AISNSW Creating Cohesive Communities Podcast

SNIPPET:

When I came to Australia and people were asking me where is Rwanda? This is something that potentially had an impact on my life and many people's lives. To realise that it actually wasn't, it didn't make news ... it was an eye opener for me.

JULIA:

Welcome to the AISNSW Creating Cohesive Communities Podcast series, developed by the Association of Independent Schools NSW.

My name is Julia Gyomber.

Today's episode we will hear from Olivier Kameya and Dr. Ari Lander, co-founders of Kumva and Kwibuka: Listen and Remember project.

Olivier is a passionate classroom teacher and versatile public speaker with lived experience on the matters of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Olivier speaks of the lasting impact of the genocide and the other crimes against humanity with the message of empathy and the question of individual and collective responsibility.

Doctor Ari Lander has extensive experience working with survivors of the stolen generation. The Jewish Holocaust and Rwandan genocide. He completed his doctoral thesis at the University of NSW in oral history and has lectured and tutored on a variety of subjects, including comparative genocide. Ari is honoured to be working with an incredible group of survivors of the genocide against the Tutsi.

Join us as we share the profound journey of listening and remembering the power of storytelling, healing, and building resilience.

Before we begin, we would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands and airways in which we are meeting and broadcasting today as we share our learning, we also pay respect to elders both past and present, as it is their knowledge and experiences that holds the key to the success of our future generations.

Welcome and hello. How are you all?

ARI:

Very well. Thank you for having us.

OLIVIER

Thank you for having us tonight today.

JULIA:

Yeah, no worries.

ARI:

It's confusing. It's confusing.

JULIA:

Great to see you. Yeah, well, I think we just need to put it out there. This is our first and amazing face to face podcast. So they’ve typically been over online so this is really quite exciting for us here. So let's just start to get into it. We'd really love to hear about your back story. Can you please tell us about yourselves and how did the organisation come about?

ARI:

I think you should start, Olivier.

OLIVIER:

I'm the Dean. My name is Olivier. I survived the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. I've been here in Australia just little bit over 23 years. And initially the program I started to talk about what happened in Rwanda the minute I landed in Australia without a single word of English.

Getting inside the classroom was quite important for me to kind of belong in the community because I felt was important to share my story, and also learn about the classroom I was going to be part of for many, many years. And that was initially what I was doing until I met Ari. And I found his approach much more organised than what I was doing. And hence we put our heads together and we came with Kumva and Kwibuka.

ARI:

So we've been only around just over less than a year and a half kind of formally as us. So I was lucky enough to meet Olivier when I was working at the Sydney Jewish Museum and he came in to share his recollections when we did professional training on comparative genocide, and then the sort of germs of making this formalised.

I was working with Kinchela Boys Aboriginal Corporation, and I said to the survivors, I knew, I think you should come together and create an education program. So in one sense, what we're focused today on is, that what we do is an education program. We're survivors of the genocide against the Tutsi. People like Olivier coming to schools and they share their recollections with schools.

JULIA:

Yeah, well, that's really powerful.

In terms of the project, why do you think it's so important to listen to these stories and to remember?

OLIVIER:

I think I'm going to speak as an outsider first.

When I came to Australia and people were asking me where is Rwanda? This is something that potentially had an impact on my life and many people's lives. To realise that it actually wasn't, it didn't make news, it gives you a perspective of how little insignificant when things are not properly, how they perpetuate the idea of not caring.

So, to that extent, it was an eye opener for me and I thought if I have to go to classroom and assist teachers in understanding what they were teaching because it's one of those resources. What is a better way of us providing that resources, that first-hand account to what happened in a structured, safe and caring environment, there is nothing better than having first hand experience, especially if you're a teacher. So that's pretty much the reason why I personally think it is important.

Now, as also a classroom teacher, I think the curriculum is so packed. That when you get this zero aids or visual stuff that help your students. There's nothing like it which, I think. So that's my contribution to this outfit.

ARI:

So you know my background is, I used to teach at university. I think we made a mistake at UNSW and I say for all due credence because I think we ran amazing comparative genocide studies courses. But due to the way universities work, for various reasons we didn't bring in the survivors recollections, but in a good way we also dealt with, academically, what all history is.

