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.

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, an assistant professor of French at Bates College, is one of three Maine college professors to receive a 2009 Maine Campus Compact award for infusing public service and civic engagement into their teaching. Dauge-Roth will receive a Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence in the Maine Campus Compact’s eighth annual faculty and student awards ceremony April 16  at the Maine State Museum.
Dauge-Roth researches the Rwandan genocide of 1994, exploring personal, literary and film narratives created since Hutu extremists massacred as many as a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu. In the four years since he came to Bates, Dauge-Roth has fostered a correspondence between Bates students and survivors of the genocide.

During a 2006 trip to Rwanda, he established a network of genocide survivors who have corresponded in French with students in his seminar “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda” to document survivors’ stories.

In 2007, Dauge-Roth’s students created the organization “Bates Students for Peace in Rwanda,” which received a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace award to support a home for street children in Rwanda. Also in 2007, Dauge-Roth assembled an international conference that brought scholars, human-rights advocates and genocide survivors to Bates to discuss the 1994 events.

Of his research into the narratives created by genocide survivors, Dauge-Roth says that “I’m examining how these authors use an aesthetic of haunting. 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.”

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

In May, during Bates’ five-week Short Term, Dauge-Roth will take 13 students to Rwanda for three weeks to conduct an oral history project with members of “reconstituted families” — families made up of genocide survivors who lost their siblings and parents. One such orphan is elected as the head of the household and acts like a parental figure for the others.

The MCC’s Harward Award this year recognizes three Maine faculty members who have made public service an integral part of their teaching and have successfully advocated for civic engagement. In addition to Dauge-Roth, they are Christina Bechstein of the Maine College of Art and Nancy Ross of Unity College.

The award was named for Donald W. Harward, who retired as the sixth president of Bates College in 2002. Harward championed service-learning and other programs designed to make Bates a more active and valuable partner in the community life of Lewiston and Auburn. He is a founding president of Maine Campus Compact and former member of the board of directors of Campus Compact at the national level.

The Maine Campus Compact is a statewide coalition of college and university presidents established to encourage and enhance campus engagement in the community. The student Heart and Soul Award and the Donald Harward Faculty Award are presented annually.

Bates commemorates the 14th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda with a screening of a new documentary film by genocide survivor Gilbert Ndahayo at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 14, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

The event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact Assistant Professor of French Alexandre Dauge-Roth, the event’s organizer, at 207-786-6281 or this adaugero@bates.edu.

Ndahayo’s film Behind This Convent explores both the efforts of genocide survivors to find the remains of their loved ones and the implementation of justice in post-genocide Rwanda. A question-and-answer session with Ndahayo follows the screening. The Rev. Bill Blaine-Wallace, Bates’ multifaith chaplain, and members of the organization Bates Students for Peace in Rwanda will also take part in the event.

Ndahayo, a director and actor, recently completed the hourlong Behind This Convent, which documents his quest to learn how his parents died during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He was only 13 years old when his parents, his young sister and some 200 others were murdered in his home garden during the genocide, in which up to a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were massacred by Hutu extremists.

The film examines the process of justice and reconciliation that still continues in Rwanda more than a decade after the genocide. “I do not want to make a mistake about how I entered into the cinematic world,” Ndahayo told the Rwandan newspaper New Times in February. “Genocide took place in my country and this has created me as I am now.”

He said, “My film career is partly to explore the horizons of storytelling as well as the power of healing that only a filmmaker can discover.”

“Ndahayo provides a unique perspective,” says Dauge-Roth, who invited the Rwandan to participate in the latest of a series of Bates events related to the tragedy. In his filmmaking, Ndahayo has had to bring objectivity to a profoundly personal and traumatic event.

“He can speak as both a survivor and a documentary maker who has thought critically about the challenges in conveying this story, especially as he meets the people who killed his family.”

Ndahayo’s filmmaking career began with a 2005 training program. Since then he has directed, produced and acted in a variety of topical film projects including Scars of Silver, My Graduation Day and his first film, the autobiographical Scars of My Days, which was presented at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival to an audience that included former President Bill Clinton and Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

In residency at Bates May 14-16, during Bates’ five-week Short Term, Ndahayo will also speak to students in Dauge-Roth’s course “Social Pulse, Documentary Impulse.”

“He will discuss the difficulty of making a documentary about a past event for which there is pretty much no filmed archive available,” Dauge-Roth explains. “Also, he’ll discuss how he chose to construct a cinematic representation about the process of national reconciliation in today’s Rwanda — a theme far less documented than the genocide itself.”

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.

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.

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 in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52) starting at 9 a.m. Saturday, March 31, 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.