From Rwanda to Nunavut: lessons in reconciliation

Morley Hanson and his team of colleagues from the Kigali Genocide Memorial, from left Lambert Kanamugire, Innocent Nizeyimana, Johane Doyon, Jackson Rutayisire, Emmanuel Nshimyimana, Morley Hanson (kneeling), Nepo Ndahimana, Janviere Uwase. (PHOTO COURTESY MORLEY HANSON)

One of the panels in a travelling educational exhibit put together by the Kigali Genocide Memorial. (PHOTO COURTESY MORLEY HANSON)

The Kigali Genocide Memorial in Kigali, Rwanda. (PHOTO COURTESY MORLEY HANSON)

Get Morley Hanson talking about it and he says it’s hard to stop.

Hanson, the veteran program coordinator at Nunavut Sivuniksavut college in Ottawa, just returned from Rwanda in July after taking a year’s leave of absence from NS to volunteer at the Kigali Genocide Memorial.

He’s got a lot of stories to tell and they leave you feeling like someone punched you in the stomach.

Like the one about the young boy who stood up in a classroom, in front of his classmates, and told this story.

“All my life I’ve been working hard at school. I’ve been doing it because I know if I graduate with good enough marks, I can get into the military. If I get in the military, they’ll give me a gun. If they give me a gun, I can go and kill all those people who killed my family,” Hanson said, recounting the experience.

“But I say to all of you now that I’ve abandoned the plan,” the boy said, finishing.

The genocide memorial, which opened in 2004 in Rwanda’s capital of Kigali, has a varied mandate.

Not only does it serve as a safe place to mourn the thousands of Rwandan victims buried there, it’s also an archive of testimonials and has an educational component that both touches on genocides in other countries — Germany and Cambodia for example — and does outreach work in the countryside.

Hanson first volunteered at the memorial in 2007-08 and was so moved by the nature of the work there, and the dedication of the Rwandan people to find a peaceful road into the future, that he always hoped to go back.

He got his chance last summer as a volunteer for CUSO, an organization that sends professionals overseas to build local capacity in developing countries in many areas including business, healthcare, education, communications technology and human rights.

On his first stint to the small, central African country, he helped to develop school curricula so teachers could teach students about the 1994 genocide, during which an estimated 500,000 to one million Tutsi and moderate Hutus were killed by the Hutu majority.

It was crucial that the taboo subject be taught in a way that did not further divide or traumatize the children, Hanson said, but would lead to a common understanding of the politics, history and socio-economic pre-conditions that led to the horrific mass murder and the possibility of healing for a torn country.

“It was such a compelling experience, it broke our hearts to leave, but we had commitments back home, at work,” he said.

On his most recent trip, Hanson, his wife Johane Doyon, who is also an educator, and a team of local colleagues spent most of their time travelling to schools in rural areas with a touring exhibit put together by staff at the memorial.

His job was to run workshops for teachers, many of whom were survivors of the genocide, to show them how to use the exhibit’s materials and stories in the classroom, in a participatory way, to get the students involved and engaged. He and his wife also ran workshops for students.

“It was draining. We were over the edge most of the times, long days, intense stuff,” he said.

Hanson also helped to train guides who could take members of the public through the exhibit’s large panels to explain the issues featured on those panels — more than half of which covered reconciliation and peace-building, including examples from other countries.

The panels show people and tell their stories — perpetrators, victims, widows, children, refugees — and explain how both sides of the fight came together and found ways to move through the stages of hate, anger, suspicion and guilt to reconciliation.

This, Hanson said, resonated with some of his Inuit colleagues and friends when he described his experience to them upon arriving back in Canada.

Inuit survivors of residential schools have told their stories, and have received both apologies and compensation, he said, but they’ve never come together with perpetrators — other than in the courts — to tell their stories together and achieve true forgiveness.

That would require bringing together Inuit and First Nations survivors with religious leaders, teachers and bureaucrats who ran Canada’s residential schools — not an easy task since many are probably elderly or deceased.

And it would require more than just a one-off event, Hanson said. In Rwanda, it often took many meetings, over months and even years, before people were able to move through the psychological stages of grief and hatred.

“It’s all about — here’s a settlement so now we can forgive and be reconciled and move on, but people are still back with the feelings, psychologically, and emotionally, that they’ve carried forever,” Hanson said. “And how do you jump to forgiveness without those steps in between happening?”

Which means the process is complicated, takes time and effort, and requires knowledgeable facilitators and multiple meetings — things that make the possibility of true residential school reconciliation, for some, seem even more remote.

A tour guide takes some students through the travelling exhibit. (PHOTO COURTESY MORLEY HANSON)