And there's a shift that we provide, which is the idea of what does it mean; Olivier comes in. What can only a survivor bring. So, I think there are many reasons for listening and remembering.

So, Olivier might touch upon today, but he's an orphan. So, when we go into schools, we say - excuse me if I put words here - but you know we try and personalise it. So if I taught the Holocaust and said 6,000,000 Jews are murdered, or somewhere around 1.2 to 1.4 million people in Cambodia, or 800,000 to 1,000,000 people in Rwanda; that's an abstract. That's a number. And so having a human being, who's there, who you can have a conversation with, takes it out of that area.

So part of my thinking for this program or my experience was why teach a student about genocide? And I think there are many reasons. And for us in Kumva and Kwibuka, it's specifically about the genocide against the Tutsi. It's specifically about events in Africa. It's specifically about Olivier's story or other survivors. But it's also about saying this story is a human story.

What happened in Rwanda changed Africa, culturally, politically. The ramifications are still being felt. It also had an impact on American global politics and the world superpower had to rethink. And for all the problems of what we call Clinton's apology, at least there's a recognition in the United States made a huge mistake politically, but also morally.

So, for me, the question of listening and remembering is taking out the abstract and saying here's Olivier as a human being in front of you. This story is something you need to internalise and understand it not as just 6,000,000 or 800,000, that Olivier, as a human being, needed his father. He loved his father. I will never get the pleasure of meeting Andre. That everything he's spoken about, Olivier, shares part of his father's story or his mother, Suzanne, and it takes it out of being an abstract of just being that number.

So, part of listening and remembering for us as a program amongst all things, I'm tying in together, is to teach about the facts of it and the lived individual experience of what Olivier went through, and then it's saying this isn't something far away.

This is a human story that teaches you essential things about what it means to be a human being, meanwhile saying to kids, this is about building compassion and empathy, because maybe why you care about Olivier story is, intuitively, you know you love your mother. If you are lucky enough to have a mother or a father that you know and you know what it means to love your father or to be loved by your father and to know that that was taken away from Olivier or our other cofounders, like Chantal, or Aggy.

And that's what we want to take it. Make it about facts. Make it about history. Make it all about the subjective experience. But also say this story raises really important questions about simply what it means to be a human being.

JULIA:

Yeah, absolutely. Wow, that was quite powerful. And you've really highlighted multiple aspects about why it's so important for students and teachers to have, as you said, the academic research aspect, but grounding it with the personal stories and making it really human. And that connects us all. That connects us as humanity.

So that really speaks to the kind of, you know, what are you sort of hoping in terms of these skills that students and educators will take away? You started to allude to in terms of the empathy. What other sort of, yeah, skill sets are you hoping to achieve?

OLIVIER:

That's a good question. I think, touching on what Ari said, when we try to personalise the learning, the ownership is on a student to unpack looking at, for example, the genocide against the Tutsi and see when the Holocaust happened. And they said never again, why does it keep happening? So as a survivor, that is my question.

And also, the question of, say, the humanity betrayed me. If someone, if the most educated people made this happen and they observed it happening, and they never did anything, now, what is your role? Because you're still going to the same classroom, the same structure. What is your, what are you going to do to make sure your individual contribution is meaningful?

If something happens to someone 3000 miles away, who you never met, but you have made a policy or you were part of the political structure that made the policy, that decision went on and affected that person. Do you feel personally responsible?

So, it comes down to not only the classroom is a learning space, but it's a personal space where people need to take individual responsibility, personal accountability, and that comes down to not only the student, but one of the things that amazes me is to hear a teacher delivering, let's say, a term of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

But they have no idea. They have no resources or they have nothing to tell the students what you are going to be looking at. Everything is abstract. Or at best it's non existent. They are looking at some of the resources that for us are problematic.

Most of the schools we go to, they talk about things, like watch Hotel Rwanda and go. You know how problematic that is for a survivor like me. If I went through the story of that, you know how problematic it is. But also it's important for the teacher. Then, if I'm going to teach it, I better know what I'm talking about.

It's not just another story, because they become the story. This is more than that. So I think again in in broad terms is to individualise as much as possible that learning space, because history is one of those things that have any power to inform the future, and people don't want to learn from history.

