On Friday, three of the four schools which are participating in SURF’s UK Rwandan Survivors Oral History Project convened at the Imperial War Museum in London to discuss and evaluate the initiative, and to develop ideas to take the work forward.

The Project is funded by the Young Roots programme of the Heritage Lottery Fund. As I have previously posted on this blog, the project has enabled SURF to facilitate for students from schools in London, Oxford, Reading and Rugby to meet with and interview UK-based Rwandan survivors about their lives before and after genocide, and experience during it.

The feedback from the students during the session was unanimously positive about the project – both in terms of the experience of meeting the survivors, as well as the new skills learnt on oral history interviews and using video cameras. The final phase of this initial pilot project is the editing of the interviews which will be made available through a new section of the Survivors Fund website.

Some of the highlights from the interviews are already online, such as this clip from the interview of Jeanette Kagabo by students from Sandhurst School:

We will post further information here in due course once the project website is launched. But until then, just to thank everyone involved who has made the project possible – and in particular the students and survivors for their commitment. We hope that this will pave the way for SURF to undertake even more education work.