This is all Ellen's fault.

Going to Rwanda was not my idea.  It was Ellen's.  Here's the story:

Back in April, it was announced that USN (where I teach) had received a grant from a generous family who wanted to help fund teacher travel for professional development purposes.  It was a pretty significant amount of money-- enough to facilitate a trip pretty much anywhere in the world-- and thus a pretty awesome opportunity.  Obviously I wanted to apply, but the problem was, I didn't know where I would want to go.  So went the conversation with my wife:

M: "Obviously I want to apply, but I don't know where I would want to go."

E:  "You should go to Rwanda."

M:  "I should go to Rwanda!"

And that was that.  So if you're a parental/worrying type, blame Ellen.  I applied, but this is where the plot takes an unexpected turn: I did not win the grant.  Another deserving colleague won instead.  After notifying me, though, my generous division head informed me that he liked my proposal so much that he wanted to help fund a trip to Rwanda anyway.  So here we are.

Perhaps you're wondering why an ostensibly loving wife in an ostensibly happy marriage would tell her husband "you should go to Rwanda."  It's not (I don't think) because she simply wants me to go away, and Rwanda sounded like the farthest possible place.  At USN, I teach a class called Social Conscience, a discussion-based senior seminar centered around the question: What Makes Good People Do Evil Things?  Genocide is just about the evil-est thing we can think of, so it makes for a good case study.

In 1994, Rwanda endured one of the worst incidences of genocide in the 20th century.  Over 100 days, nearly a million Rwandans were murdered by tens of thousands of their seemingly "good" Rwandan neighbors, who chased them, rounded them up, and typically hacked them to death with machetes.

My Social Conscience students explore the nature of this unspeakable behavior, its causes and aftermath.  We examine the situational and systemic influences on perpetrators, bystanders, victims and rescuers.  We unpack the meanings of ideas like "good", "evil", "justice", "forgiveness", and "reconciliation".  Rwanda is a living, breathing example of these concepts in action, and after next week, I'll be able to tell my students, I've been there.

I'm incredibly nervous about a number of aspects of this adventure, not the least of which is that it's entirely possible that I will have shared this blog with everyone I know and will soon find there's no internet connection with which to update it while we're there.  If this is the one and only post on this blog, or if the most exotic locale from which posts are made is Nashville, I apologize in advance.

But thanks for reading.  We already have a lot to share-- just preparing for this trip has led us on a winding path marked by generosity and connectedness.  More to come...