They just read us textbook based, so we try as we are going to touch on as a progress, we going to touch on are a number of things we observed from the students and some of them have been quite eye opening, which we didn't think it will get to a point where some of the 14-15 years old, I think of their role when if that happened again what would I do.

JULIA:

To sort of motivate that social action.

ARI:

Look, I think skills like I want teachers to know that there's clear stuff that we've bought pedagogically. So I've been interviewing survivors for almost over 20 years, roughly around 20 years from my doctorate and then later on when I moved to Sydney Jewish Museum, then at Kinchela Boys Home and now the amazing work we do with our team. There's now eight African speakers, 6 survivors, a husband and a wife, one who's Burundi, one who's Rwandan, and they speak about their individual experience. But what it means to be married to a survivor.

For me, if I think there are many skills. A simple one is what is oral recollections and we don't get too into detail in our program but we touch upon. But what we do that's unique in our program is we take in two survivors or two of our speakers.

So for example, we have two survivors who are sisters, but they were separated. One was taken at the age of 11 with her father and her siblings and her grandmother to a place called Murambi because they thought that would be safe because there have been sightings of Mary there. So it’s considered a sacred place. And there ended up being a massacre there. And it's the second largest massacre memorial in Rwanda, with about 50,000 human beings. And she witnessed most of her family being murdered.

So what Aggy does, is like Olivier, I believe, incredibly complicated. Incredibly courageous, incredibly important. I don't have the vocabulary to express the significance of what it means to them to share their stories, but obviously I believe deeply, personally, that it's incredibly profound, incredibly important.

So Aggy was separated from her sister. Her sister Chantal is a co-founder as well. She’s 13. And what we're trying to show is what only Aggy and Chantal can show. That Aggy and Chantal was separated from their parents. And but she remembers it as an 11 year old, Aggy. Or Chantal is a 13 year old, Olivier's 20. It's his view, as a 20 year old going through it, who his father was, Andre, who his mother was, Suzanne. And when we bring in those two voices is to see how they complement each other, enrich each other, and understand each and every story is unique and distinct.

So within me, amongst all the different things we might touch on the facts and details we might put up a picture of the map and we might say, here's the memorial at Murambi. Here's where Olivier's in Kigali, and why he has problems with Hotel Rwanda because he was only a few 100 metres away from Hôtel des Mille Collines, but the other side is to go and say. History is not always about being objective. Part of the beauty is the subjectivity of Olivier’s story. This is me, Olivier, sharing my story as only I can and say history is not always about being objective.

So the last thing I'll say here is we have a survival, Like Aggy who's survived Murambi where as I said 50,000 men, women and children were murdered. We also have a wonderful survivor, Ladis. Ladis was at a place called Ntarama where 5000 people murdered and there's another genocide memorial site. And again those are big numbers. They almost don’t mean anything so I'm trying to make it an individual's. Ladis is a little bit older. He's 13. And they're going through exactly the same thing. But also comparatively different? If I couldn't make my students objective about what Ladis saw or what Aggy saw or the objective they saw, thousands of human beings murdered. Why would I want to do that to the student, and what would that even look like?

So I think the exact opposite. I think sometimes history's about being subjective. I judge what happened in Murambi from an emotional, subjective space that it's a heartbreaking tragedy, and then I have a moral judgement too. So part of what we do in Kumva and Kwibuka is even though we don't always say it explicitly, it's about understanding history is not always about being objective. It's about the importance of actually having a subjective emotional engagement, and the best historians, in my opinion, come from a place of empathy and understanding why these decisions were made.

JULIA:

Well, it's quite profound and quite heavy some of the things that have just been raised. Thank you, and, just on that note. There is quite a bit of heaviness here, and yet we are. It is deeply personal and subjective. How do you explore and unpack such difficult topics within a teaching environment, and what kind of impact does that have on you, as the storyteller, were you telling the story, and then for the classroom?

OLIVIER:

Thank you for the question. I think personally because my engagement has been from very early on, it has been a journey. I have consciously taken to talk about my story. But I'm very mindful that each one of our team members, even every survivor, will all go through different journey.

