The Global Schoolhouse: Reading, Writing... Rwanda?

LIKE SUPERMAN, CARL HOBERT LEADS A DOUBLE LIFE. By day, the earnest 45-year-old can be spotted in the halls of Belmont Hill School (Massachusetts), his blue blazer flapping over khaki pants as he races to teach a French or Spanish class. But by night, he is flying to Rwanda, Norway, or Mexico — on a one-man mission for peace, propelled by a 15-year-old's plea that "the world is really messed up."

Switching identities like this is now second nature to the Minnesota-born teacher. One minute Hobert might be grading a Spanish literature essay, the next he's fielding a call from Rwandan President Paul Kagame entreating him to conduct a conflict-resolution workshop in the former killing fields of Kigali. When he hangs up, Hobert is called to weigh in on a faculty adviser meeting. Back at his desk, he tears open an invitation from Bill Clinton to participate in a symposium on the Realities of Globalization in the 21st Century. Then the bell rings for class.

What makes Carl run?

Whether conferring with presidents, text messaging students in Costa Rica or attending a foreign language department meeting, Hobert is fueled by a single, driving passion. If he were a politician, his campaign slogan would be: "It's the children, stupid."

It was the children, after all, who led Hobert to teaching in the first place. And after attending the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy it was the children who then led him to peace building through what he calls "preventive diplomacy."

The latter work culminated on a cold January night in 2002, when Hobert heard George W. Bush, in his second State of the Union address, condemn certain countries — specifically Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — as members of an "Axis of Evil." Hobert was so disturbed by this categorization — concerned that the president was inadvertently teaching Hobert's and others students to hate these countries and their citizens — that he was propelled into action.

"I felt at the moment he uttered those three words," says Hobert, "that we had to balance this perception of evil, of terrorism, of 'there are others out to get us.' We had to balance that with a self-confident, but not haughty, educational alliance — in the U.S. and abroad — to resolve and prevent international conflict more effectively."

It was a tall order — out of which the Axis of Hope was born. With the support of his Belmont Hill mentors, head Rick Melvoin and psychologist Michael Thompson, and building on his work at the Fletcher School, Hobert launched the Axis of Hope as a nonprofit organization whose mission is to teach students the art of preventive diplomacy and global responsibility. Who better to engage, he reasoned, than young people, so that when they grow up they might do a better job than their elders in dealing with global conflict.

Because Hobert believes that conflict resolution begins at home, he spent several years honing the preventive diplomacy and Intellectual Outward Bound case-study approach¹ not only with his own students, but also with those in the New England area, beginning in the winter of 2002. Four years later, with the need for conflict resolution sadly growing, he fields requests for help from all over the country — and the world.

"We Are All Rwandans"
In July 2005, at the invitation of Rwandan president Paul Kagame — who had ties to Belmont Hill School — Hobert flew to the "land of a thousand hills" to conduct a conflict-resolution seminar with students just 11 short years after the Rwandan genocide.

It was a genocide in which Hutu Power militia exhorted their fellow Hutu to rise up and systematically slaughter nearly one million of their Tutsi "cockroach" neighbors. More efficient than Auschwitz, this low-tech killing-by-machete took place within a neat 100 days, until Kagame's army came out of Uganda and liberated the country on July 4, 1994.

He likes to quote Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

If you can imagine Jewish Holocaust survivors trying to co-exist with Nazis in post-war Germany, you can appreciate the challenge facing President Kagame as he has worked to build a unity government — ensuring tribunals for the genocidaires while promoting peace and reconciliation for the population. Above all, he continues to remind citizens that they are no longer Hutu or Tutsi, telling them, "We are all Rwandans."

Hobert considered it a high honor to walk into this land of fragile peace and work with Gaspard Kagenza, deputy headmaster at Green Hills Academy, along with his students and those from the FAWE Girls' School — built for genocide orphans.

For five days, 38 students and teachers studied, debated, negotiated, and role-played a case study Hobert wrote with a former student of his about the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, called Whose Jerusalem? Hobert deliberately assigned them a Middle East case study, rather than one about Rwanda. They'd come back to Rwandan issues afterwards.

