Three survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda came to �ֲ���ý this week to openly discuss with students the trauma that’s been woven into their lives and their country’s history for three decades. 

The intimate discussions offered students a powerful opportunity “to be confronted with a lived experience that is foreign to them,” said Alexandre Dauge-Roth, professor of French and francophone studies, who welcomed the guests to campus for a three-day event, “Rwanda 30 Years After: Trauma Healing of Genocide Survivors and Intergenerational Trauma.”

Beginning on April 7, 1994, and lasting 100 days, members of the Hutu ethnic majority, incited by local authorities, militia, and the Rwandan army, murdered upwards of a million people, most exclusively from the Tutsi minority. The massacre left behind open mass graves, family members unable to find and bury their dead, mistrust across the country, and sadness that a land full of natural beauty could be stained with such horror.

“Rwanda is so beautiful, but after ’94, I thought, ‘How could it still be beautiful?’” shared Esther Mujawayo to a gathering of more than 50 students from three different classes held in Roger Williams Hall on Monday.

Dauge-Roth is an expert in the literary, cinematic, and testimonial representations of the 1994 genocide and an internationally recognized authority on how educators can effectively teach students about the genocide.

He said that when students “engage and interact with people who have experienced radically different forms of violence and who come from different cultural backgrounds, you can no longer project your values and your judgments. You have to start to really try to understand their perspectives, their aspirations, and sense of history as much as you can, as you engage in a transformative dialogue with them.”

Some of the dialogue surprised the students. Too often, victims are reduced to their sole status of survivor, viewed as passive and without agency, or unable to move beyond their trauma. But the three Rwandan guests, who all played key roles in the reconstruction of their community, sometimes laughed and told jokes as they demonstrated their resilience and continued love for their homeland and people.

“This is why we laugh a lot,” said Mujawayo of Essen, Germany, to students the next day in the course “The Politics of Memory,” taught by Professor of Politics Jim Richter. “We don’t want the killers, the death, to have the last word.”

Students dug deep into the two-way conversion, asking their guests — Mujawayo, joined by siblings Jean Bosco Rutagengwa of Amherst, N.H., and Chantal Kayitesi of Dedham, Mass., — how Tutsi survivors balanced the memory of their loved ones who were killed with the trauma that memory brought. 

Mujawayo, a psychotherapist and activist who has about the genocide, said they’ve tried to shield their children from the bad memories — while also continuing to retell the historic event so it never repeats. “But also, how do you find the right dosage, so that you don’t overwhelm them?” she asked in the gathering of three classes on Monday.

“We tried to shield them from hearing bad stuff,” added Rutagengwa, who helped to form (“Remember” in Kinyarwanda) an advocacy association for survivors’ rights and memory after the genocide. “But we also have made sure they know their history.”

Mujawayo used a metaphor to explain healing and storytelling: “Our story is stinking, but we use this smelling thing, this suffering, to tell a story. If you solely focus on the bad, you only have the stinking. But if you plant something good just next to it, you produce something good.” 

A manure pile is a stinking thing, she said, not a place where you want to gather and talk. Mujawayo suggested then to grow something around it, like banana trees, to make it more beautiful. “Grow your bananas,” she said. “Please don’t stay there, in the negativity. Grow something beautiful.”

Bora Lugunda ’25 of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, asked the Rwandans how outsiders should best approach interviews with survivors to help document the history of the atrocity. 

“It’s not that hard,” Rutagengwa said. “Survivors want to tell their story. It’s good when they share the details, because it helps in the healing process.”

Associate Professor of History Patrick Otim, who next year while on sabbatical in East Africa will pursue research on survivors of the war in Uganda that took place between 1986 and 2008, appreciated this question — and the Rwandans’ responses. Otim said the three guests taught the students in his that historians have to be transparent — and also to conduct interviews with empathy and respect.

“The question for me as a historian is always: How do we treat historical actors like survivors of genocide? When we write history, we have to be respectful of their experiences and portray them in the most accurate way,” Otim said. “I wanted my students to learn how to work with or get information from survivors. This talk was a lesson in oral history.”

On Monday, as the trio talked with students from two French courses and one history course gathered in Roger Williams Hall, they detailed how they’ve lived with the trauma of living through the genocide in frank, raw terms.

They explained about the Gacaca courts (2002–2012), a system of restorative justice aimed at helping rebuild the country through public confessions and testimonies about the atrocity to put an end to decades of impunity and allow survivors to know the fate of their loved ones. 

Mujawayo, who lost her husband, parents, and hundreds of relatives in the genocide, said the open, public discussion about the details of the genocide helped many to find, if not forgiveness, a certain sense of accountability and closure as they were morning their deads.

“After my sister was killed, I at least knew where her body was thrown. So we could bury her in dignity,” she said. “It was not an easy process, finding the latrines where they threw them, but it gives some comfort to restore their dignity.”

