I've always tried to articulate how Rwanda changed me. How when I came home this time, I wasn't so starry eyed. This article kind of sums it up. While I did not build something that had to be rebuilt in a physical sense, I think I saw how I could break things down and create a chaos that is so unnecessary. Seeing newly arrived white people in Kigali was always a joke to me and my friend, Elizabeth. We saw how excited they were to "change the world" and we had been there long enough to know it wasn't going to happen. Change needs to happen and can ONLY happen by those who need it. We can not come in and do it. We can help. We can facilitate. But we, as outsiders, can never know the culture well enough. We can never know the environment well enough to make a real change.
Please read this article and please take heed when planning that volunteer trip overseas.
https://medium.com/race-class/b84d4011d17e
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