Day 1

We landed in Kigali last night, and spent most of the day today resting and getting settled in and having meetings. (The converter I bought for my laptop isn't working, so I'm going to keep this short until I find a way to charge my battery, which is dying soon.) So, pardon the writing - I'm rushing to get this out before it dies. Hopefully, my later posts will be more thoughtful and filled with great wisdom and humor... but this is going to have to do for now.

I'm so glad to be here - it's beautiful and the people are really sweet. And it's great to be back in Africa, which has such a special place in my heart. Just the smell of the air (the wood burning for cooking) makes me happy.

This is my first trip to Rwanda. It's an incredibly complex country, but from the little I know so far, I can tell you that the work that they have done to recover from the genocide is truly impressive. It feels very safe and advanced, relative to several other African countries that I've been to. It's hard to believe that such a horrible thing happened here just 16 years ago.

I'm traveling through Rwanda with a filmmaker from Massachusetts named Robert Johnson as a two-person delegation of the 2010 American Documentary Showcase, which is a program of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs. Each year they select 30 American documentaries to take into a variety of countries in the developing world. Our job is to act as cultural ambassadors and showcase documentaries as a tool for free speech and democracy.

We will teaching workshops on documentary filmmaking and will also be screening the film I co-directed and produced, "Come Back to Sudan", to journalism and film students here at a university and the Rwandan Film Institute. We will also be screening the film several times as a part of the Rwandan Film Festival, which is happening this week.

We are off to Butare (the country's main university town) early tomorrow morning. I'll post more as soon as I can find the time and internet access and recharge my battery. With any luck, I'll be able to do all that before we leave!