David Mwambari, graduate student in Syracuse University’s Pan African Studies Program, spoke during Prof. Shannon Lawson’s honors English class Thursday, April 23. Nathan Lorenz, son of Dr. John Lorenz, accompanied Mwambari to film the session for a documentary.

Mwambari is originally from Rwanda and survivor of the atrocities there in 1994. His family fled to Kenya and Mwambari later traveled to the United States to study.

Lawson traveled to Rwanda last summer, and has incorporated concepts of the cultural themes she encountered there into this semester’s honors English composition class.

“I thought, if my whole class is about the horrific experiences of genocide, we’ll all come away with the feeling that the world is a terrible place,” Lawson said.

So Lawson instead decided to frame the discussion and writing assignment on genocide around two questions. What causes ordinary people do evil things? And also, what causes ordinary people to do heroic things. The students in the class wrote a research paper on this theme.

“Forgiveness is so crucial,” student Abby Teske said. “Do you agree with this? And if so, how do we spread this forgiveness?”

“We must first deal with the past…You must forgive them so that you can also rest,” Mwambari said.

Mwambari spoke about how much of the traditional oral teaching methods in his home country have disappeared, often because the traditional languages are dying out as western culture gains more of a stronghold.

“It’s a journey. It’s a lot of sleepless nights,” Mwambari said of the healing process for survivors of events like genocide and war.

Now he works to raise funds to make education accessible to the people of his home country and other places in Africa with the organization Sanejo. The name translates as “building tomorrow’s generation.”

“My passion is education,” Mwambari said. “Education makes sense.”

“We (in America) take education for granted,” said Clint Misamore, Mwambari’s partner in this fund-raising project.

Misamore described their work as bridging the gap between optimism and opportunity.

Mwambari also lectured that evening about post-genocide Rwanda in the Flohr Lecture Hall of Clark Memorial Library.