An image from the 2009 Bates visit to Rwanda for the course “Learning with the Orphans of the Rwanda Genocide.”

In its story about teaching genocide, International Educator features the Bates course “Learning with Orphans of the Rwandan Genocide,” taught by Associate Professor of French Alex Dauge-Roth.

Writer Dana Wilkie frames the challenge of teaching genocide this way: “How does a university program…address the power of political regimes and demagogues bent on inciting the sort of hatred that leads one people to commit atrocities against another?”

Dauge-Roth, who conducts ongoing research in Rwanda and directs the nonprofit Friends of Tubeho, offers an answer by first noting that “we all have defenses that allow us to intellectualize” horrific acts like genocide.

“But when there’s more intimate proximity with the human effects of genocide, the way you relate to such events shifts radically,” he says.

In the case of Dauge-Roth’s course, he and students travel to Rwanda, where students partner with orphans of the 1994 genocide to create oral histories and other documentary resources.

Achieving this kind of “intimate proximity” (which is the title of the article), creates “ways to move on and to create connections and dialogues” to prevent future genocide.

• View story in International Educator, January-February 2013.
• View story about Dauge-Roth’s course in Bates Magazine, Fall 2009.

The lecture, titled Tomorrow My Life: Orphans in Post-Genocide Rwanda, is open to the public and admission is free. It is part of the Civic Forum Series sponsored by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates.

Starting in April 1994, Hutu extremists in Rwanda massacred as many as a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu. Kayitesi, a Tutsi, lost her parents and two older sisters during the genocide. Kayitesi was able to escape with a few of her siblings and found refuge in an orphanage in the Congo, where she spent four years. After completing high school in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, she moved with her surviving relatives to the village of Tubeho.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychopedagogy from the Adventist University of Central Africa in Kigali and a master’s in education from the University of Québec at Trois-Rivières.

Kayitesi serves as an ambassador for Friends of Tubeho, a nonprofit organization committed to providing access to education for more than 300 orphans of the Rwandan genocide. In this role she organizes fundraising events and raises the international profile of the organization.