2025 Rwanda Delegation— Alexandra Allard
Speech‑Language Pathology ‘25 (B.S) ‘27 (M.S)
I’m honored to join the Anne Frank Project in Rwanda, where I’ll have the opportunity to explore how communication is supported and celebrated in a completely different cultural context. I’m eager to learn from members of the local community, deepen my understanding of global approaches to care, and return to Buffalo State with a renewed sense of purpose.
May 31, 2025
As May fades and June rises the weight of what is ahead begins to settle in. The rainy days lately have given me space to pack, to prepare, and to tie up the loose ends of my daily life. With each passing day I feel something closing and something else quietly opening. It is not just a trip. It is a new beginning.
In a time when the news at home grows heavier by the day, I find myself craving distance not to run away but to gain perspective. What waits for us in Rwanda is not an escape but a return to clarity. A shedding of noise. A reminder of what truly matters.
I am grateful to be going with the village we have built, this group of people who are committed to growing stronger not just for ourselves but for each other.
I am trying to leave expectations behind. New places do not scare me because I have grown familiar with discomfort. What truly unsettles me is what I will learn about the world’s deeper truths. The military shaped part of me for challenge for structure and for resilience but this I know will be something else entirely. Something incomparable.
In America death is something we avoid something we hush. I believe we have forgotten how to grieve, how to truly sit with loss and carry it forward with meaning. In Rwanda grief has been made visible. Loss is part of the national story not something to hide. They have transformed a history of horror into a landscape of remembrance and resilience.
I have met death in many forms. Sometimes it felt eerily normal. But rarely is it spoken about let alone honored. Now I am stepping into a place where hardship is not dismissed, it is acknowledged. Surviving is seen as strength. Pain is not pitied, it is respected.
That is the kind of world I want to learn from. That is where I am heading.
June 4, 2025
Hopeful.
Something about Rwanda is contagious.
I arrived at the airport with tired eyes, but a quickly filled heart. The more I looked around and the more voices I heard, the mores smiles met my eyes. I noticed how fast everyone moves, everyone stands up and gets each other’s bags on the plane, to me it appeared everyone knew each other and there was a sense of commodore. We walked off the airplane across the runway and walk in the airport. The airport was warm, cozy and clean. Way cleaner than Buffalo.
From the airport we start our drive to our hotel, motor bikes and similar faces filled the streets and roads. My whole head was filled with what used to be. We watched the documentary about why we are here. Every minute of being here I know that at every moment of my time it is not going to be happy, hopeful and joyous. Just like at home I feel like I am waiting for the shoe to drop and the next thing to happen.
I have had to take deeper breaths the past 3 days more than I have in 2 years of school.
Each breath takes In the Rwanda air, I know I feel a piece of me let go and release.
Forgiveness.
June 5, 2025
Muraho
We started off in the morning going to the city center of Kigali to the Namirembe Women’s Center.
This central hub hosts and helps thousands of Rwandan Women in reading and writing followed by sewing, cooking, and hair braiding. Following the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, the Rwandan government has become the first country with a female major in parliament. Touring the female owned co-op felt very normal and special. We were lucky enough to observe them learning new skills and wanted to even show off their work to us and were so proud. We walked through the village to some of the shops that some of these women have opened on their own. Female business owners running it all on their own. The village was full of small business owners waiting patiently to help or work. Their smiles and kindness were contagious.
We left Kigali to drive to the Genocide against the Tutsi Museum.
Drew attempted to prepare us for the complete adjustment of mood we need to consider. The happiness you feel just minutes away comes to a shrieking stop. We walked down to the front of the museum but not without stopping by a group of 500 children who were there for a field trip. In Rwanda, children are required to learn and visit the Genocide memorial to learn their history properly without judgment. Rwanda’s school curriculum includes an education approach to teach young people to learn from the past without blaming anyone or being traumatized.