So the healing space is deeply personal. It's a personal one because we all have different story. We can touch on the same event in a different with a different eye on it. But what I have found for me personally is that it helps me. I don't keep that in and what I hope when I share that with my students. The worst thing to think is that you lose hope in humanity. And my story is about. I'm not in your classroom so you feel sorry for me. I'm in your class so you see what happened as a lesson. And hopefully you make sure it doesn't happen again to anyone, to any of you.

And we use it or anecdotes for them, for example, who has a phone who takes photos, who can become a bystander to something happening in the in the playground, and here we are teaching you about things that happen in history not only 30 years ago, in my case 75 years ago. It is the same, human doing violent stuff to another human being.

And so the job for me, is not to kind of internalise what I'm feeling in the classroom. But at the same time, acknowledging that each one of our students has an individual attribute to take really, really seriously, to be able to make that change we all want. Because if everyone took that personal responsibility, I will not have lost my parents. I will not have people in high places discussing whether it was important to send help to save my parents and my family.

So, in that case those students who are going to become future leaders have to understand their place in history. When we go to the classroom, it is to spark that. Because these days, it's much easier to follow the crowd and both society both wonders.

If you look at Germany, they were highly, highly educated people who decided to do things you would think will not happen in an educated society. You have the most educated, most connected generation of our time hearing about it and we want to make sure if we can help it that they make a different decision when that happens.

So, for me it helps to know that I'm shaping hopefully something that may not happen again in the future. And that is the hope for me when I go in the classroom but also is a therapist. And that when I speak about. It's a kind of therapy. It gets easier and I have observed also observed some of my teammates starting to kind of open up. because it's one thing to own your pain but is also seeing someone else's pain and they would or would say it's about empathy having, cultivating or inspiring that kind of empathy to be able to be in someone's shoes. So, when you make a decision, it comes from a place of empathy.

ARI:

I think you know you're right. It's heavy and I think anyone who's listening to this would hopefully see and feel like the sensitivity which Olivier speaks to and I think also we've got a lot of knowledge and experience. We've got a beautiful team.

So for example, we have two teammates, Yvonne and Lambert, and they live up in Newcastle and he teaches out in Newcastle. Would love to come. So why I'm saying this is like there's this beautiful thing that happens because then you got a husband and wife speaking together. They're both survivors. And what it means for somebody to come into a space that's not there as a school and share very valuable open emotions.

So my experience of this, and now I've probably taught literally hundreds of thousands of students from university down till, we do this program with year six kids, who’ve been amazing. Is there's ways to unpackage it.

So, we don't simply walk into a classroom and start telling the story. We open up with basic questions, even just about geography of Rwanda. Just about how things are culturally different because in our program we make sure it's constantly interactive.

And we have the two voices from Africa in there and I'm guiding interview through, but at least. We open up that. So it's an easy safe question asking a student when they look on a map on the globe and they'll see in Rwanda what strikes them as geographically different to Australia. And from that come out issues of history and culture, like for example the fact that we're an island and a very large island in the continent, as opposed to a tiny, small, small landlocked country. So if I said Olivier, how many languages do you speak?

OLIVIER:

Five. No, four.

ARI:

So you know, so you know for most Australians, they would say like you know one or two mostly. If I said how many siblings did you have before the genocide?

OLIVIER:

Seven. I was one of the seven.

ARI:

So all and so when we speak about that we these things make different cultural reality. So it's an easy safe space and when something we made a distinct decision when I discussed creating Kumva and Kwibuka, I said we need to speak about childhood beforehand, because a number of reasons.

One is, Olivier would not be the same person if he hadn't gone through the genocide against the Tutsi. Aggy, who's 11, is in some sense much less formed emotionally and mentally. So as an 11 year old witnessing members of her family being murdered in front of. There are certain things that break and there's certain things that don't heal and.

Students, I think, need to understand that and not martyr them suffering because every survivor has to be happy and OK. But also what it means that yes, Aggy comes into space and she's becoming a better and better speaker, and she's definitely on a journey of healing her journey of speaking and articulating her trauma and being vulnerable has been one of self-discovery and healing. But at the same time, saying an 11-year-old because she went through that she will never be who she would. Have been if she hadn't gone through this.