After the genocide, Mujawayo helped found AVEGA () with 50 other widows to provide assistance to Tutsi and Hutu widows and children of the genocide. The approximate meaning of “agahozo” is “to dry your tears.”

Chantal Kayitesi, who lost her husband, parents, siblings, and relatives, pointed out that the children of the killers too have had a difficult path moving forward by having to accept their intimate connection to the genocide. While many Rwandans want all of their people to move forward, it’s vital to keep retelling the history, “so that it never happens again.” 

After the genocide, Kayitesi was also a founding member of AVEGA and has contributed to a collective testimony written by women survivors, Entendez-nous! (Hear Us). “There are always people who try to deny there was a genocide,” she said. “But it really happened.” 

In a culture with a deep tradition of oral history, Rutagengwa said that Rwandans have turned to writing down in detail the events of the genocide, so that they can make certain to pass on a true account of it. “We lost great people, but we didn’t want to lose them forever,” he said. “We needed to record who they were. So we made lists of the survivors.”

Dauge-Roth said many students were struck by the compromises that Tutsi survivors were asked to embrace in the reconciliation process, such as moving away from a punitive desire of implementing justice, embracing the restorative justice model of the Gacaca courts, and coping with the return of the vast majority of the perpetrators within their communities as necessary steps to work toward national unity. 

“This was a huge shift for most,” he said. “But they were also in a situation where there was no other choice for them and for the country. The vast majority of them accepted what was demanded from them for their own country and future generations in this historical context without precedent.”

After the visit, Lily Ritch ’25 of Cincinnati, Ohio, gave to Mujawayo and Kayitesi a hand-written thank-you note that read, in part: “This conversation was rough, and I am walking away with a deep respect and admiration for you. I am inspired by your ability to feel and recognize your trauma as a necessary step toward moving forward towards progress and future prevention.”

By helping students at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, a high school for orphaned and vulnerable youth in rural Rwanda, to think and speak about the society they want to see, “the project will contribute to cultivating Rwanda’s next generation of peace- and changemakers,” Whidden, a politics major, wrote in her grant proposal.

Twenty-five years after the genocide that devastated the country, one of Rwanda’s central development goals is to strengthen open dialogue and critical thinking, particularly among the country’s youth.

To that end, Whidden, a veteran of �ֲ���ý’ Brooks Quimby Debate Council, and staff in the Village’s career center will develop a debate curriculum, culminating in a weeklong camp. The curriculum will address the triple goals of critical thinking, public speaking, and English language learning.

“The goal of developing this curriculum is to give students the skills to think and question for themselves, rather than having some white Western individual coming in and trying to challenge certain ideas or status quos,” Whidden said in a recent interview. “It’s not for me to come in and question those things for them but to give them the tools to start asking those questions for themselves.”

Whidden, of New York City, first traveled to Rwanda during Short Term in 2015, as part of a documentary filmmaking course looking at post-genocide reconstruction, taught by Professor of French and Francophone Studies Alexandre Dauge-Roth. Back on campus, she completed a semester-long research project on post-conflict development in Rwanda.

With funding from the �ֲ���ý Purposeful Work internship program, she returned to the country in  summer 2017 as an intern for the Village. She worked in the school’s career center, taught an accelerated English course, and created a peer-mentoring program.

“I had a really incredible experience working there,” Whidden said. “I became really close with my students — especially with my debaters, who were remarkable — and I built a strong relationship with my supervisor and with the director of the Village.”

After her eight weeks at the Village this year, Whidden will move to Morocco on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award. In the meantime, she’s grateful for the chance to return to the school.

“It’s a complete privilege and remarkable opportunity to give back to and continue to work with an organization that was really formative in my personal and professional development,” she said.

A scene from Kivu Ruhorahoza’s 2015 film “Things of the Aimless Wanderer.”

Kivu Ruhorahoza, an award-winning Rwandan filmmaker, presents two of his films at �ֲ���ý College: 2015’s Things of the Aimless Wanderer at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 29, and Ruhorahoza’s 2011 feature debut, Grey Matter, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 2.

Rwandan filmmaker Kivu Ruhorahoza presents two of his films at �ֲ���ý.

Both screenings take place in Room G52, the Keck Classroom, in Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk). Sponsored by the French and francophone studies department at �ֲ���ý, the screenings are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-8293.

Ruhorahoza’s second feature film, Things of the Aimless Wanderer comprises a series of cryptic and loosely connected narrative shards. Each depicts an uneasy encounter between an African woman and a male figure of authority or menace, be it a 19th-century white explorer, a 21st-century Western journalist or a Rwandan man performing reconnaissance for a shadowy internal agency.

