Gilbert Ndahayo.

A Rwandan filmmaker dedicated to producing documentaries about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Gilbert Ndahayo visits Bates College to show his new film, The Rwandan Night, at 7 p.m. Monday, March 4, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

The event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact adaugero@bates.edu.

The Rwandan Night is the sequel to Ndahayo’s autobiographical piece about the murder of his family, 2012′s Rwanda: Beyond The Deadly Pit, and is the second film in a planned trilogy about the tragic events of 1994.

This 70-minute ethnographic documentary explores the world of the oldest survivor of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. One night in 2006, the 51-year-old Sakindi bears witness to the genocide. Instead of living alone with the sorrow of losing his parents and other family members, he decides to speak for the first time before a large audience during a commemoration at Mumena Stadium in the capital city of Rwanda.

Ndahayo lost his parents and 52 other family members in the genocide. Today he is a candidate for a master’s degree in fine arts at Columbia University. His films as writer and director include the award-winning Scars of My Days (2007) and Behind This Convent (2008).

Scott’s photography presents networks of images surrounding each of her subjects, members of Tubeho, a community of people in Kigali, Rwanda, orphaned by the 1994 Rwandan genocide. These networks are “not meant to create a linear story or to fully encapsulate the subject,” she says, but are instead a collection of snapshots of people living their lives, communicating “what they are like, where they came from and what they see.”

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At 7:30 p.m. Feb. 22, the college screens the 1997 film Valentina’s Nightmare: A Journey into the Rwandan Genocide, which documents the massacre of an estimated 20,000 civilians on April 15-16, 1994, at the Nyarubuye Roman Catholic Church in Kibungo Province, where they had taken refuge. A discussion with Valentina Iribagiza, one of the few survivors of the Nyarubuye massacre, follows the screening.

A week later, at 8 p.m. March 1, in an event titled Recording Testimonies and Bearing Witness in Rwanda, the college shows Voices of Rwanda, an acclaimed documentary compiled from hundreds of hours of interviews with genocide survivors. A discussion with filmmaker Taylor Krauss, who directs an oral history project with survivors, and genocide survivor Berthe Kayitesi follows the screening.

Both events take place in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave., and are open to the public at no cost. They are sponsored by the French department with support from the Learning Associates Program. For more information, please contact this adaugero@bates.edu.

In April 1994, tensions between Rwanda’s Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups boiled over into 100 days of nightmarish violence in which up to a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were massacred by Hutu extremists. Alexandre Dauge-Roth, assistant professor of French at Bates, focuses his research and teaching on the process and the societal purposes of documenting the genocide. The Monday events are part of an ongoing series of Bates events exploring the topic.

First broadcast on the PBS series “Frontline,” Valentina’s Nightmare is reporter Fergal Keane’s documentary about Iribagiza. A Tutsi, she was 13 at the time of the genocide, and survived the massacre of her village by hiding among the bodies of her family and neighbors.

Keane was one of the first Westerners to enter the Nyarubuye churchyard after the slaughter. “I had an intellectual understanding of what the word ‘massacre’ meant from reading books,” Keane told “Frontline.”

“But books don’t smell. Books don’t rot. Books don’t lie in stagnant pools. Books don’t leach into the earth the way those bodies did. They can’t tell you about it. Nothing can tell you about it except the experience of going there and seeing it.”

Krauss’ documentary compiles recordings and testimonies of genocide survivors. He is the founder and director of a nonprofit project, also called Voices of Rwanda, that preserves such testimonies to ensure that these stories continue to inspire a global sense of responsibility for the prevention of human rights atrocities.

After the screening, Krauss and genocide survivor Berthe Kayitesi, author of the testimony Tomorrow My Life: Orphans in Post-Genocide Rwanda, will speak. Kayitesi, a Tutsi, lost her parents and two older sisters during the genocide, but was able to escape with a few siblings and found refuge in an orphanage in the Congo, where she spent four years.

