Written By Drew Kahn

This is the article I wrote for the next issue of 1300 Elmwood which is the magazine that is sent out to all Buffalo State Alumni. The article discusses the meaning behind the trip to Rwanda in January 2012. The magazine will be out this summer.

“Learn Properly”

In 2006 I played Anne in The Diary of Anne Frank at Buffalo State. It was a production in which Anne’s story was juxtaposed to the story of a young Rwandan girl (Anana) hiding during the 1994 genocide. The production was more than a theatrical performance it was education. People learned that there is an “Anne” in every genocide. The Diary of Anne Frank made me want to be an actor, an educator, an artist, and a public servant. I learned that making visceral and emotional connections to people’s stories will teach truth. It takes courage to tear down protective walls to learn each other in this way, but only then do we share humanity.

This journey took me to Rwanda in January 2012, six years after I played Anne. I met a woman named Veni at the Nyamata Genocide Memorial Site where many of her family members were buried. When we told her why our group was in Rwanda she confirmed that it was important for us to simply be there and learn properly what happened in her country.

To “learn properly” meant that the Anne Frank Project (AFP) at Buffalo State College needed to pack its bags and travel half way across the world to Rwanda to truly experience shared humanity. Our group consisted of eight students, Drew Kahn (Director of AFP), Carl Wilkens (an American humanitarian who refused to leave Rwanda during it’s darkest hour), and me. The Anne Frank Project (est. 2009) was created after the successful performance of 2006 to continue inspiring people to make changes in the world and end genocide. It is based on Anne Frank’s message about finding the good in the world, and the change we need to make in order to find it. Traveling to Rwanda meant that we were going to experience direct connections to genocide, and live a cultural, educational exchange using theatre to help communicate our experiences. The cultural outings to memorial sites, orphanages, and schools brought a whirlwind of emotions, which we needed to discuss and reflect upon regularly. We developed vocabularies about grief, pain, anger, joy, forgiveness, the human condition and social justice. Our clearer communication and storytelling aided us towards understanding the truth behind genocide and the current Rwandan culture. These are personal vocabularies, unique to each individual, that will allow us to intelligently and creatively express ourselves for the rest of our lives.

We spent time alone and together reflecting on what we were learning and how it was affecting us emotionally, intellectually, and physically. As we tapped into our rich emotional vocabularies, we wove our stories together with Mashirika, a Rwandan theatre company that devises performances for social justice. The studio was our safe place to sing, dance, and tells stories about social themes that represented the individual, and the world as a whole. After three days of rehearsal we devised a show that we performed for nearly two hundred students from the Kigali Institute of Education. The theatre turned into a forum for big discussions about using theatre in the classroom and the importance of storytelling to make social justice a reality. That discussion confirmed how necessary our work was in Rwanda. We needed to have a visceral connection to people and their stories in order to create change in us, and the people who watched our performance.

The Anne Frank Project is eager to use theatre to engage in social justice issues in other countries that have also suffered genocide. Rwanda is our model teacher for this global outreach.