So we've always begin with the childhood. The child’s all about playing soccer. I'm going to church. What's your father was like happy memories. Chantal describes remembering her father, riding a motorbike down, and they would sit on the back and be a special ride. Because there are many cars or motor bikes in the town that she grew up in. Only 3005 thousand people, and that's a happy memory.

Or Ladis describes growing up in an agricultural farm and going out to the bush, where they take the cows to feed the goats to eat the weeds, or whatever it was. I'm blurring it but and he says, you know, we, we had special food that we cooked, right or was the hours of playing streetball.

So we go and say it's not, a survivor is not only a survivor, they're also their childhood before, their family and culture. And genocide doesn't just destroy human beings physically, it also destroys community, family and those worlds they described and created.

So we give them time as a lead in. You can always stop at each point. And now that, say, Olivier. For example, Chantal shared this story. We stop and then give time for questions and it creates a safe place of learning. Oh, now they know Olivier a bit. They spend 30-40 minutes talking and then we create a conversation about their experience during the genocide and then stop afterwards for more question.

So what I love about our program is most schools have given us the time and we're going for two hours. And what you see is most students they're not; I see people patronise the younger generations most of the time. Like you can hear a pin drop.

I used to early do in our programs, is click how many questions we get. It's 30-40 questions for most programs, because I think we have successfully created a safe space, but we're unpackAggyng it and making sure that we're dealing with this event honestly.

Ladis for example, he survived his two aunts murdered in front of him. He had to bury his father's body. We need to and want to speak to that. We need to and have to speak to Olivier's experience. And students are inherently asking questions about how did human beings do this to other human beings, and how does one survive this? What impact does it have on your ability to love, your ability to have faith, and personal resilience? And we're modeling all of that for them.

And so the final thing we try and do to make this safe thing is we come out with a safe message, whatever that might be. So that while there's this darkness and it's a darkness, I think we have to acknowledge and speak about human beings, capacity for cruelty. But we also speak about its capacity for empathy an. And so we try and wrap up and lead our students with that positive space.

JULIA:

Yeah, instilling that light and, yeah, positivity. That's quite a journey and it's really powerful that it's multi-pronged in terms of self-healing but almost a healing historically and for students. As well, and educators that are involved. So being impressive, yeah.

OLIVIER:

I think, adding to what I said. Really, when we were thinking about this. I mean, his experience as an educator at a higher level also has been to most survival of the Holocaust or the genocide and me going into classroom early on and just being very annoyed at seeing what I'm saying is going over people’s head because I was not packAggyng it properly.

So there had to be a way to kind of package it in a way that it is safe for the classroom, in a way that makes them feel that they or they own the space. I'm feeling safe. You know, I'm being exposed because make no mistake, we most parents tend to shield their parents to the evil or the society. But we know it exists.

Although we bring this. Yes, it's kind of that. But we've lived through it. And we are modeling that you can actually get through it. We don't have formula on to go through it. But we are telling you on if you take this on us as a journey, there's going to be a process, there's going to be tools you can use. You got it, you go in a classroom, you're being educated, you got this.

So it's your place, how you chose to use that time we give you because we have to tell them. At the end of the day, if I go out of this room and you even ask me a burning question, so long as you ask it, respectfully, mindfully, it's a good question. And we found that, as Ari said, he's got 30 questions most of the time from students, 14, 15, 16 years old. Very intelligent questions, and from observation it's been nothing but a very good learning experience for us because we are also learning how to make the program better.

JULIA:

Amazing. We're all on the journey and we're all learners and teachers at the same time. It's amazing you've got that opportunity. And demonstrating that throughout the project.

In terms of those questions, just wanted to ask the two of you. What's one of those aha or inspirational moments you've had in a program, something that really, you know, stands out for you and you really hold in your heart? Would you be able to share one of those moments.

OLIVIER:

No, you want you to go first. You're the one with the clickers.

ARI:

I've got a lot.

JULIA:

It would be. True. Yeah, yeah.

ARI:

I will say there’ve been so many amazing questions. Yeah, I mean it, genuinely. I think it goes both ways, when even I will just say when I see a survivor articulate something. So, I'll say I'll say as an example of one of this group of 16-year-old kids who are on a summer program during April holidays and we're sitting around.

