13th April, 2006

DAVID ADAMS

It wasn’t until Australian teacher Michelle Shaw started talking to people in Rwanda about what had happened in the 1994 genocide and its aftermath that she realised how different the African nation was.

The 38-year-old says that while in other places where genocide has occurred - whether it be during World War II or in Cambodia - the perpetrators had usually either fled, been killed or tried in courts, in Rwanda “perpetrator and victim live next door to one another and exist side-by-side with each other now”.

SOWING INTO A NATION'S FUTURE: Shaw expects that the group wil provide training to more than 500 teachers during their 16 days in Rwanda, better equipping them to instruct children such as these, photographed during Shaw's trip to the nation last year. PICTURE: Michelle Shaw. “It seemed to make sense to sow into the teachers and communicate to them that God sees them as more precious than gold and they have a great role and responsibility in their nations future,” says Michelle Shaw.

“I remember one pastor’s wife sharing with me that she was buried alive with her family as a child in her early teens during the genocide,” she says. “Her whole family died except herself - everyone else was killed. She then went on to become a Christian and was beaten daily by an uncle who looked after her because of her Christian faith. She then married a man who became a pastor of one of the largest churches in Kigali. Then, about 12 months ago, the family that murdered her family walked in the door of the church and one of them was wearing her brother’s clothes.”

Shaw says it was stories like that - “they speak very quietly of very traumatic things” - that helped to underline to her the importance of the task that Hope: Rwanda is all about - instilling a sense hope into the people of a nation which 12 years ago saw more than 800,000 people killed in 100 days of genocide.

Shaw is leading a team of 25 education specialists who have gone to Rwanda this month to work with the local Ministry of Education in providing training for Rwandan teachers as part of the global initiative.

Speaking to Sight before leaving for Rwanda on 10th April, she explains the rationale behind the team's work.

“We felt that the way the project could be sustained beyond just the time that we were over there was to spend time equipping and empowering Rwandan teachers who have an ongoing relationship with the next generation of children coming through," Shaw says.

“It seemed to make sense to sow into the teachers and communicate to them that God sees them as more precious than gold and they have a great role and responsibility in their nations future.”

The team, which is spending 16 days in Rwanda, includes 22 Australians - from New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria - and three Americans. While most are primary and secondary teachers, the group also includes three clinical psychologists.

Shaw visited Rwanda last November to meet with local teachers and education officials to find out what they wanted included in the training.

“The message came over very clearly that due to the genocide many of the teachers in Rwanda were...teaching without having had formal training as a teacher,” she says.

“A lot of teachers had been killed. Rightly so, initial efforts by aid organisations have been to rebuild schools and they did a very good job of quickly rebuilding schools and getting as many people back into the schooling system but to do that they had to utilise even students who just finished their secondary education as teachers.”

She says that while the Rwandan Ministry of Education has a modern curriculum that addresses many development-related issues such as hygiene, AIDS and water sanitation, “a lot of teachers aren’t familiar with the content of that curriculum”.

“So the idea is that we’re going in to basically inservice the teachers on Rwandan education curriculum documents,” she says. “I think it’s really great that rather than it being some Westernised, paternalistic kind of approach.”

The team will kick off their visit with a teacher training conference in Kigali with at least 250 expected to attend. This will be followed by a program of visits to secondary schools and may include a second conference with teachers of Christian schools at the end of their time in Rwanda.

THE BARE NECESSITIES: There is only one teacher for every 80 students in Rwanda and many lack even basic educational resources. PICTURE: Michelle Shaw.

Shaw, who attends the Urban Life Church - an Assemblies of God church in Menai on Sydney’s southern outskirts, says she first heard about the Hope: Rwanda project when the church’s pastors were informed of the project at last year’s Hillsong Conference. She says the church’s leadership decided to send a team to Rwanda “and it just happened that a lot of people at our church happen to be teachers”.

Shaw trained as a primary school teacher 15 years ago and specialised in teaching English as a second language for while before training to become a learning support assistant helping children with special needs. Now working at a primary school in Sydney’s south, she had some experience in delivering teacher training - having visited Cambodia with her family to carry out some training in early 2005 - and so was appointed to lead the team.

Shaw says she was inspired to take part in the trip by passages in the Bible which talk about “extending a hand to the orphan and the widow".

“Even on a humanitarian note, I think I’ve always felt very deeply that when I have and someone else doesn’t that I guess I feel there is a social responsibility to do what I can...I also believe politically that as our globe becomes more and more interconnected, history will judge on how we deal with what’s happening in Africa in the next 10 years.”

The team, who have been meeting via an online chatroom in planning for the trip, is completely self-funded with each team member paying for their own airfares, accommodation, transport and vaccinations. They also plan to take basic resources for the teachers including items such as scissors, stickytape, chalk and basic maths and science equipment.

Conscious of the ongoing need to support Rwanda, Shaw says there has also been some talk of making the trip an annual event pending a review of how things go on this trip.

She recalls a story she encountered at a memorial for the genocide in Rwanda. “I remember one story where a lady says ‘Look, my life has been absolutely horrible. My children will be impacted by what happened in my life but I have great hopes for my grandchildren'.”

~ www.hoperwanda.org