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

Read about Bates students studying in Rwanda.

By Simone Path ’11, with Associate Professor of French Alex Dauge-Roth

One must know and see, one must see and know. Indissolubly. — Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah

In Rwanda, drenching rains can quickly turn the red dirt roads into barely navigable mazes of rocky protrusions and gorges pooling with mud. It was after one such downpour last spring that I began to confront what I am made of, physically and psychologically.

In country, each Bates student was paired with a member of Tubeho, the organization of orphan survivors of the genocide. Together, they negotiated how to move forward with interviews and oral histories. Pictured here are Innocent Micomyiza and Morgan Lynch ’10.

I saw before me an exhibit of human bones, arranged by leg, arm or skull, starkly displayed against a dark blue background. Only 15 years ago, those bones gave form to living bodies, like my own, full of hopes and dreams. Then came April of 1994, when one of the final genocides of the 20th century rapidly unfolded, leaving some 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, slaughtered in just 100 days.

My encounter with human bones occurred last May at the Gisozi Memorial in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. At this memorial and others like it, visitors are reminded how the world turned away — yet again — during a genocide. Fixated on the dead bones, I was determined not to look away, even as I heard the sobs of a few Rwandan survivors who would become my friends and the sniffling of a fellow Bates student nearby.

I was among 13 Bates students, all women, who had arrived in Kigali to begin the off-campus portion of our Short Term course “Learning with Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda,” taught by Associate Professor of French Alexandre Dauge-Roth.

The orphans we would learn from are members of Tubeho — the word means “let’s live” in Kinyarwanda — an association that since 2000 has brought together more than 300 orphans of the genocide to live in a Kigali neighborhood. They live in “reconstituted” families, groups of four to six genocide survivors who have lost their siblings and parents. In each family, one orphan is elected as the head of the household and acts like a parental figure for the others.

During our three-week stay in Rwanda,each Bates student was paired with a French-speaking member of Tubeho who was, in most cases, a student with aspirations similar to ours. We would conduct interviews with our Rwandan peers; they would choose how the interview would be conducted: video, audio, or in writing. We Bates students would submit our questions ahead of time for consideration by the orphan survivors.

The challenge of conducting oral histories was, Pathe writes, “to create a safe space for dialogue, where initially no such space existed.”

We were fortunate that Professor Dauge-Roth, in researching the personal, literary, and film narratives created since the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, had established strong connections with Tubeho, so we were not total strangers to them. Still, the expectations were great considering the short time we would be in country, just three weeks. We would not simply be learning about our hosts from a clinical distance. No, we would be expected to learn with them by becoming emotionally close to them. We would be expected to create a safe space for dialogue where initially no such space existed.

We gradually developed a sense of when to ask questions, when to shut up and listen, and when to put the genocide completely aside.

To accomplish this goal, the Bates students and orphans would have to carefully and reciprocally redraw the boundaries that separated our communities. But this was easier said than practiced.

Eugene Mugabo and author Simone Pathe ’11.

At one exhibit at Gisozi that showed snapshots of victims when they were alive, I watched as my Rwandan “brother” Eugene examined the backs of each photo. I was looking at the fronts of the photos — images of newlyweds, a father holding his first son, a young driver standing beside a shiny red car — trying to digest the fact that all these innocent people were dead.

That fact was not news to Eugene, however. He was searching for connections. He was looking for names, dates, and places written on the back of the photos. These faces could have been his friends, family, teachers, or neighbors. Though I was physically close to him, I felt so removed from his experience. I did not know whether to stay while he turned over every photo, or to give him space, leave, and go on to another exhibit.

Our struggle to establish a dialogue about the genocide was easier once we recognized, respected, and became comfortable with the gap that existed between our vastly different experiences. We gradually developed a sense of when to ask questions, when to shut up and listen, and when to put the genocide completely aside. We took our cues from the Rwandans, soon realizing that every moment would be different for every survivor. Some went on at length about seeing known killers walk free in Kigali yet were reluctant to talk about their own pasts.

