Reconcile. Reconciliation. Reconstruct.

My path to Rwanda began more than a decade ago. With a book.

During my Master’s studies at NYU I read Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed With our Families, a reporter’s account of the Rwandan genocide. This book inspired me to start a journey that began with academic study and led to travel, which led to international reporting, which led to GPI, which led me back to Rwanda. This time in person.

Today, as I walked another path – the brick stones carefully placed next to the mass graves at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center – I marveled at how paths converge and ideas, once forgotten, re-emerge.

I, like many Americans of my generation, became aware of the Rwandan genocide years after it happened. At NYU, the role that local media messages played in the atrocities here ruled my academic discourse. The role of international media messages during the genocide fueled my desire to create a new option to traditional foreign correspondence.

Today as I entered the museum, Kigali’s muggy air began to drip light raindrops that tasted of tears. Those drops became a reminder that media messages are not simply subjects of academic blather, they are the food with which we feed our minds, the basis on which we make so many judgments, and often, the stepping stones to action.

The museum is powerful and well-executed. The path thru it tells a poignant, contextual and heart wrenching story. The graphic images of piled bodies and the display of club and machete-cracked human skulls among stacks of leg bones are difficult to digest but even more difficult to reconcile with what you find on the streets of Kigali today.

In my first days here, I have fallen in love with this city. The streets are the cleanest I have ever seen. The people humble, welcoming and kind. The lush green hills that encircle the city are peaceful, quiet even.

So far on this journey we have met more than a dozen “come froms” – those who come from other places and choose to stay and make a life in Kigali. The sentence, ‘I just came for a vacation…and that was two years ago’ seems to be a common refrain among people from neighboring countries and Western countries too.

Never, in my experience, have international perceptions and media messages so completely distorted the reality of a place as they have in Rwanda. It has been difficult to reconcile my expectations of what Rwanda would be, with the reality of the peaceful, patriotic place I have found so far.

“To cause to coexist in harmony,” Webster reminds me as I search to define the word reconcile.

Reconcile. Reconciliation. Reconstruct.

Tomorrow, a new kind of construction begins.

GPI, in partnership with the Girl Hub and the Girl Effect, will train 9 young Rwandan women in the skills of journalism. We will unveil our palpably successful training-to-employment model in this unique place. Our message of local, ethical, investigative story telling exists in the sharpest contrast to the media messages of the 1990s that were on display in the museum – the kind that advocated hate, preached division and yielded chaos.

Tomorrow, the next generation of change agents will pick up their pens, their notebooks, their tape recorders and their cameras with the goal of telling a new story about a new Rwanda.

There is hope pulsing through this city.

Tomorrow, 9 young women will inhale a deep breath of courage and with the exhale, their voices will emerge.