By Jim Fisher-Thompson
Washington, DC - Monday April, 5, 2010 - Rwandan exchange students and their American counterparts from Massachusetts recently received encouragement from Senator John Kerry, the son of a U.S. foreign service officer, in their efforts to foster greater cultural understanding through examining the past.
"I've found as I've traveled around the world that cultural understanding and building relationships" are critical to world peace, Massachusetts Democrat Kerry told the 38 participants of the educational exchange program Facing History and Ourselves at a breakfast he hosted on Capitol Hill March 25.
"We have to face history and each other as individuals," said the former 2004 presidential candidate, now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, because "it's critical to things that are right in moral and human terms."
And "what you are engaged in," he told the secondary school students, is "a very important person-to-person, grassroots effort because you can't know where you're going if you don't understand where you've been."
The students interacted over the past two years through mutual visits and communicated over the Internet, examining "what makes a community strong and what can tear it apart," explained Margot Strom, executive director of Facing History and Ourselves.
The U.S. students from Massachusetts visited Rwanda in July 2009, and their Rwandan counterparts reciprocated with a March 2010 visit to the United States as part of the overall two-year exchange program, which is funded by the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ( http://exchanges.state.gov/ ).
In Rwanda, the Americans discussed and toured sites of the 1994 genocide that killed upwards of 800,000 Rwandans. During their U.S. tour, the Rwandans were immersed in an examination of the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s.
At the Senate breakfast, members of both student groups shared their experiences and danced to traditional Rwandan folk music, wearing Rwandan dress.
Elizabeth Brederson, a student at Hudson High School in Hudson, Massachusetts, told America.gov the Americans' visit to Kigali last year was "truly amazing. We grew together by learning the importance of community, and it was surprising how quickly we all came together and supported each other."
Saying "the world came too late and too slow" to assist Rwanda in 1994, Kerry urged the students to continue to find ways to bridge "levels of misunderstanding" that can still occur between nations and groups.
"These challenges don't go away," he told the youths. "I wish people behaved better, and hopefully they will because of efforts like yours."
Facing History and Ourselves is an international nongovernmental organization dedicated to engaging students from different backgrounds and countries in an examination of racism, prejudice and anti-Semitism. The organization reaches 1.9 million students a year through a network of 50,000 educators worldwide. Its Web site ( http://www.facinghistory.org/ ) counted more than 700,000 visits from people in 215 countries and 2.6 million page views in 2009.
Source: U.S. Department of State
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