In each story, a female figure is an object of lust, surveillance, fascination or violence, inevitably disappearing from the narrative. Every disappearance becomes a sort of chorus, punctuated by enigmatic images and haunting musical soundscapes.

Grey Matter is the first feature-length narrative film produced in Rwanda by a native Rwandan filmmaker. Set in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, this self-referential film-within-a-film depicts the vision and trials of a determined filmmaker as he tries to produce his first feature, The Cycle of the Cockroach.

That trenchant drama about a brother and sister dealing with the aftermath of genocide finds no support from agencies only interested in funding upbeat policy-friendly films. As the filmmaker borrows recklessly from a loan shark, Cycle plays out on the screen, subtly measuring the horror and systematic madness of events hardly unique to Rwanda, while offering insight into the nature of political violence.

Ruhorahoza was born in Kigali in 1982. A self-taught filmmaker, he won the award for Best African Short at Montreal’s 25th Pan African International Film Festival and Best Short at the Kenya International Film Festival in 2009 for his short film Lost in the South.

Slant Magazine observed that Ruhorahoza employs film to “communicate the unthinkable consequences of mass tragedy” — the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Grey Matter received a Jury Special Mention for Best Emerging Filmmaker and won the Best Actor award at the 2011 TriBeCa Film Festival. The film went on to win, among other honors, the Grand Prize at the Tübingen French Film Festival; Best Director and Signis Award at the Cordoba African Film Festival; and the Jury Prize at the Khouribga African Film Festival.

Ruhorahoza has taught directing and screenwriting workshops for various organizations and has served as a mentor at the TriBeCa Film Institute for underprivileged aspiring filmmakers from New York.

Alex Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and francophone studies, gives the Kroepsch Lecture on March 18, 2015. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

What shapes a meaningful conversation with people whose sense of self has been fractured by witnessing the horrors of genocide? In such conversations, who controls what is meaningful and worthy of discussion, remembrance and action?

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, recipient of �ֲ���ý’ 2015 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, devoted his Kroepsch lecture on March 18 to a thorough analysis of those questions — specifically as they pertain to his decade of engaging �ֲ���ý students with survivors and their stories of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

And whether or not he ever used the words “power” and “ownership” during his late-afternoon lecture, those concepts were the floor his talk stood on.

How do power relationships play out in the dialogue between a trauma survivor and that person’s interlocutor? Who owns the survivor’s story, the space in which it’s heard and its retellings? Most important, what is the interlocutor’s ethical and civic obligation to the survivor?

Associate professor in French and francophone studies, Dauge-Roth is internationally known for his research into personal narratives from the genocide, work represented by his 2010 book, Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History (Lexington Books).

Dozens of students, colleagues and friends offered a warm welcome to this scholar and teacher who, in his 10th year at �ֲ���ý, “received many, many nominations for the Kroepsch,” as Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer said in introducing Dauge-Roth.

Recipients of the award are nominated by current students and recent graduates, and the honoree is selected by a panel of recent recipients. Auer quoted a nominator who had taken part in Dauge-Roth’s Short Term course in Rwanda. That person praised Dauge-Roth for teaching not only academic aspects of the genocide, but the “importance of being understanding, nonjudgmental and sensitive with the [Rwandans] we worked with.” (Another nominator drew laughter by calling Dauge-Roth “the thesis adviser I needed, not the thesis adviser I deserved.”)

Dauge-Roth’s talk was titled The Transformative Power of Literary and Testimonial Encounters. Revealing a mentality scrupulous in both its morality and its attention to the ramifications of an idea, the hour-long talk traced an arc from Dauge-Roth’s own studies, in his native Switzerland and at the University of Michigan, to the thinking behind signature courses that he introduced at �ֲ���ý.

Both courses, “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda” and “Learning with the Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda,” were driven by interaction between Dauge-Roth’s students and genocide survivors. The latter, a Short Term unit, has twice brought students to Rwanda.

Together, Sarah Bravmann ’12 and Alexis Mutimukunda face a genocide exhibit of human skulls at the Ntarama Memorial in Rwanda during the Short Term course “Learning with Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda” in 2009 led by Alex Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and francophone studies.

As he designed these courses, he recounted, a central issue quickly emerged. “What are the informative — but more importantly the potentially transformative — places, voices and roles, that we as an academic community are willing to offer to members of another community whose history we are studying?”

“My hope was that a polyvocal and decentered mode of teaching would open up challenging spaces of dialogue, inviting students to re-evaluate the borders of academia; to reflect on their civic role when exposed to histories of pain; and to question the understanding, circulation and production of knowledge about others.”

Inspired by research conducted for his graduate degrees, notably his work at Michigan with the personal testimony of people living with AIDS in France, Dauge-Roth focused on the literature of survivors of the genocide — biographies, diaries, oral history and film.

