In February, 26 Harwood Union High School students (sophomores through seniors) traveled to Rwanda for three weeks. The students were accompanied by trip leader/Harwood teacher Steve Rand, as well as Harwood teachers/staff Tedin Lange, Tara Cariano, Paul Kramer, and Rachael Potts. It was the first Harwood trip to Rwanda since 2018, as the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo prevented the students from traveling in 2019, then the pandemic put a pause on the annual trip.
The Harwood students visited Rwandan schools and traveled across the country, documenting their learnings through media projects. They had worked with filmmakers, including a Harwood alumna, and ethnographers prior to the trip. They also hired four Rwandan filmmakers who traveled to the south of the country with the group.
The Harwood students will present some of their media projects along with photos from the trip at the Zen Barn in Waterbury Center on Sunday, April 16, from 4 to 6 p.m.
MUSIC AND SOUND
Some of the 14 projects Harwood students created focused on music and sounds, the beauty of Rwanda’s natural landscape, “things that were important to Rwandan such as the concept of love, and happiness, and education. We did a project focused on mothers from Rwanda to get that perspective of gender roles,” Rand said.
One of the schools the students formed a partnership with was the National School of Arts and Music. “It's a pretty amazing program that was developed by a gentleman who had been a refugee living in Canada and he himself was a professional musician,” Rand said. “After the genocide in 1994, he decided to return to his country. He started the school, basically from scratch, and has built it up into this amazing program. When we travel to the school, we do media work with them. They love to perform.”
Rand said that with some of the $134,000 Senator Bernie Sanders secured for Harwood’s travel/exchange program, he hopes to bring students from the National School of Arts and Music to Vermont in the fall. “We want to do a musical performance that's collaborative between Harwood students and Rwandan students,” he said.
IMMERSION EXPERIENCE
Of the recent trip, he said, “It's meant to be an immersion experience whereby students do a deep dive into the culture and learn as much as they can about the people and the place. Hopefully the takeaway is that the learning leads to this concept of being very similar. Even though we live 7,000 miles away, they're similar. Then the nature of the geography of that place, students get pretty enamored by the different places we go. It's a small country, yet it has all these different climates -- rain forest, Serengeti, volcanoes, land of 1,000 hills. The idea has always been that they learn as much as they can about a different culture, and they have this cultural exchange and that they can articulate a better understanding of the world. It's not an easy trip, because it's pretty intense to hear the stories of genocide. I think it's a good topic for young people to examine, and do a deep dive into and just try to understand, how does that even happen?”
Regarding the upcoming Zen Barn event, Rand said, “These presentations are stories of hope, because the recovery in Rwanda is pretty extraordinary. In terms of raising the standard of living, they still have to address issues of malnourishment. They still have to address issues of governance. But it's a super safe place. The people are very welcoming and friendly.”
Learn more about Harwood’s trip to Rwanda on April 16 at the Zen Barn.