The students assumed the identities of Palestinian or Israeli moderates or extremists and then were given confidential briefings on the roles they had to play as teams — representing members of the Likud or Labor Party, or Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, or the U.S.-led Quartet. After five days of intense negotiations, during which the "tensions and frustrations were very real," according to Hobert, the Rwandan group crafted an agreement that called for the Gaza Strip and the southern portion of the West Bank to become the new state of Palestine. Their final Middle East peace proposal was sent to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The group finished with a day of community service at the Home of Hope orphanage in Kigali.

When talking about the impact of the seminar, some of the students mentioned the power of walking in someone else's shoes, and what they had learned — starting with what Hobert calls the five essential "C's" of negotiation: communication, comprehension, compromise, coexistence, and compassion.

Mimi Chantal Umotoni was two years old and living in exile in Uganda when the genocide struck her country. She's been in Rwanda for four years now, after her Ambassador father was called home. But it was her mother who encouraged her and her brothers to attend the conflict resolution seminar, because "she deals with girls who have been traumatized from the genocide."

Like any teenager, Mimi at first thought the seminar would be long and boring, especially since it took place during her holiday. These sentiments were also shared by her classmate Cynthia Sezibera, whose father Richard Sezibera served as Ambassador to the U.S. and now to the fragile Great Lakes region in central Africa. Cynthia admits she went because her friends were going. "I thought I would just check it out and probably not come back," she said. "But it was interesting, and I came back with pleasure."

Mimi assumed the role of an extremist Palestinian, and, during the icebreaker, was told to stand with other Palestinians on a roped-off map of the Gaza Strip. "That's when the extremists became angry, because we finally noticed that the space we had was not enough for us," she said, not hesitating to use the word "we." "The moderates wanted peace, but the extremists wanted to fight for their rights. And Jerusalem was the main problem because both Israelis and Palestinians had a religious past in that space — so it was very intense and confusing."

Toward the end of the week, Gaspard Kagenza and Carl Hobert talked to the students about the relevance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to their own country's recent history of bloodletting.

Cynthia acknowledged that she had a much better understanding of why the two Middle East groups hated each other, as did the Hutu and Tutsi, but also pointed out that, in Rwanda, the groups at least shared a common language, religion, and government.

For Mimi, the exercise brought out vivid images of her own country's pain. Even though she lived outside the country during the genocide, "I have cousins my age who watched their parents being killed. And you start talking and you feel their pain, and I'm like why...?"

Axis of Hope. Axis of Hope is a nonprofit education organization dedicated to improving the practice of international conflict resolution in public and private schools worldwide. It maintains a strong commitment to helping young people to understand conflict and to develop conflict-resolution skills through hands-on practice. In particular, the organization specializes in the study of geopolitical issues, and continues to develop expertise in health and safety issues, including the AIDS pandemic, the war in Iraq, and environmental issues worldwide. Since January, 2002, Axis of Hope has provided training and facilitation services to a broad spectrum of regional, national, and international student groups. Participating independent schools include: Belmont Hill School (Massachusetts) The Blake School (Minnesota) Concord Academy (Massachusetts) The Episcopal School (Pennsylvania) Green Hills Academy (Rwanda) Lycée Louis-le-Grand (France) Phillips Academy (Massachusetts) Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire) Moses Brown School (Rhode Island) Newton Country Day School (Massachusetts) Nicols School (New York) Peterson School (Mexico City) St. Paul Academy and Summit School (Minnesota) University High School (California) Wilbraham Monson Academy (Massachusetts) Winsor School (Massachusetts) The program focuses on both students and educators: Students. Using a unique combination of content and activities, students learn about conflict in ways, according to the organization, "that enliven the imagination, awaken moral reasoning, and impart social and civic skills that they can use throughout their lives." Through international conflict prevention activities, students obtain important skills that will better prepare them for future academic and social challenges, as well as the necessity of lifelong learning and being a responsible world citizen. Educators. The educator seminars provide an opportunity for educators to continue their lifelong learning and growth, which will benefit both them and their students. Through participation in the seminars, teachers receive training about culture, religion, politics, ethics, and inter-group conflict, and are provided with extensive supplementary materials and resources for use in their classrooms. For more information, visit the Axis of Hope website, www.axisofhope.org.

