan Stewart, who was right between nine-year-old Willoughby and seven-year-old Ian. From the Bronx, Johnathan had no contact with his parents: his father was in prison and his mother was not in the picture. Johnathan’s loving grandmother, who was his legal guardian, had lost her legs as well as her vision to diabetes. Nonetheless, her heart could see how good being with the Davis family was for him. 

Over the years, as Johnathan spent more time in the Davis household, he became a son in all but name. 

And he did become a big brother when Katie Davis was born in 2000. In 2006, when Johnathan’s grandmother passed away, the Davises legally adopted him. 

Learning by doing

By her early 40s, Sharon realized that she could and wanted to do more, so she consulted a career advisor. After talks, tests and time, all signs pointed toward becoming an architect. Acquiring a degree in architecture is an all-consuming and enormously arduous educational process generally undertaken by people about half Sharon’s age. “I really don’t think the administration at Columbia University expected me to make it. I don’t think they had had anyone my age graduate before,” she says. 

She studied and succeeded, graduating in 2006 and setting up her own firm, Davis Design. In 2008, on the cusp of trying to design the first LEED-approved townhouse in New York City, the tanking real-estate market lead her to put that would-be project aside. Mere days later, thanks to connections via another volunteer project of hers, Sharon was put in touch with a public relations consultant for Women for Women International. The leaders of WfWI asked: “Would you be interested in designing a school in Rwanda?” This offer was, of course, the perfect marriage. “It put together nonprofit work—which I’ve always done—with architecture,” says Sharon. 

Women for Women International

Sharon’s project in Rwanda—the Women’s Opportunity Center in Kayonza; a geographic, emotional, and educational locus—officially opened on June 28, 2013. And if there’s a country where the lives of women need sensitive, self-sustaining support, it’s Rwanda.

Rwanda has two main cultural groups. The Hutu, who constitute 90 percent of the population, have farmed the land there since some time between the 5th and 11th centuries. The Tutsi, comprising roughly ten percent of the nation, migrated from Northern Africa, possibly Ethiopia, roughly around the 14th century. Though relative newcomers and smaller in numbers, the Tutsi became the ruling class in what was (and remained) an essentially feudal relationship.

Centuries of hatred and resentment by the subjugated Hutu boiled into a brutal civil war in 1961, during which the Tutsi monarchy was overthrown. As a result, many Tutsi (as well as Hutu moderates) left the country. Over time, though, they returned, re-igniting the long-held hostilities of Hutu extremists, who, in 1994, slaughtered nearly 800,000 people, most of them Tutsi. Furthermore, not only were many Tutsi women raped, they were intentionally infected with HIV/AIDS. During and after the Genocide—said to have lasted about 100 days—over 2,000,000 Rwandans fled their country. 

When the United Nations set up a tribunal that November in response to the Genocide, sexual violence was included as a war crime, one of the first times an international body had recognized rape as a weapon. 

Three years later, Women for Women International set up shop in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.

A space to heal

In April 2009, Sharon and her design team landed in Kigali, then traveled 60 miles east by car to Kayonza to inspect the proposed women’s center site.

During the two-hour-long drive, one of the first things to strike Sharon was the water situation. Women trudged along, lugging dirty water in dirty pails. Sharon learned that they spend an average of four hours a day performing this laborious task. In a country where the average life expectancy is 50, that’s far too many hours.

At the site itself, she and her team wondered how they would bring electricity to the remote location. They also listened to stories, both from local women and WfWI experts. As for who can enroll: “If they’re married and have a kid, they’re considered a woman. So they can be 15 or they can be 80.” 

To Sharon’s disappointment, she didn’t see much in the way of architectural inspiration—most rural people live in mud and straw hand-made buildings. Fortunately, traveling south to visit the recreation of a former king’s palace provided the spark she needed. 

A cluster of round, connected, window-free yet sunlight-welcoming structures began forming in her mind.

Eventually the center would have eight classrooms and several bigger structures for large gatherings.

But the main problem was getting clean water to the site. Rwanda has a pleasant average temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit due to high elevation and abundant rainfall, and Sharon focused on the idea to capture what’s coming from above. The steel leaf-shaped roof of each unit provides the necessary shade when it’s sunny, and clean water pouring into durable cisterns when it rains. “It was a way to show women that there are other methods of getting water rather than spending hours going and collecting it. The idea was symbolically conveying a way to design things so that they could be timesavers for them,” says Sharon. 

Another timesaver concerns travel: “The women who are enrolled come to the center every other week for a whole day, because it takes them a long time to get there,” says Sharon. Thus food preparation—a kitchen and dining area powered by biodiesel fuel—become part of the plan. So, too, does composting.

The women’s coursework also affected Sharon’s design: “The program they go through is divided into three curriculum areas. The first is about coping with trauma, women’s rights, human rights, reproductive rights, and financial security, so those are very small environments. We were told the women were taught in groups of no more than 20, and that the women who succeeded the most were those who stuck together after they finished the program and worked in cooperatives together. 

So the bonding of those women was a critical part of their success. 

That’s why there are no windows that might distract anyone from what’s going on inside.” In this manner the floor plan and façade help the women focus on each other. “And they’re sitting in a very small circle so everyone can see and look at each other all the time,” Sharon adds.

The second phase in each country where WfWI has a program is choosing a vocation. “In Rwanda it’s almost all agricultural, because that’s what they have there. The last main area is teaching them how to run a successful business,” says Sharon. “There are literacy programs and other things that go on, as well. But those are the three main pieces.” 

As Reveca Muverugo, one of the graduates, said, “I used to farm alone. Then I started making bricks and earning money. Now I can afford to hire people to work on my farm.” That stunning statement of success is due to one of Sharon’s most important decisions: that the very foundation of self-empowerment should begin by teaching the women how to make the bricks themselves. Said lessons are immersive, tactile, and quite literally, the first steps each women takes toward a life-changing awareness of being on a whole new road, a road that didn’t formerly exist.

Header image: Sharon Davis (second from left) accepting the Active Citizen Award from Karen Sherman of WfWI (far left), at the 2010 Women for Women International gala in New York City. Image courtesy of Patrick McMullan.