And I just love the way Olivier articulated about the need to like, I'm going to paraphrase, I'm doing a bad job, but just when I saw Olivier, it's been such a beautiful, intimate group. It was only an hour and just said talked about their need to bring beauty into the world. And it really moved me also what the survivor articulated because it's a relationship.

It's not simply us sharing, it's how they respond and what, the responses they cause to elicit amongst our survivor team and how their spouses. So it's both ways.

We were at PLC, Pymble Ladies College in one of our first programs and I'm giving you this an example because we don't, I mean this was our second round together. Chantal, our beautiful survivor who's speaking, hadn't spoken publicly in 3-4 years since I've interviewed her, or two or two or three years because I used to interview her.

Also at the Sydney Jewish Museum and she's, I mean, this is common. She’s very frAggyle and it was beautiful. No Shanice was there that day. The PLC, your daughter was there, Shanice, and it was lovely because we sometimes bring the children survivors there. And it was a big hall. Year 11, year 12 together, Legal Studies Program, 180 students or something. So quite a large group and we only had an hour that day. Like whatever it was and this.

Olivier tells a story about this his father telling him he needs to have his like speak truth to himself, whatever his journey, has like a notion of enlightenment. I have to be authentic to who I am as a human. Thing and he said this right at the beginning. So that's our first part of our program. So this is like. 15 minutes.

At the end of the program, we're doing questions and this student asks and says, “what have you come to your own truth like? What has been your truth?”

And Olivier just stopped and said, “I hadn't really thought about it.” He said he had to think and he gave a really beautiful response just on the spur of the moment, but I see that happen a lot. And this young woman came up to them at the end and you can see how moved she was. So that's both sides.

I will own one example because I gave it all girls school. I mean like Newington, these schools have been amazing supporting program like ours in its infancy that we're working on is very embryonic, it's very frAggyle. I'm overthinking or underthinking and. This team is like what? They're doing 30 years after the genocide is astonishing.

And we're at Newington Boys. The other day at Aggy, I was speaking at this all boys school for the first time and we're doing something totally new, speaking about anthology we published called the Book of Love and Lost, in which our co-founders had all written stuff in, including, obviously Olivier and these boys came up to Aggy at the end and I don't even I didn't hear what they said, but I could see that several of them were really emotional and crying.

And Aggy came out at the end and were talking. And she was like. She felt really, really good, like heaviness of being gone and said these boys just came up to me and wanted to just tell me how much they cared. And how much they were moved by what I had to say. And that's part of what we're doing and she was like, these strangers who met me for two hours in this panel. We only spoke for like 5-10 minutes but we’re all sharing our stories. They were touched and moved.

It wasn't just a story about Tutsi. It was a story about Aggy and they cared for Aggy, which is why they were moved and had such a strong emotional response. I found those two beautiful, frAggyle, and sublime moments for me.

OLIVIER:

For me was a recent experience when we were speaking to (when was) We did a program.

ARI:

You can rattle off so many schools. Let's do it now.

OLIVIER:

All girls and as you do in history, we talk about the role of UN, the failure of UN in all this, you know.

“If you guys manage to take your responsibility personally, go and change the UN and how it works. Think it differently because it has failed so many times. It's history, our history. Therefore, this old body that doesn't serve any purpose, you need to change it.”

And then one of the girls and I've never been asked that question, “So how do you think, if for example, I was going to go become one of the UN representative. How do you think I'll go about changing how the UN works?”

I go, “now you start a journey, so you have found something that may inspire you to go and think of you and us, not just this whole body where people go and get heavy bags and just nothing that works outside the body.”

And it was a beautiful question I haven't heard it from any student.

JULIA:

Amazing. I love the way it was turned around and I love that process that we're forever learning. And celebrating and encourAggyng curiosity and questions is just so imperative to that journey. Thank you so much for sharing. Before we wrap up, is there anything that you'd like to share or add in terms of our conversation today?

ARI:

Could I flag a couple of things. I mean I think we've spoken about so much, but I will say you know, part of what when I approached the team is I said it's about you sharing your stories and coming into a space with that, that human face to face contact.

