Exhibition completed!

The news from Kigali is that the 17 panels for the 'peace making after genocide' exhibition have just gone to the printers in UK for fabrication! Years after envisioning this project, a year after the conceptual work began, it is finished. The final details of design and text have been completed, incorporating feedback from staff, from the memorial centre’s community partners, and others. The translation is finished and the Kinyarwanda version dropped into the panels to replace the English. The cost of fabrication has been included in a small grant from CIDA (thank you Canada) and the cost of shipping from UK will be paid by the remaining money from your donations (thank you again to all who gave.)

What remains is to shepherd it through the process of getting to Kigali airport and through customs so that it can meet the deadline of arrival in Rwanda on March 31^st. 

What remains is continuing challenging conversations on how to guide this exhibition, how to facilitate dialogue on difficult topics, how to guide and converse in an inclusive manner, how to talk about the genocide and peacemaking without being prescriptive. How to allow everyone to have their own process, to be in their own place regarding the possibility of peace and reconciliation, to not impose. To encourage conversation, to widen debate, to use story to offer possibility, that’s what’s driven the exhibition development process but it’s not easy.  Nineteen years after genocide, it’s not so long. If it was you, would you even entertain the notion of reconciliation? Of forgiveness? How loud would you laugh at someone suggesting that to you?

Some say that reconciliation is a western driven NGO notion that makes work for foreigners. And maybe that’s true at times, but this exhibition isn’t telling anyone what to do, it’s asking, as it says on one panel, ‘the journey to peace, is it possible?’ This is the question that Rwandans ask themselves and this exhibition nudges it into the open, wonders, invites.

What remains is to take the exhibition out and about and it seems its first community visit will be in May, in Gisenyi, up on the Congo border. What better choice than that troubled area, taking the invitation to tour the exhibition across the border as well as providing workshop for students and teachers in local schools and public events for the whole community. And some of the presenters at those public events will be peacemakers profiled in the exhibition. I will be back in Canada when this pilot mounting of the exhibition takes place my heart will be in Rwanda, wishing this project well.

“This is big,” said one of my colleagues after a lively discussion about facilitating dialogue on exhibition topics and messages. “One day we’ll look back and see that this was important for Rwanda.” I hope he’s right.