Reporting from Rwanda

Harwood has been doing this trip for about 14 years. It’s run by Steve Rand, a Harwood English teacher. The trip to Rwanda is three weeks long and we travel throughout the entire country.

In Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, we stayed with Rwandan families. There, we visited a Good Samaritan Ministries preschool, for which Harwood Union High School students are building a new school. These schools were founded by an incredible lady named Teddy after the genocide. We sang and played games with the students there. At the end of the trip, we gave friendship bracelets to each of the 250 students at the school.

We also visited genocide memorial sites at churches and genocide museums in Kigali.

There were also many cultural experiences, such as eating traditional foods, watching traditional dances, visiting the King’s Place and going to the bustling and vibrant markets in Kigali.

Then, we traveled to Lake Kivu on the western border Rwanda shares with the Democratic Republic of Congo, and then we made a trip to the south to visit the Nyundo School of Art and Music and G.S. Byimana, another school.

We got to go on safari at the end of the trip to Akagera National Park, which is on the border between Rwanda and Tanzania.

During the trip, we visited five schools in total. After the Good Samaritan Ministries preschool, we went to Nyundo School of Art and Music in a town called Kabgayi in southern Rwanda. The whole atmosphere of the school was incredible. Everywhere you went, someone was singing or playing an instrument. Most of the students there could play multiple instruments and had some knowledge of singing. Each student had multiple talents, but specialized in one. We helped make and produce music videos of the students so they can use them for auditions in the future.

The next school we visited was called G.S. Byimana, and this one was very different from the schools we had visited so far on the trip, since it is a rural village school. The school had at least 2,000 students of all different ages. The whole experience there was so different but in the best way possible. They greeted us with a welcome ceremony with singing and dancing, and then we ate a traditional Rwandan lunch with the entire school. After lunch, we broke into smaller groups to have one-on-one conversations with students. The language barrier made it hard at first, but through charades and translators, we were able to have really meaningful conversations.

Les Enfants de Dieu was an incredible school that’s a rehabilitation center for street boys. The center is doing amazing work by taking street boys and placing them back into society. They bring them to school and give them a safe place to let out their frustrations by channeling their negative energy into something positive, such as dancing, acrobatics and sports. The goal is to have them totally integrated back into regular society and back into family life.

The Nyundo School was where we did the majority of the media projects. Nyundo Art School is a private boarding school that used to be with Nyundo Music School, but they recently were able to have their own facilities. We filmed and recorded the students at the art school and created media projects using interviews we did with the students. We worked closely with the students and made sure that their stories were being told from their perspectives and not ours. The photographers/videographers whom we traveled with from the Vermont Folklife Center, Ned Castle and Myles Jewell, taught us how to represent the people we interviewed in a respectful and unbiased way. This can be difficult, as the camera and microphone are very powerful tools.

A major part of the trip was a full immersion into the Rwandan culture. We were totally disconnected from home. Being disconnected was a major part of the experience of the trip because we weren't always checking our phones for the daily Snapchat or reloading Instagram all the time. It made us totally present in what we were doing, living in the moment. It was so nice to not have to worry about what was happening back home and truly be present and in the moment.

I took a lot away from this trip because not only were the people genuinely nice and the country’s landscape beautiful, but the history of the country is what makes Rwanda the way it is today.

Rwanda has recovered beautifully from the horrific genocide that happened 23 years ago. (Editor’s note: The genocide was a mass slaughter of the Tutsi minority by the Hutu majority government. The death toll was estimated at between 500,000 and 1 million people in a period of only 100 days.) We were told that neighbors, friends and families would kill each other just because the government was telling them to.

After the genocide was over, the only way to move on was to leave the hate in the past and forgive, because the people wanted peace and to make the statement “never again” a reality.

Going to Rwanda really made me understand why it's important to forgive people for their mistakes. Going to Rwanda has impacted my life because I was able to learn from the people’s ability to forgive and has helped me figure out parts of me that I didn’t know I was interested in learning or my personality in general.

I am so thankful for my community in supporting not only me to go to Rwanda, but Sara Gosselin as well, because without the community’s help and support, we would have not been able to go on the trip.

I am also thankful that Steve Rand opened up the trip not only for Harwood students, but allowed Stowe and Peoples Academy to go on an amazing trip as well.

Victoria Duff is a Stowe High School junior.