This turned out to be way harder than I thought it was going to be. The history of how the killings began. The message that was being put into the country by the Belgium government began way before 1994. It was not just one morning the Hutu decided they were going to start killing. The killing began way earlier than the Genocide. Mass murders were happening years prior. Many people warned the government and tried to protect the Tutsi. Many fled Rwandans, including my dear new friend, Alice. Alice, like others, left to seek asylum and safety. The museum was informative and rewarding. I have tried to prepare myself with all of the facts, however you cannot ignore the rooms of skulls and pictures of each victims face. Most of the skulls were imperfect, with either blunt force trauma or possibly a bullet, the majority of skulls I saw were not adults as the growth plates had fully formed. This made me sink to the floor, the details of the museum were changing life.
After seeing the city busy with smiling helpful humans. 30-50 years ago this was an entirely different. I cannot speak to how things used to be, but I can speak about the dramatic change in emotion in one day. I went from feeling complete joy to completely destroyed. The forgiveness that Rwandas have embraced has been miraculous and it has all been due to their leadership.
That evening was a night of reflection on the impact one sentence or conversation can change or impact another person.
June 6, 2025
As we get on the bus and prepare for your day that is ahead of us, I remind myself to take lots of deep breaths. We start to drive to a town full of people working their full-time jobs.
We arrive at the Nyamata Genocide Memorial and from the outside it appears to just looks like a church/ museum. Nyamata was a church the Tutsi sought for refuge and safety. What they had in mind as safety and hope, the murderers saw it as an opportunity to kill. The director of the site started by talking to us about what we should expect to see and the layout of the tour. I didn’t start to feel until we got to the front doors and you could see the bullet and grenade fragments that had destroyed the original front doors. We walked through the front doors and my mind immediately went back in time and I could visualize every person that was inside in 1994. I could see children hiding under the pews, mothers clinging to their children, fathers fighting with no weapon and getting met with pure hatred and rage. There was a bin to my left full of skulls, bones, and belongings. The pews were piled with the originally bloody clothing worn by each victim. The originally white alter was now cooper, stained from the blood of the victims. Next to the alter to the right, was the tub originally used to baptize children, we were told was use to end of their lives instead. Downstairs is the grave of 28 year old young Tutsi woman who had rejected the advances of young Hutu men. Then came the genocide. On April 13, 1994, Hutu militia reached Nyamata, Hutu men sought revenge against the young Tutsi woman who had previously rejected their advances. She was wounded, repeatedly raped, and killed. Then came the final act. The Hutu men drove a stake through her body as far as they could. What is left of her rests inside a coffin in a specially-built crypt beneath the church floor. It is draped in a white cloth, a large wooden cross lain across it. Her name was Annonciata Mukandoli. I walked out the church in tears.
She was 28 years old. I am also 28 years old. It is hard not to feel connected to her, I have felt the need to protect others in jeopardy of myself. I felt a rush of sadness and angry. As we walked outside something incredible was happening. A pickup truck was pulling up to the memorial site with 4 coffins of victims from 1994 that had just been discovered. A police truck then came escorting the families of the victims. It was as if we were at a funeral 30 years later. We did not want to interrupt this extremely significant event.
I felt strangely attached to this process. My families customs after death are much simpler. We usually cremate the remains of our loved ones. Watching this process unfold in front of me gave a new meaning to preserving the bodies. My mind immediately went to the mother of the newly recovered victims. These mothers have had no answers for 30 years, walking around the towns with the slightest bit of hope they may run into each other again. But today the answers they needed were clear. These families have gone 30 years without knowing the truth, is inspiring.
I have this anger inside of me I cannot shake. I want to be okay with my own mothers life being taken away by another person intentionally. Most of the skulls inside the memorial had all suffered a trauma to the skull. A cause of death I am way too familiar with. Each skull was more and more triggering and connected to me. It was impossible to distinguish the bones of 30 victims in one coffin from another. This was hundreds of lives taken and hundreds of families now will suffer a trauma that will be passed down for years to come.
