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The news site of Santa Barbara City College.

The Channels

The news site of Santa Barbara City College.

The Channels

Filming post-genocidal Rwanda

Through film cameras, City College students brought everyday Rwandan struggles into the spotlight while visiting the country from June to July this summer.

After a year and a half of planning, assistant multimedia arts and technology professor Curtis Bieber and communications instructor Carrie Cropley took a group of 12 students to the four corners of Rwanda, Africa. At $5,000 each, the students arrived on June 13 to begin their documenting of Rwandan life.

Students created films about “the roll of women in Rwanda, the genocide (in general), reconciliation after the genocide, music, culture” and some students just made travel logs, Bieber said. “Those were the main ones.”

Upon arrival to the capital city, Kigali, they saw why Rwanda is called the land of a thousand hills. Bieber described the landscape as lush, green and clean.

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Throughout the trip, students’ days normally involved walking two to three miles to an orphan school to teach Rwandan children English and other activities. They taught them how to jump rope, make paper air planes and even how to unwrap their very first candy bars.

Afterwards, they would have class with Bieber or Cropley. But as routine as their days might seem, they were far from normal.

“Ninety-seven percent of the country has no electricity, and about the same amount of the country has no water,” Bieber said. “Rwanda isn’t set up for tourism.”

In various genocide memorials the group of students visited, they saw gruesome remains. The first genocide memorial they visited was at a City College-like technical school where over 40,000 students were slaughtered in 1994, said Bieber.

“It wasn’t uncommon to meet genocide survivors who had lost entire families,” Bieber said.

After seeing mass graves and preserved bodies, the group stayed in dormitory type rooms that Bieber described as Guantamino Bay prison cells.

Before their trip ended, the students held a goodbye concert at the orphan school. Student Joanna Schultz played songs by Bob Marley and Jack Johnson on her guitar.

They taught the students the chorus to Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” and they all sang, “Don’t worry, about a thing, cause every little thing is going to be all right.”

The students and Bieber are currently still editing their footage gathered from the trip.

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