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Shannon Lawson, assistant professor in English and Humanities at Shawnee State University, shows a photo of the Wall of Dreams in Rwanda at a school where she and several other Americans volunteered to help build this summer.

Shawnee State University Assistant Professor in English Volunteers in Rwanda

            Instead of going to the beach and vacationing, Shannon Lawson, assistant professor in English and Humanities at Shawnee State University, got up at 6 a.m. every morning for four weeks this summer working in Rwanda as a volunteer for a school project. She had visited Rwanda twice before on tours, but this time she decided to work as a volunteer.
            On April 6, 1994, in only 100 days, a campaign of mass murder was unleashed upon the Tutsi people of Rwanda and more people were slaughtered with machetes and clubs than had died from atomic weapons in all of history. The people of Rwanda are still recovering from the holocaust where an estimated 800,000 people died.
            David Mwambari who has visited SSU in the past has committed his life to rebuilding communities shattered by the violence. In 2009, he launched a non-profit organization, “Sanejo: Building Tomorrow’s Generation,” a grassroots organization headquartered in Kigali, Rwanda, that is rebuilding African communities.
            Mwambari partnered with YGAP out of Australia, the “Y Generation Against Poverty” organization, to sponsor rebuilding the Ntenyo Primary School in the Muhanga District near Gitarama, Rwanda, where Lawson volunteered. Nearly 600 students were in the school with only nine teachers.
            “He wanted to build classrooms and he wanted to have native English speakers to interact with the teachers and the students to help with the English language,” Lawson said.
            The president of Rwanda wants the official language to be English and all the testing for the children is in English so they have to learn the language.
            One of the customs in Rwanda is that when a woman marries and has a child, she is known by the oldest child’s name so Lawson’s name was Mama James, since her oldest son’s name is James.
            “It’s like a form of respect,” she said. “I was the only volunteer that was married with kids. I wanted to make them feel comfortable, so I had them call me Mama James.”
            Lawson went there thinking she would be mostly in the classroom working with grades one through six teaching English, but she also helped with the building site as well – moving bricks.
            “Whatever they needed me to do, I did. We would make like a chain of people and pick up bricks and move them,” Lawson said. “Rwanda is the land of a thousand hills, so you couldn’t drive a truck to the building site.”
            The truck could only go so far and drop the bricks into a pile. Women then carried the bricks and cement to the building site. One woman had a job of holding boards in place so the builder could saw the boards.
            “Almost everything is done without electric and when they had to have it, they would bring in a generator,” Lawson said.
            She did a workshop with the teachers one day on effective methods of teaching and gave them hints on motivating the children and effective discipline.
On the Saturday before leaving, members of the community, parents, teachers, children and volunteers had a celebration beginning with “umuganda,” a community service to help clean up the building site. The community members have a “umuganda” once each month for different clean-up projects in the community. Then the singing and celebration began.
            The volunteers painted one wall of the school house and called it the Wall of Dreams. Students, teachers, workers and volunteers put their handprints on the wall and wrote their dreams in the handprints. Many of the children wrote what they wanted to be: “I want to be a doctor.” “I want to be a nurse.”
            “My dream is to go back next year,” Lawson said. “It’s the ultimate test of a teacher to just use a chalkboard.”