"But we have to live with those people who've lost everything," says Cynthia, "and the best way to make sure it doesn't happen again is to learn about it and understand what happened."

Gaspard Kagenza agrees. "The hope is that when these children grow up, their education will help them realize that they owe it to their country to be patriotic and recognize the rights of everyone and just live together in peace." As an adult, Kagenza has absorbed much more of the impact of the genocide on his country, which makes him more determined to be a part of the effort to teach reconciliation to the next generation. "We hope that the ideology of genocide, the ideology of segregation, the ideology of executing someone because of their origin," he says, "should be a thing of the past — should never happen again."

But of course, it has happened again — in Sudan.

When asked how they would advise a group of children and adults in Sudan, Daniel Karake says, "Having learned about genocide and conflict, it's probably better for the children to learn about it, but I don't know what to tell an adult."

Mimi Chantal steps in and says it would be hard to convince the children, "because they're witnessing their parents being killed, their brothers dying of hunger, their houses being destroyed." It's not easy convincing a child, she says, because a child does not understand what's going on. "So they just react, and that's where it's the seed part, you know, it starts growing." It's powerful to hear her make a connection from the Middle East to Rwanda to Sudan.

"I think it would be better for parents to try their hardest — because parents have a big impact on children — to convince their children that revenge is not always the right way to solve your problem," she says.

Forging a Global Alliance
Deeply affected by his Rwanda experience, Hobert continues to conduct workshops both locally and globally. In January 2006, he flew to Paris to work with youth following the race riots that took place the previous fall.

In the summer of 2006, he was invited to work in Scandinavia with independent school students on an Independent School Study Abroad Consortium (ISSAC) program called ,i>Peace in the Modern World: Global Studies, Conflict Resolution, and Intercultural Understanding. "It has been an amazing experience to work with the students at the International People's College (IPC) in Denmark and the people at the Nobel Foundation," Hobert says, "especially given what's going on in the Middle East right now."

But Rwanda stays with him. "Why," he asks, "did the world not pay more attention to Rwanda in 1994?" He likes to quote Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

Carl Hobert's mission is to make sure the friends are never silent. After the sobering, but inspiring workshop in Rwanda, he crafted a new case study called Rwanda: Reconciliation and Reconstruction — or Return to Conflict? In March 2006 in Mexico City, he engaged 50 students in a two-day conference at the Peterson School campuses, using the new case study.

Back at Belmont Hill, he receives an e-mail message from one of the student participants, Andrea Valdes Hernandez. "You probably won't remember me," she writes. "I was the really intense brown-haired girl in the Hutu-Moderate table." The Rwandan conflict got to her, she says, "but the reality is that that kind of violent attacks — led by discrimination and human mutual hate — is not only happening in Africa, it's all around the world — here in Latin America, even in your country, the United States...."

A week after the workshop, Andrea's teacher had them watch American History X (a movie about neo-Nazi skinheads), and Andrea told Hobert, "After that day, I burst into tears. Watching these kind of things happen makes something inside me yearn, and it hurts." She now asks Hobert a favor. "Maybe it's a bit bold of me, but please include me in your worldwide programs. I would really like to help you do something for the world." Hobert had mentioned that he would like to gather a group of young people from the different workshops around the world and have them work together. "Please," Andrea begs, "let me be a part of that group."

If Carl Hobert has his way — and before too many more classroom bells ring — that group of young people will gather, and they will not be silent, and maybe, just maybe, peace will finally have a chance.

Kitty Thuermer is the associate editor of Independent School and director of publications at NAIS. For more information on the Axis of Hope, visit www.axisofhope.org. Carl Hobert is writing a book entitled Axis of Hope: Teaching Global Responsibility in U.S. Schools, which will be published by Beacon Press in 2007.

Note

1. Hobert's 'Intellectual Outward Bound' case-study approach allows students to role-play many different sides in a geo-political conflict, to teach them how to resolve — and to prevent — future conflicts in the Middle East, in Africa, and beyond.