“Interactions with survivors of genocide is not only about the past and grievance but also about sharing laughter within the present despite of it all,” says Dauge-Roth. Here, �ֲ���ý students and survivors of the genocide in Rwanda gather for music and fellowship during Short Term in 2013. The survivors live at Tubeho, a collective of houses in Kigali where orphans of the genocide live in reconstituted families.

It was his dissertation director at Michigan, Professor of Comparative Literature Ross Chambers, who articulated the idea that reading survivors’ literature can’t be a passive act: Listeners, Dauge-Roth learned, need to “develop a critical self-awareness regarding their own agency and inadequacy as they respond to survivors’ stories.”

As he created his Rwanda-based courses for �ֲ���ý, Dauge-Roth drew on three consequential lessons from his graduate work. First, trauma causes what he calls a “fracture within the self,” a break between one’s pre- and post-trauma selves that must be negotiated.

Second, that negotiation is not just personal and internal, but social and cultural. Traumas such as AIDS or the Rwandan genocide become, or reflect, social preoccupations. So society dictates the terms of the discourse around them — often to the detriment of the traumatized, as in the bleak early years of the AIDS crisis, when sufferers were branded as “social parasites.”

“Third, I learned that testimonial literature forces on us a political discussion about the social representation of suffering and our civic role in its unfolding and aftermath,” Dauge-Roth said. Crucially, in the words of literature professor Antoine Compagnon, “what is at stake for us as readers is our willingness to be disturbed by, and ultimately transformed by, our encounter with another’s experience.”

In the audience at Alex Dauge-Roth’s Kroepsch Lecture were, from left, departmental colleague Kirk Read; Katherine Dauge-Roth, Alex’s wife; and their son, Aymeric Dauge-Roth. (Phyllis Graber-Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As Dauge-Roth said in describing the Short Term course in Rwanda, his hope was to create “a space of encounter that would allow survivors to bear witness, on their own terms, and challenge us, their interlocutors, to explore what it means to be a listening community; and what responses we must forge as their painful histories are passed on to us.”

So what does it take to be a listening community? Dauge-Roth offered three tenets (“I’m French — everything goes by threes,” he joked). First, it requires that we move past pity and compassion, “since these are just part of the strategy for maintaining the status quo.” Second, it means incorporating into our own histories the history of pain that we encounter.

Third, it means that listeners “see themselves as indirect witnesses, whose responsibility is to develop a critical self-awareness regarding their own agency and inadequacy as they respond to survivors’ stories. Learning with the survivors” — not merely from; a key distinction for Dauge-Roth — becomes an “ethical gesture” that makes possible reciprocal relationships between survivors’ histories and our own.

“These courses have taught me and my students,” he concluded, “that listening to testimonies bearing witness to the genocide questions both our willingness to confront disconcerting human behaviors and our sense of cultural hospitality — when hospitality is understood as a transformative interruption of one’s self.”

“Facing the disturbing experience of genocide demands that we identify what role we play, and ought to play differently, in the social recognition and circulation of the histories of pain that community partners share.”

View a video of Alex Dauge-Roth’s Kroepsch Lecture:

April marks the 20th anniversary of this genocide in Rwanda, three months of violence in which Hutu extremists killed as many as 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutus.

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and Francophone studies, is an expert in the literary, cinematic and testimonial representations of the 1994 genocide.

�ֲ���ý students visit the Murabi Genocide Memorial site in 2009 as part of Alex Dauge-Roth’s Short Term course “Learning with Orphans of the Rwandan Genocide.” The sign refers to the French soldiers who created a volleyball pitch amidst mass graves during their occupation in June 1994. More than 50,000 people were massacred at the site.

He was invited to take part in two commemorative events last week organized by Bene-Rwanda, the Rwandan diaspora association in Italy. The events were part of “Kwibuka 20” — “We need to remember” — a commemoration based in the Rwandan capital of Kigali with satellite events around the world.

Dauge-Roth explains the events of 1994 and what is at stake for Rwanda moving forward.

1. What was the immediate impact of the genocide on life in Rwanda?

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, professor of French and Francophone studies.

The genocide killed more than two-thirds of the Tutsi living in Rwanda, close to 20 percent of the entire population and saw another 20 percent flee to the current Republic Democratic of Congo. In July 1994, the country was a field of ruins and chaos: No institutions had been spared. Suspicion and hatred prevailed among the two major segments of the population. Grief and trauma were palpable in everyone. The social cohesion of the country was in pieces, and everything had to be rebuilt from zero.

2. How did Rwanda move on after that?

The first priorities were national security, the rebuilding of the institutions, establishing peace in order to attract investments — and, of course, finding a way to implement justice to try the hundreds of thousands of people suspected to have taken part in the genocide.

The ethnic labels “Tutsi,” “Hutu” and “Twa” were banned from official government documents, and a nationalistic discourse arose to transcend ethnic divisions.

