Majority of youths in foreign countries presume that modern Rwandan history is all summed up in the movie “Hotel Rwanda” which is popularly shown to students as a basic Rwandan history lesson that addresses the 1994 Tutsi Genocide.
Fourteen students from US Harwood Union High School with their English teacher Steve Rand and 4 students from Woonsocket, believe that this movie doesn’t do any Justice to the country’s history and have set out to learn about it first hand when they visit Rwanda for their first time next Sunday with world renowned journalist of the Addison independent Andrea Suozzo for three weeks.
The group’s trip will be memorialized as “Stories of hope” where the students will be visiting the genocide memorials and different museums across Rwanda where they will learn and record the true complexities of the political and social background that caused the genocide to occur.
These 18 students and their teacher for the past two years have included a multimedia effort which will help the students process the new experiences they will encounter during their journey.
Instructors in ethnography and multimedia will help students use recording equipment. The true lesson the instructors wish to teach is how to take the time to listen, experience and also share meaningful
stories during their expedition.
Suozzo told IGIHE.com by email that he was looking forward to immersing himself in a completely unfamiliar country, with rich history that has bought an amazing new reality to today’s world.
Suozzo will be leaving his comfort zone of his desk at the Addison independent, for his first taste of the equatorial heat of the sub Saharan Africa.
He says he believes it will all be worth it, for his trip won’t be about a group of foreigners travelling a thousand miles just to get a few pictures of gorilla’s nor to experience exotic music and dancing but instead its a journey of justice for these students that wish to do justice to the stories they will bring back with them.
The instructors want the students to personally see for themselves what has made Rwanda one of the country’s globally recognized places to design and build information technology.
Suozzo wrote “I’m ready to go and soak up every bit of knowledge (and sunshine) I possibly can, and to help 18 high school students bring back their own stories of what they have learned there.”
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