These sites ask you to share your favorite foods, favorite date nights, hobbies, hopes, dreams; they ask you questions like "If you could have dinner with a any person dead or alive, who would it be?, or "Would you give your kidney to your lover and why?" You get the idea. In response to the favorite books category I listed, We Wish to Informm you that Tomorrow We will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevich. This book is an account of the 1994 Rwanda genocide whereby the Hutus were ordered to kill all Tutsis, triggered by the assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana. In 100 days, 1,000,000 Tutsi's were killed, 85% of the Tutsi population, a nation wiped out.
While I lived in South Africa I was asked to teach history classes for the 8th, 9th, 10th grade students. Outdated, boring, history books, at least 8 nations representing the student body, and a novice teacher. What to do? During a group assembly with teachers, students and some parents, I decided to broach the idea that the students might benefit from a very focused analysis of a period of time instead of the usual cursory review of the history of our world; that we should concretize for them and put in context the motivations for warring nations, genocide, politicide and ethnocide, in light of the "end of Aparteid." I felt that by examining specific people and events it would ignite curiosity to learn more, make connections, and stir them to take action to make change, question, advocate for causes they believed in, and to recognize the need to have courage in a world one believed would never see these atrocities again. At that meeting that night, I had the Gourevich book and a book about the life of Ghandi. I spoke at the meeting with great passion about the Rwandan genocide and Ghandi leading the Indians to independence from the British rule without violence. Gaping mouths, wide eyes, raised eyebrows, concerned faces........that semester I created my lessons and we studied the Holocaust and Ghandi. I used resources at the University of Cape Town and museums to teach. Something very powerful happened in that experience with me and those students, studying topics and ideas so taboo. I still get emails from my students,who sign their name and then add, "Ghandi Power!" - the slogan and mantra for how we chose to live together inside and outside my classroom.
Thursday, I am leaving Uganda, on my own, to travel to Kigali, Rwanda to visit the Genocide Memorial. I wish Philip Gourevitch were accompanying me, but I am sure he's busy editing the Paris Review and / or writing his next piece for Vanity Fair or The New Yorker. I plan to document all that see in my journal and with my camera. I will be sure to share with those who are interested. I know there will be many. I'll try not get on my "soap box" and bore people with my usual rants about injustice, and my intolerance for intolerance, and my emotional tirades about human rights. I will try and temper myself and remain silent when I know words will do more harm These are the kinds of lessons I've learned in my life. South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda, Mexico City, Honduras, Nepal, the under-served, the voiceless, the homeless, the soul-less, the weak, the strong, Tutu, Ghandi, Che, King, Mandella..........these are the issues and people and places that interest me. These are the issues I care to think about and the people I want to speak to. These are the places I'd like to go on a date. (Okay, the South of France, too), and these are the people I want to talk to you at a dinner party with my friends and loved ones. So, EHarmony.com, thanks for the opportunity to find my "true love", but I think I already have.
