Students see genocide through Rwandan eyes

Known as the Land of 1,000 Hills, students said it was hard to imagine that only 17 years ago there were bodies piled up on street corners of Rwanda, bloodshed abundant.

In January, six of Buffalo State's theater students embarked on an emotional journey that they said would change their perspectives forever. They traveled to Rwanda as part of the Anne Frank Project and experienced firsthand the influence that the genocide still has in this country today.

Students who went said they were faced with the challenge of learning how to process their emotions and how to deal with them. They said they found that their theater training provided them with an outlet to release emotions and work through the pain they were seeing.

 "It was an emotional trip," theater student Tieisha Thomassaid."We left realizing how truly blessed and fortunate we are."

The students said they also realized that everyone processes what the group saw differently and that it was nice to have a large support frame there while learning to process what they were experiencing.

Descriptions of Rwanda included words such as luscious, beautiful and green.

The group visited different memorials while they were in Rwanda, all with a similar horrific theme.

"The day we visited the genocide memorial is the kind of day where you wake up cool and by the middle of the day you're crying your eyes out," Thomas said. "These people could have been cousins and now you're looking at bones."

While moving around Kigali, the city where the group stayed, students said they saw young men, sometimes boys, with guns the way we picture our military. They said they learned Rwandans believe that as a boy grows older, he becomes corrupt, so boys are trained to be soldiers.

One of the more shocking experiences the group said they shared was seeing exhibits of skulls and bones in glass cases and bodies in chains. The bodies on display had been buried alive in a mass grave. Once the bodies were discovered, roughly 250,000 in one grave, they were removed by the community and washed as a show of honor and respect.

The students were shown the Kigali Memorial Center exhibits by Rwandan students, where they were allowed to see the genocide through Rwandan eyes.

"One room was full of clothes that were found on bodies. The one that did it for me was the children's exhibit," Thomas said. "It was decorated like a nursery, all in yellow. I sat in a chair and cried watching a video of a son who had lost his mother."

Theater student Julia Smith said she agreed it was difficult to see the role children were given in the genocide.

"You walk into a room and there's this giant poster of this beautiful, happy baby and underneath it is a list of information," Smith said, "their name, their birthday, their favorite food and, underneath that, how they were killed."

The students experienced another memorial on the ground floor of a school, Julia said. Roughly 50,000 people were told they would be safe there before they were systematically killed by Hutu Extremists.

"These bodies were preserved in lime," she said. "The hair was intact, you could see the expressions on their faces."

She said it's difficult to be around death and still see something human, that it's not the same emotion as seeing a casket. She said the toughest part was seeing a skeleton clutching another tiny skeleton to its chest and picturing a mother clutching her child as they died.

There was a mass grave behind the school they visited as well, which they learned had once been the grounds of volleyball courts of the French army who had taken refuge behind the school, all the while knowing what was right below their feet.

"People were dug up and reburied and preserved. To me this is horrific but I had to come to terms with what to me was disrespectful," theater student Kara Ashbysaid.

They said it wasn't easy to see but what you don't think of is the smell, so strong you can taste it.

The memorials chose to show the events as they really were, said Drew Kahn, director of the theater department.

"Most people don't see (it), so they never have to come up with the words," Kahn said. "It was an honor to be there with (them)."

Along the way, the students kept daily blogs. They said they used them as both a way to remember every detail of their experiences and also to help them try to understand. Now, teachers in local high schools are choosing to use these blogs as part of their teaching.

"Our purpose was to learn about Rwanda: the people, the genocide, the history, the food and the culture," Smith said.

"We learned how theater can be a channel of change," Ashby said. "When you see something you feel is wrong, speak up."

Jennifer Waters can be reached by email at waters.record@live.com.