Day 5 - Kigali

Today we held Part 2 of our workshop for students of the Rwandan Film Institute at the US Embassy. It was really fun - we did a bit more instruction and then asked all the students to tell us about the stories they were interested in turning into films so we could give them some advice on their projects. They were great - here are some of my favorites:

- An orphaned former refugee who had fled to Congo (so thin and small that I feel massive next to him) wants to do a documentary of his childhood. He wants to return back to Congo and visit the place where he spent his childhood and wants to interview his old friends and examine some of the hardships they endured like hunger and discrimination.
-A woman named Charlotte (who is a total dynamo) wants to do a documentary about domestic violence in Rwanda and the contrast between the laws to protect women that do already exist in the country, and the mentality of many men in the country who still perpetrate violence against women. Charlotte is a leader in a theater troupe and works for a program which focuses on using theater to tell stories to help prevent domestic violence. She is really interested in also filming examples of model households to help show people what a healthy household should look like. She thinks it would be great to show men cooking, because that is something that they just don't do.
(Though in Rwanda, unlike some other countries in Africa, you do see men carrying water and heavy loads. I've been places where you would never see men do that either. They make the women do all the heavy stuff.)
-Juliet wants to tell the story of her mom and dad. Her dad was a Rwandan refugee who fled to Congo during an earlier upheaval and lived in Congo for 35 years. Her mom was Congolese. They met and married in Congo, however, this was not at all accepted by her mother's family (or Congolese society in general). They had to move back to Rwanda to be accepted, but still faced discrimination because Rwandans didn't accept them as Rwandans either. They miss the language and culture of home in Congo. But their strong love has kept them together here.
-One guy wants to do a film about the music that helped inspire people to survive the genocide and helped them mobilize to rebuild society afterwards.
-Alfred knows a guy who was a street kid. He met him in 2001 when he was begging on the streets. The kid lived on the streets, and loved to sing. At night, he would sleep near a home that he thought was abandoned. But there was a rich family who lived nearby, and the lady who lived there heard his singing and thought it was beautiful and helped him to get into a singing competition. She cleaned him up and convinced him to enter, and he won the competition. (They are very big on competitions here. In addition to many academic competitions they hold, last night I saw on local tv a report about a festival that included an egg-eating competition, a rice-eating competition, and a water-carrying competition.)
-Joseph says when he was 6, he thought that if he got his diploma, he would be able to get a job and be the boss. But now that he earned his diploma a year ago, he still can't get a job. He wants to interview the Minister of the Economy, and do a documentary about unemployment among the educated in Rwanda.
-John Pierre wants to do a documentary about how the Swahili language unites the people of East Africa. (The official languages here are Kinyarwanda, which everyone speaks (except me - it's not easy), and English. It used to be French but they switched over to English after the genocide. I can occasionally recognize a few Swahili words tossed in to the mix.)

There may be a shortage of equipment and other resources here, but there's definitely no shortage of great stories!