Moving quickly away from a punitive conception of justice to a form of transitional or restorative justice, the Rwandan government established in 2001 the gacaca courts. These courts heard 1.4 million cases in a span of 10 years.

�ֲ���ý students interact with local youth outside a bar in Nyamata during a visit in May 2013. For Dauge-Roth, the photo “signifies the global connectedness of Rwanda, where 60 percent of of the population has a cell phone and every young person has a Facebook page.”

3. How successful have these efforts been?

Needless to say, not everything has been achieved and nothing is perfect in Rwanda today — as is the case in any country, African or not. The current president, Paul Kagame, must step down in three years at the end of his second term. It remains to be seen if Rwanda’s institutions and the social fabric of the country will be strong enough to ensure a peaceful political transition.

Among the challenges are Rwanda’s distribution of wealth and demographic trends: The population has doubled in 20 years, and land and resources are scarce.

In the long term, though, the biggest issue will be to see how the generation born after the genocide — more than 50 percent of the current population — will embrace the newly coined national identity and whether they refuse to revive ethnic categories and hatred for political gain.

4. Tell us about your involvement with the commemoration events in Italy.

My talk in Rome focused on the numerous political and personal challenges survivors face when voicing their experiences. Their testimonies are an attempt to gain social recognition for their past sufferings and present needs.

In addition to a roundtable on the tensions between personal and collective memory in post-genocide Rwanda, I also led a pedagogical workshop in Genoa, where I presented the value of learning with survivors of the genocide against the Tutsi when teaching courses on this genocide and the current national reunification process.

5. What other projects on Rwanda do you have planned?

With French colleagues, I am organizing a three-day international conference and a film cycle in Paris this November themed “Rwanda 1994–2014: Memory Constructs and the Writing of History Twenty Years After the Genocide.”

My current book project, Who Speaks Behind the Archive? Personal and National Reconciliation in Rwanda, focuses on the cinematic and documentary representations of the reconciliation process in Rwanda.

6. Are you planning to teach your travel Short Term “Learning with Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda” in the near future?

I plan to go back with students in 2016, before Rwanda’s presidential elections in 2017.

In the meantime, I will teach a new version of the course “Documenting the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda” this fall, with a special focus on how the current politics of national reunification and the gacaca transitional justice have shaped representations of the genocide.

Devin Tatro ’14 of Haverhill, Mass., is the co-recipient of a Davis Project for Peace grant. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Two �ֲ���ý seniors have received a national award that will launch an initiative in Rwanda to support children of incarcerated people.

A 2014 Davis Project for Peace award has gone to Simone Schriger of Los Angeles and Devin Tatro of Haverhill, Mass., who, after graduating from �ֲ���ý, will spend this summer in Rwanda developing a program to foster resiliency and community among people whose parents have been imprisoned for reasons including their involvement in the 1994 genocide.

Simone Schriger ’14 of Los Angeles. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Established in 2007 by the late Kathryn Wasserman Davis, the Project for Peace program provides $10,000 apiece to initiatives promoting peace and addressing root causes of conflict. Learn more at .

Titled Restoration, Reconciliation and Rehabilitation: Empowering CIPs, Schriger and Tatro’s project will explore how children of incarcerated parents (CIPs) can develop coping skills conducive to their mental health.

The pair will establish the program with the Rwandan branch of Prison Fellowship International. They are basing their project on activities proven in U.S. CIP-advocacy programs, which they will adapt for Rwanda’s unique circumstances.

Imprisonment is a salient social and political issue in Rwanda, which ranks seventh worldwide for imprisoned population, according to Tatro and Schriger. Twenty years after the 1994 genocide, in which Hutu extremists massacred as many as a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu, the nation is still working toward recovery — a situation presenting a unique context for more universal concerns about children of prisoners.

With some 120,000 individuals accused of genocidal crimes, Rwanda found distinctive ways — such as the “gacaca” courts adapted from tribal practices — to exercise justice in the years after the massacre.

“Achieving a peaceful society demands successful criminal reconciliation: healing broken relationships, repairing the damage done by crime and restoring an imprisoned offender to an integrated and productive member of society upon release,” Tatro and Schriger write in their Davis proposal.

Yet, they note, the children of prisoners have typically been neglected in the two decades of national healing.

“Rwandan CIPs are a critical missing link in national reunification and vital to the peace-seeking process.”

Schriger and Tatro bring complementary interests and skills to the project. Tatro, who has studied in Rwanda, is an honors anthropology major whose experience with field work will inform the pair’s research.

“Working with children of incarcerated parents as a demographic is something I’ve been interested in doing,” she says. “It’s a demographic that people don’t necessarily know how to help or deal with.

“A lot of these children go under the radar — it’s like losing a parent, but also involves shame and confusion. We will look into how this ties into their identity.”

