Travels

On Wednesday I'll be off to Rwanda and Burundi again for a little under three weeks. This is an annual trip that I've taken for the past three years. What I'm particularly looking forward to is the warmer weather after an increasingly cold Pretoria winter.

My travel companian, Sarah, and I will arrive in Kigali at 5:30am on Thursday and in the afternoon I'll be running a two-hour training session for teachers at a secondary school on nonviolent discipline in schools. Even though it feels a bit hectic to be doing something like that after our badly timed flight, I'm looking forward to seeing how some of the principles I've been applying in the South African context pan out in the Rwandan context.

On Friday, I'll be attending a conference on reconciliation hosted by Shalom, Educating for Peace, where I'll give a talk on Storytelling as a means of healing and reconciliation. Again, this is a good opportunity to see how ideas I've been working on in my PhD thesis will pan out with a live audience. I'll focus on reconciliation in the South Africa context, though, leaving some room for application into other contexts.

The rest of the time in Kigali should be somewhat more low key and we'll travel through to Burundi the following Thursday. In Burundi we'll be spending time with Youth for Christ, where we'll probably get to spend a significant amount of time at their orphanage.

I hope to have internet access to be able to update this blog with my travels. But if not, I'll be sure to fill everyone in when I get back!