So, but on top of that, we did publish an anthology, and when Olivier says, you know, how many languages speaking like he wrote. But part of the anthology that we published which we mentioned before called the Book of Love and Loss, Chantal and Aggy were involved.

And so is Amadee, a Burundi, who's married to Aggy, and he's a beautiful member of our team as well. And we also involved Olivier's daughter Shanice, who's 20, and Chantal's daughter who's 10. And she wrote piece for her ten-week writing course through West Words. And like any book like.

Also I’ll say I'm a failed writer. I studied playwriting at night, and many, many years ago and I'm passionate about what words do in one sense all we have are words to communicate our dreams, our fears, our hopes to share this complex history, but this personalized history, so I'm really proud of the fact, and I think it's amazing.

Like, I think it's really hard to learn in English, if everyone could write, there’d be way better books around and a lot of amazing books. Amazing books. But it's hard to write and what our survivors did is again astonishing. I have no other word for it that.

30 years after this event, none of them wanted to be writers. English is their fourth or fifth language. It's not related to any of the language. The closest related language is French, which is very different to English and yet, we're on the beginning of the journey, where they all work parts of their apology, and I will say this like so.

I'll say I'm a pretty good writer. Like I wrote for theatre, like in theater, I worked for many years. I failed as a writer in the end, no problem with that, but the reason why I'm saying this is, I know how hard it is to write. And so I was really amazed and really proud of what our team was able to write in that anthology, that they are on a journey becoming more and more articulate storytellers. More able to share are all of them and me too, because it's such an intimate space we're in. And so for me, it's.

I think it's really hard being a teacher out there now. I hear it from all my friends and we have privilege. So I say, well, I think we've got 28 schools this year, which is amazing and I hope you'll get more, to make this succeed and but the reason why I hear it constantly from teachers, how tough it is post. And so for me, I will say I'm sure it's really hard being right there at the furnace of working with students.

But for all the different schools we go in, like someone will say without school, they've got a Rep on the outside for not being the easiest to work with or social dynamics can be apparently very problematic. Lot of bullying, a lot of racism, a lot of not good learning. When we go in, I'm constantly impressed by how attentive and respectful the students are, and so I find that also incredibly inspiring.

OLIVIER:

And found the classroom, any classroom we went to. We found them receptive, respectful and what we think this program will bring on top of what, for example, teacher has to use in their classroom, is that authentic results to teach.

Personally, for me as a teacher, to be able to teach something without an idea behind on what I'm going to do, it's just it's daunting.

So one of the things I think will be beneficial to the teachers of history is to know that should you want to teach about the Holocaust of the genocide, even legal studies, because Rwanda brought so many positive changes, although it's, it was traumatic. When we go to that space and we show out of this, there's some positive, not everything in life is. You may see things outside your place being bleak, there's always that element of hope.

So we bring that in the classroom. I found that students who have this empathy, they can also sense when their teacher is struggling. And those are some of the aspect we will hopefully want to inspire our students to have. And because it's difficult for everyone, not only teachers, but students, they may be struggling with other things and when they get to hear their story from eight of us at some point it may change the way they see they see life in general and so we are not only going to classroom as and which here want to inspire you to become better human beings but be responsible when we talk about their role as you know some students don't get for example what it is.

If you love music, how that have been used as a propaganda tool to inspire hate? If you were an accountant or a banker, they don't get to connect what does that historically. They just think it's a job or an occupation without looking how those things may connect or connect amongst each other today, and deliver a policy that is going to be calamitous to someone’s life.

So when we get to a point where a student take I love music and I'm going to use music for good. That's our role partially is done because they have to do the work themselves. So we think this program is going to be very beneficial to teachers who want to touch on this sensitive topic. But it's one they can't hide away from.

JULIA:

So true. Thank you so much for sharing today.

OLIVER:

You’re welcome.

JULIA:

Thank you so much for. Demonstrating so clearly with your project, the power of listening and remembering, and how that can enhance and build resilience within school communities and beyond. Really thank you so much for the authenticity, the warmth and compassion.

ARI / OLIVIER:

Thank you. Thank you.

JULIA:

Thank you for listening to this episode. For further information on the AIS NSW Community Cohesion Podcast series and project or any of our guests, please see our show notes.