An honors psychology major, Schriger is interested in the practice of restorative justice, a theme in Rwandan reconciliation and recovery efforts since the genocide. She believes that restorative justice methods are the key to an empowered community.

Restorative justice prioritizes the personal needs of the victim and the community over the abstract needs of the state. It fosters dialogue among the parties with the intent of redressing the victims’ grievances and rehabilitating the offender.

“It is based on the belief that justice has to be achieved through a process of reconciliation and conversation, rather than just banishing someone to a cell,” Schriger says.

The pair hope to bring that concept into the breach between imprisoned parents and their children, who are typically separated by barriers not only physical but emotional and social.

“We want to put children in contact with their parents,” says Schriger. “We want them to understand that their parents are real people — and that not everything has to be perfect, but that they can have working relationships.”

Tatro points out that her and Schriger’s project reflects a growing worldwide concern about the well-being of CIPs. “A lot of our work in designing this project was looking at programs in this country that address children with incarcerated parents — programs that are growing in number and influence.”

The project will be undertaken in partnership with Prison Fellowship Rwanda, a nonprofit related to Prison Fellowship International, an NGO that employs restorative justice techniques to aid prisoners, ex-prisoners, victims and their families.

Along with interventions by expert counselors, Tatro and Schriger will empower CIPs with resources for emotional catharsis and self-understanding, such as journaling, support groups and letter writing to imprisoned parents.

Drawing on Tatro’s anthropology training, the pair will also document the narratives of the children, “beginning to capture and interpret their unique position, and what it means for peacemaking, in a post-genocidal culture,” they write.

Tatro visited Rwanda in the fall of 2012 where she got hands-on experience in conflict resolution at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Rwanda Development Board.

She also conducted research in Uganda for her honors thesis in anthropology, which looks at the efforts of the Sebei people to market their ethnic and cultural heritage to tourists and international aid organizations.

Schriger, who received a prestigious Watson Fellowship this spring, worked with CIPs at a program for impoverished children in Los Angeles. She spent winter 2012 in Chile, where, in addition to studying at a local university, she conducted research for her honors thesis about perceptions of dating violence in that country.

Gilbert Ndahayo.

A Rwandan filmmaker dedicated to producing documentaries about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Gilbert Ndahayo visits �ֲ���ý College to show his new film, The Rwandan Night, at 7 p.m. Monday, March 4, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

The event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact adaugero@bates.edu.

The Rwandan Night is the sequel to Ndahayo’s autobiographical piece about the murder of his family, 2012’s Rwanda: Beyond The Deadly Pit, and is the second film in a planned trilogy about the tragic events of 1994.

This 70-minute ethnographic documentary explores the world of the oldest survivor of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. One night in 2006, the 51-year-old Sakindi bears witness to the genocide. Instead of living alone with the sorrow of losing his parents and other family members, he decides to speak for the first time before a large audience during a commemoration at Mumena Stadium in the capital city of Rwanda.

Ndahayo lost his parents and 52 other family members in the genocide. Today he is a candidate for a master’s degree in fine arts at Columbia University. His films as writer and director include the award-winning Scars of My Days (2007) and Behind This Convent (2008).

Scott’s photography presents networks of images surrounding each of her subjects, members of Tubeho, a community of people in Kigali, Rwanda, orphaned by the 1994 Rwandan genocide. These networks are “not meant to create a linear story or to fully encapsulate the subject,” she says, but are instead a collection of snapshots of people living their lives, communicating “what they are like, where they came from and what they see.”

At 7:30 p.m. Feb. 22, the college screens the 1997 film Valentina’s Nightmare: A Journey into the Rwandan Genocide, which documents the massacre of an estimated 20,000 civilians on April 15-16, 1994, at the Nyarubuye Roman Catholic Church in Kibungo Province, where they had taken refuge. A discussion with Valentina Iribagiza, one of the few survivors of the Nyarubuye massacre, follows the screening.

A week later, at 8 p.m. March 1, in an event titled Recording Testimonies and Bearing Witness in Rwanda, the college shows Voices of Rwanda, an acclaimed documentary compiled from hundreds of hours of interviews with genocide survivors. A discussion with filmmaker Taylor Krauss, who directs an oral history project with survivors, and genocide survivor Berthe Kayitesi follows the screening.

Both events take place in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave., and are open to the public at no cost. They are sponsored by the French department with support from the Learning Associates Program. For more information, please contact this adaugero@bates.edu.

In April 1994, tensions between Rwanda’s Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups boiled over into 100 days of nightmarish violence in which up to a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were massacred by Hutu extremists. Alexandre Dauge-Roth, assistant professor of French at �ֲ���ý, focuses his research and teaching on the process and the societal purposes of documenting the genocide. The Monday events are part of an ongoing series of �ֲ���ý events exploring the topic.

