Rwanda always on my mind

The Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects at Texas Tech has approved my research for this summer. I'm looking forward to a month in my home-away-from-home, making more friends, and learning more.

Now begins the nitty gritty work of coordinating the details, including recruiting the women to participate in the study. Thank goodness for Never Again Rwanda, who will once again host my research in Rwanda.

Here's what's on tap: a five-day writing workshop for ten women who survived the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide and liberation war. The women and I will retreat from daily life to the Hotel Bethanie in Kibuye, on the shore of Lake Kivu. I'll have a Rwanda female trauma counselor at the workshop in case anyone needs to talk through issues.

We'll spend some time together developing camaraderie and writing one trauma narrative, the memory of one specific event of those "bad times." At the conclusion of the workshop, each participant will have her story to do whatever she likes with it.

Writing has demonstrated healing capacities, even though it may be painful during the writing process. Jamie Pennebaker's research has studied the effects of writing about painful subjects. But his research differs from mine in that the writers he works with write for themselves only. In my 13 years experience as a composition teacher, I've had, on average, one student choose to write a trauma narrative (all my students choose their writing subjects) in every section of every class of every year. They consistently say that, while they felt better after writing, that it was very important to them that I read it. In other words, they wanted a witness to their retelling of the trauma.

Writing trauma narratives can be useful to human rights workers who interact with traumatized populations, and perhaps this condensed workshop can be adapted for their use. Trauma narratives themselves have strong implications for writing teachers, too. There are structural and imagery issues, and it's not unusual for presentation issues such as grammar, mechanics, and usage to fall apart when writers perform the challenging cognitive and emotional work of writing trauma. Revision and assessment are especially touchy matters for some teachers, and they struggle with how to work sensitively with writers to improve the communicative capacity of these narratives.

But traumatized people need these stories. They need to tell them, and as much as it hurts to read them, to experience alongside another's terror, we too need their stories.