The more and more you think about this massacre the worse it gets. Hundreds of children and families were seeking refuge in a church, where everyone is meant to feel safe. These murders took their lives in a place where you are meant to feel more alive, to find hope. I cannot shake the idea that at that same church 30 years later, a family will now lay their loved one to rest in that same church with the new vision of hope in mind.
I have been angry for 7 years at 2 men. Blaming for taking away the one person in my life I always hoped I would have. This man took away my hope 7 years ago. I have been trying to find new hope as the trial continues to find the truth about who committed the act that took her away from her family and children.
On the bus we had an hour’s drive to our next stop which would be the reconciliation village.
After the genocide, the government arrested hundreds of killers. The President put out a statement saying anyone who can admit to what they did and be able to identity where the bodies of victims are located, they may be released into a reconciliation village. This was to not have 2 sides but one individual country of Rwandans. My mind was not able to process this. I have never looked a killer in the eyes or spoke to someone with kindness who I had previous knowledge that they took someone’s life away and possibly worse.
Driving there I tried to have an open mind… but how on earth can you forgive someone like that? I also hoped I would get some answers to take away my own anger and possibly lean more to forgiveness.
As we approach the village, children swarm the van with smiles and hoping for a handshake, I started to feel better and then
we got to their assembly room……
We were greeted by singing and dancing from the entire village. My mind could not process what was happening, they grabbed our hands to bring us closer and to make sure we moved our bodies before sitting in the chairs placed in front of the village. There was an older man with hat and a cane. I grabbed his hands and finished the song by dancing with him and sitting down. We listened to the story of a man, when was 6 years old, he remembers first hearing propaganda and parents telling him how the “Tutsi” were not equal to their family, the “Hutu”. The differences between the Rwandans were created by the Belgium, when they took over the territory from Germany. The Belgians initially maintained the Tutsi dominance but later, in the 1950s, shifted their support towards the Hutu population. The propaganda that went out by the Rwandan government forced the divide. He shared his story, how he went his whole life prior to the genocide thinking people were different and one group is better than another.
My heart broke and my mind could not stop moving. Does this story not sound familiar? How many people have heard their parents or grandparents say something completely out of pocket. Now for some of us, we are lucky enough to not have those types of people in our lives growing up, so to hear another person’s family say these things, it can be a scary shocking phrase. But if are only raised in your “bubble” you may not ever know what else is out there.
I listened to every word he had to say, I looked in his eyes every time he spoke. There were many of us in the room, but it felt like just me and him.
I could feel his empathy. I could slowly start to see him as a person, but also a victim himself.
He did not know any better, he was doing what he assumed was the correct way of life being told to him by his government.
And then Stephen started to speak… this was who I was dancing with during our welcome.
Interacting with this man prior to hearing his story changed my life. I saw him as a human before I knew his story. I felt when he was left out of dancing and wanted him to be included. I wanted to him even though he had a horrible past.
His final words to us were….
“There are still people who will claim the Genocide did not happen, it is up to you to tell them what you have seen today.”
I will be sharing this story until the day I am in the past.
After hearing everyone’s stories it was time to leave for the village. I was sad I was not able to talk to each person individually, but I was thankful to hear the stories I was.
As I was walking out to leave, I felt someone grab my shoulder and it was Stephen looking for a hug goodbye. Everything in my body froze and then my heart kicked in and I was not sure in the moment who needed the hug more.
I think I did…. I will never forget I gave a hug to a preparator of a Genocide in 1994.
If I can understand this man’s story, I could feel his emotions, I could sense his empathy, why can’t this be a universal truth?
What even in forgiveness? Is it for the victim? Or is it a collective idea that makes for a better society?
I wanted to keep the experiences related to the Genocide cohesive. Each stop we made in 2 days fit another piece into the puzzle of why we are here.
The children of this new generation post Genocide, need to know from the past of what is not acceptable in a way that makes sense and feel right for them. Heading to the school to watch how Story-Based Learning has impacted the classrooms will be such a rewarding experience.