Ann Arbor psychologist Patricia Pasick establishes 'Stories For Hope Rwanda'
By Janet Miller, annarbor.com, Oct. 10, 2009
Ann Arbor psychologist Patricia Pasick understands burying the past doesn’t make it go away.
So when she traveled with her husband to Rwanda and was asked to help address the needs of the country’s next generation, she knew the stories about the horrific 1994 genocide that killed close to one million people over two months needed to come out of the shadows.
With a $40,000 grant from the Rwanda government, Pasick began collecting "Stories For Hope Rwanda," where elders and youth come together to speak about the past. The project, which started in May, is modeled after StoryCorps, a non-profit organization that has recorded tens of thousands of stories from people around the United States since 2003.
Stories For Hope, said Pasick, “is like StoryCorps, only with a therapeutic twist.”
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The power of story telling
By Moses Gahigi, The New Times (Kigali), May 12, 2010
History has taught that silence does not heal; it only breeds distrust and despair.
The tone of his voice was heavy with conviction almost close to emotion, he spoke with a slight shudder but the words came out so clearly and you could tell that what he was speaking came from his heart to a person who is close to his heart.
The facilitators and the recording crew were attentively listening and the whole process went on effortlessly, with the expression on his face you could see that Augustin Kajuga was breaking free from the culture of silence which had gripped him for long and was now telling his son Ignace Nkurukiyimana a story of his life and a story of his heart courtesy of Stories for Hope Rwanda.
When Patricia Pasick a trained psychologist, visited Rwanda in 2006 and observed the Rwandan history and all the efforts people are involved to heal from the cruel past, she decided to come up with an initiative as part of her contribution to the process.
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