Two survivors, Pascal Mucyo and Ildephonse Majyambere, were able to give oral testimonies at genocide sites where friends and relatives had been slaughtered. In a school located in Nyange, near Kibuye, Ildephonse delivered a powerful testimony in the very classroom where students were killed. Others, meanwhile, reserved such personal details for one-on-one interviews with their American sisters, far away from onlookers.

We traveled often during our stay, and on these long rides our small, crowded red bus became an unexpectedly dynamic classroom. Conversation — not music from iPods — filled the time, and the passing countryside prompted memories, like the recollections of a survivor who described his month of walking and hiding on the very roadway we were on.

Near the end of our second week, we traveled overnight with one Tubeho member to the Murabi Genocide Memorial, a former school in the southern region of Butare where 50,000 people were massacred. As was the case at all of the memorials we visited, we were the only visitors. Only the frequent bleating of goats and cawing of crows punctuated the silence.

At the Murabi Genocide Memorial, mummified remains of child victims.

To help prepare us, Professor Dauge-Roth showed us photos and video footage he took in 2006 of what we would witness. But I doubt anything could have prepared me for standing in a building filled with bodies. Preserved with white lime, they lay close together on large metal platforms in 10 separate rooms. Amid the chaotic but recognizable bodily contortions — mouths open as if in mid-scream, hands raised to shelter their heads, mothers clutching babies, and women with legs sprawled and underwear around their knees — pain and resistance were visible.

Some of us sobbed. Some were so stunned that tears were too much to ask for. Two older women, both survivors working as gatekeepers of this memorial site, escorted us around but they did not speak French, nor did they respond to the few phrases we tried to pronounce in Kinyarwanda. Instead, at the end of the visit, they embraced each of us, holding us for a long time, as if making sure we would be all right before sending us on our way. That day signified an inversion of the roles we had expected to play: We were suffering, and the survivors were comforting us.

In our final meeting as a group, Batesies and survivors, we discussed what to do with the testimonies our encounter had generated. The orphans were rightly concerned about how their testimonies would be used. Because we were there to learn with them, the answer to that question would flow from their needs and desires.

So we broke into two groups. The Tubeho members decided to ask us to create a Web site to make visible their needs and the challenges they face. A website would mean unprecedented social visibility for a group that, by their very definition as orphans, do not often have such a voice.

On the Bates side, we discussed the questions we wished to address in our final papers. We decided to write about what we learned about ourselves, how our understanding of the genocide had changed, and how we would share what we learned.

The last question haunted us. Even before returning, we all fretted about how to answer the dreaded question from our friends: “How was Rwanda?” Sharing all the details of an intense experience, we learned, can sometimes just devalue it.

Still, we needed to talk. Some people were receptive, like my dad, who had consumed all the information about Rwanda and the genocide that he could get his hands on, and my friends, who were genuinely interested. Others implied that they were not interested in hearing anything too upsetting.

Alex Dauge-Roth (left) and his Bates students gather with their Tubeho partners at the Kigali airport at the conclusion of their visit.

True, we cannot force our experiences on anyone. But by not hearing the full story about humanity’s worst moments — whether it’s Rwanda in 1994 or Nazi Germany 70 years ago — these people will miss the significance of what most surprised us, the ones who listened: the hopefulness of the survivors.

These hopeful members of Tubeho, with whom we shared those long bus rides, morning jogs, and impromptu dance parties, welcomed us into their homes and trusted us with their stories. In return, I hope we showed them equal trust: that they, their country, and the bond that unites all of humanity, which many of them spoke so eloquently about, will not be forgotten.

In the end, that’s what we created in Kigali last May — a pure, shared space of hope. Our responsibility now is to nourish this space, remaining vigilant and creative in the present while remembering the horrific places from which these survivors have bravely traveled.

