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Centre Marembo

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Keeping Memories: The Rwandan Community in the UK

October 2011- October 2013

Our project is concerned with celebrating the heritage of the UK Rwandan community as well as commemorating the 1994 Rwandan genocide and preserving the personal accounts of those who experienced it.

We will interview around ten Rwandan people living in the UK about their experiences before and during the genocide in Rwanda and their stories of coming to the UK since the event. We will also run community workshops where will present and discuss the project, collect feedback and collect oral histories from a large number of people. We will use this material to create a mobile exhibition of photographs, transcripts and interactive learning materials that can be shown in a variety of locations and will be accessible to a range of audiences.

We will also utilise this exhibition as a forum for debate and will host guest speakers and musicians on opening evenings. The exhibition will run from April to July to tie in with the genocide memorial period. To accompany the exhibition we will produce a short book in the second year of the project which collects material from the interviews, feedback from the exhibitions and community workshops, additional written contributions and documents the project. This will be given away free to schools, universities community groups, libraries and individuals. We will permanently store the audio recordings and transcripts of the interviews in Sussex University Special Collections, a secure archive that is accessible to the public.

Throughout the project, we will recruit and train volunteers both from the Rwandan community and the wider local community to carry out the project. The project will be overseen by volunteers from the Rwandan community, and we will recruit a team of students from the University of Sussex to carry out the interviewing process and publicise the project. These volunteers will receive extensive training to carry out the interviews in a sensitive, informed and effective manner, and will receive full recognition for their work.

The aims of our project are as follows:

1. To conserve oral history and individual accounts of the Rwandan genocide, flight, arrival and adaptation to life in the UK, in order to provide the community with a means of preserving and learning about their collective heritage
2. To enable the Rwandan community to participate in a project to commemorate the genocide in order to facilitate grieving, address social isolation and depression, and encourage inter-generational understanding
3. To build links with schools, universities, community organisations and other institutions in order to provide opportunities for the wider community to learn about the heritage of the Rwandan community, including the genocide
4. To provide opportunities for volunteers to learn new skills and gain experience on oral history and heritage conservation by participating in a meaningful and interesting project.

If you would like to know more about the project, contribute or participate, please contact Dan Godshaw, Project Coordinator on info@ryico.org