First broadcast on the PBS series “Frontline,” Valentina’s Nightmare is reporter Fergal Keane’s documentary about Iribagiza. A Tutsi, she was 13 at the time of the genocide, and survived the massacre of her village by hiding among the bodies of her family and neighbors.

Keane was one of the first Westerners to enter the Nyarubuye churchyard after the slaughter. “I had an intellectual understanding of what the word ‘massacre’ meant from reading books,” Keane told “Frontline.”

“But books don’t smell. Books don’t rot. Books don’t lie in stagnant pools. Books don’t leach into the earth the way those bodies did. They can’t tell you about it. Nothing can tell you about it except the experience of going there and seeing it.”

Krauss’ documentary compiles recordings and testimonies of genocide survivors. He is the founder and director of a nonprofit project, also called Voices of Rwanda, that preserves such testimonies to ensure that these stories continue to inspire a global sense of responsibility for the prevention of human rights atrocities.

After the screening, Krauss and genocide survivor Berthe Kayitesi, author of the testimony Tomorrow My Life: Orphans in Post-Genocide Rwanda, will speak. Kayitesi, a Tutsi, lost her parents and two older sisters during the genocide, but was able to escape with a few siblings and found refuge in an orphanage in the Congo, where she spent four years.

She now holds a bachelor’s degree in psychopedagogy from the Adventist University of Central Africa in Kigali, Rwanda, and a master’s in education from the University of Québec at Trois-Rivières. She serves as an ambassador for Friends of Tubeho, a nonprofit organization committed to providing access to education for more than 300 orphans of the Rwandan genocide.

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In Alex Dauge-Roth’s Short Term course, students learn with, not from, orphan survivors of the 1994 genocide

By Simone Path ’11, with Associate Professor of French Alex Dauge-Roth

One must know and see, one must see and know. Indissolubly. — Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah

In Rwanda, drenching rains can quickly turn the red dirt roads into barely navigable mazes of rocky protrusions and gorges pooling with mud. It was after one such downpour last spring that I began to confront what I am made of, physically and psychologically.

In country, each �ֲ���ý student was paired with a member of Tubeho, the organization of orphan survivors of the genocide. Together, they negotiated how to move forward with interviews and oral histories. Pictured here are Innocent Micomyiza and Morgan Lynch ’10.

I saw before me an exhibit of human bones, arranged by leg, arm or skull, starkly displayed against a dark blue background. Only 15 years ago, those bones gave form to living bodies, like my own, full of hopes and dreams. Then came April of 1994, when one of the final genocides of the 20th century rapidly unfolded, leaving some 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, slaughtered in just 100 days.

My encounter with human bones occurred last May at the Gisozi Memorial in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. At this memorial and others like it, visitors are reminded how the world turned away — yet again — during a genocide. Fixated on the dead bones, I was determined not to look away, even as I heard the sobs of a few Rwandan survivors who would become my friends and the sniffling of a fellow �ֲ���ý student nearby.

I was among 13 �ֲ���ý students, all women, who had arrived in Kigali to begin the off-campus portion of our Short Term course “Learning with Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda,” taught by Associate Professor of French Alexandre Dauge-Roth.

The orphans we would learn from are members of Tubeho — the word means “let’s live” in Kinyarwanda — an association that since 2000 has brought together more than 300 orphans of the genocide to live in a Kigali neighborhood. They live in “reconstituted” families, groups of four to six genocide survivors who have lost their siblings and parents. In each family, one orphan is elected as the head of the household and acts like a parental figure for the others.

During our three-week stay in Rwanda,each �ֲ���ý student was who was, in most cases, a student with aspirations similar to ours. We would conduct interviews with our Rwandan peers; they would choose how the interview would be conducted: video, audio, or in writing. We �ֲ���ý students would submit our questions ahead of time for consideration by the orphan survivors.

The challenge of conducting oral histories was, Pathe writes, “to create a safe space for dialogue, where initially no such space existed.”

We were fortunate that Professor Dauge-Roth, in researching the personal, literary, and film narratives created since the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, had established strong connections with Tubeho, so we were not total strangers to them. Still, the expectations were great considering the short time we would be in country, just three weeks. We would not simply be learning about our hosts from a clinical distance. No, we would be expected to learn with them by becoming emotionally close to them. We would be expected to create a safe space for dialogue where initially no such space existed.

We gradually developed a sense of when to ask questions, when to shut up and listen, and when to put the genocide completely aside.

To accomplish this goal, the �ֲ���ý students and orphans would have to carefully and reciprocally redraw the boundaries that separated our communities. But this was easier said than practiced.

Eugene Mugabo and author Simone Pathe ’11.

At one exhibit at Gisozi that showed snapshots of victims when they were alive, I watched as my Rwandan “brother” Eugene examined the backs of each photo. I was looking at the fronts of the photos — images of newlyweds, a father holding his first son, a young driver standing beside a shiny red car — trying to digest the fact that all these innocent people were dead.