Simone Pathe ’11 of Madison, N.J., is a Dana Scholar and politics major. Alexandre Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French, won a 2009 Maine Campus Compact award for successfully infusing public service and civic engagement into his teaching. He is president of Friends of Tubeho.

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.

Scholars and human-rights advocates will join survivors of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda to discuss its origins and outcomes on Friday and Saturday, March 30 and 31, at Bates College.

Titled “Rwanda: From National Disintegration to National Reunification: The Legacy of the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda,” the conference is open to all free of charge. Sponsors of the event include the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For more information, please contact Assistant Professor of French Alexandre Dauge-Roth, the event’s organizer, at 207-786-6281 or this e-mail.

This interdisciplinary gathering will gather speakers from Rwanda, Europe and the United States, including members of the Rwandan diaspora living in New England. “Envisioned as a place of encounter and relationship-building, it will allow survivors of the genocide of the Tutsi to share stories, struggles and hopes to promote a better understanding of this traumatic legacy,” says Dauge-Roth.

In a prelude to the conference, students in Dauge-Roth’s seminar “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda” will offer posters and performances reflecting their correspondence with genocide survivors at 4:30 p.m. Friday, March 30, in Pettengill Hall. The presentations are part of the Mount David Summit, a celebration of academic achievement at Bates.

The conference itself begins with remarks and a reception at 7:45 p.m. Friday in Chase Hall Lounge. It continues with a day of panel discussions starting at 9 a.m. Saturday, March 31 in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52) and concludes with a Rwandan dance performance and remarks at 8 p.m. in Chase Hall. (Click the links for a full conference schedule and a list of participants.)

The panel presentations will proceed chronologically from a discussion about the origins of the genocide, to eyewitness accounts of the massacre, to an examination of the country’s efforts to rebuild and to effect national reconciliation.

Speakers include faculty in diverse disciplines from Bates, Bowdoin and Colby colleges and the University of Paris; experts on the genocide including a Human Rights Watch specialist on Rwanda, a Rwandan national prosecutor and the director of the Refugee and Immigration Services at Catholic Charities Maine; and survivors including founding members of an association for the genocide’s widows and children, and two authors who bear witness to the massacres in their works.

The event takes place about a week before the 13th anniversary of a genocide whose scale and ferocity stunned the world. As Dauge-Roth points out, 2007 is midway through the timeline for the Rwanda government’s Vision 2020, a program, devised in the wake of the tragedy, for the impoverished nation’s reconciliation, reconstruction and economic revitalization.

“We are 13 years after the genocide and 13 years before 2020,” Dauge-Roth says. “So it’s also a moment where we can learn, evaluate and reflect on what has been accomplished and consider what the challenges are in the longer term.”

Dauge-Roth, a Swiss native who started at Bates in 2005, organized the conference as an extension of his own research into the Rwandan genocide. He is exploring the personal, literary and film narratives created about Rwanda in the years since Hutu extremists massacred as many as a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu.

“I’m examining how these authors use an aesthetic of haunting,” he says. “These testimonies and documentaries find ways to haunt the reader and the viewer, so that we cannot go back to our usual business and forget about it.”

During a 2006 trip to Rwanda, Dauge-Roth established a network of genocide survivors who have corresponded with Bates students in this winter’s “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda” seminar. (French is an official language of Rwanda.)

“I hope that students will reflect on what it means to listen to a survivor,” says Dauge-Roth. “There’s a lot to learn from them about the ability to struggle and to live on despite horrific loss.”

Several speakers from the Bates event will also take part in similar panels at Harvard University (5-7 p.m. March 27, Tsai Auditorium, South Building, S010), at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. (4-6 p.m. March 28, Hogan Campus Center, Room 519) and at the University of Colorado at Boulder (April 3).

“My hope is that these conferences will be a key step to building personal relationships with Rwandan community partners for future projects,” Dauge-Roth says.