That fact was not news to Eugene, however. He was searching for connections. He was looking for names, dates, and places written on the back of the photos. These faces could have been his friends, family, teachers, or neighbors. Though I was physically close to him, I felt so removed from his experience. I did not know whether to stay while he turned over every photo, or to give him space, leave, and go on to another exhibit.

Our struggle to establish a dialogue about the genocide was easier once we recognized, respected, and became comfortable with the gap that existed between our vastly different experiences. We gradually developed a sense of when to ask questions, when to shut up and listen, and when to put the genocide completely aside. We took our cues from the Rwandans, soon realizing that every moment would be different for every survivor. Some went on at length about seeing known killers walk free in Kigali yet were reluctant to talk about their own pasts.

Two survivors, Pascal Mucyo and Ildephonse Majyambere, were able to give oral testimonies at genocide sites where friends and relatives had been slaughtered. In a school located in Nyange, near Kibuye, where students were killed. Others, meanwhile, reserved such personal details for one-on-one interviews with their American sisters, far away from onlookers.

We traveled often during our stay, and on these long rides our small, crowded red bus became an unexpectedly dynamic classroom. Conversation — not music from iPods — filled the time, and the passing countryside prompted memories, like the recollections of a survivor who described his month of walking and hiding on the very roadway we were on.

Near the end of our second week, we traveled overnight with one Tubeho member to the Murabi Genocide Memorial, a former school in the southern region of Butare where 50,000 people were massacred. As was the case at all of the memorials we visited, we were the only visitors. Only the frequent bleating of goats and cawing of crows punctuated the silence.

At the Murabi Genocide Memorial, mummified remains of child victims.

To help prepare us, Professor Dauge-Roth showed us photos and video footage he took in 2006 of what we would witness. But I doubt anything could have prepared me for standing in a building filled with bodies. Preserved with white lime, they lay close together on large metal platforms in 10 separate rooms. Amid the chaotic but recognizable bodily contortions — mouths open as if in mid-scream, hands raised to shelter their heads, mothers clutching babies, and women with legs sprawled and underwear around their knees — pain and resistance were visible.

Some of us sobbed. Some were so stunned that tears were too much to ask for. Two older women, both survivors working as gatekeepers of this memorial site, escorted us around but they did not speak French, nor did they respond to the few phrases we tried to pronounce in Kinyarwanda. Instead, at the end of the visit, they embraced each of us, holding us for a long time, as if making sure we would be all right before sending us on our way. That day signified an inversion of the roles we had expected to play: We were suffering, and the survivors were comforting us.

In our final meeting as a group, �ֲ���ýies and survivors, we discussed what to do with the testimonies our encounter had generated. The orphans were rightly concerned about how their testimonies would be used. Because we were there to learn with them, the answer to that question would flow from their needs and desires.

So we broke into two groups. The Tubeho members decided to ask us to create a Web site to make visible their needs and the challenges they face. A website would mean unprecedented social visibility for a group that, by their very definition as orphans, do not often have such a voice.

On the �ֲ���ý side, we discussed the questions we wished to address in our final papers. We decided to write about what we learned about ourselves, how our understanding of the genocide had changed, and how we would share what we learned.

The last question haunted us. Even before returning, we all fretted about how to answer the dreaded question from our friends: “How was Rwanda?” Sharing all the details of an intense experience, we learned, can sometimes just devalue it.

Still, we needed to talk. Some people were receptive, like my dad, who had consumed all the information about Rwanda and the genocide that he could get his hands on, and my friends, who were genuinely interested. Others implied that they were not interested in hearing anything too upsetting.

Alex Dauge-Roth (left) and his �ֲ���ý students gather with their Tubeho partners at the Kigali airport at the conclusion of their visit.

True, we cannot force our experiences on anyone. But by not hearing the full story about humanity’s worst moments — whether it’s Rwanda in 1994 or Nazi Germany 70 years ago — these people will miss the significance of what most surprised us, the ones who listened: the hopefulness of the survivors.

These hopeful members of Tubeho, with whom we shared those long bus rides, morning jogs, and impromptu dance parties, welcomed us into their homes and trusted us with their stories. In return, I hope we showed them equal trust: that they, their country, and the bond that unites all of humanity, which many of them spoke so eloquently about, will not be forgotten.

In the end, that’s what we created in Kigali last May — a pure, shared space of hope. Our responsibility now is to nourish this space, remaining vigilant and creative in the present while remembering the horrific places from which these survivors have bravely traveled.

Simone Pathe ’11 of Madison, N.J., is a Dana Scholar and politics major. Alexandre Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French, won a 2009 Maine Campus Compact award for successfully infusing public service and civic engagement into his teaching. He is president of