The Manhattan Times

Inwoodite packs her bags for Rwanda to train teachers

by Corinne Ramey

Although it’s halfway across the world, and only the size of Massachusetts, the African nation of Rwanda has always had an inexplicable attraction to Kathleen Malu.

“People ask: ‘What’s with you and Africa?’” said Malu, 58. “I just can’t seem to escape it.”

This January the longtime Inwood resident will be returning to Rwanda, exactly three decades since she first set foot in the country. Currently, Malu is a professor at William Paterson University of New Jersey, where she teaches in the college of education. While in Africa, she will teach Rwandan teachers as part of the Fulbright Program, a prestigious grant from the U.S. government that funds international exchange for an educational purpose.

Malu first became interested in Africa in 1967 when growing up in Bethlehem, PA. In high school, she participated in an activity called Model United Nations, in which students represent different countries and attend a mock U.N. meeting. By chance, Malu was assigned to represent the country of Rwanda, located in east-central Africa. She still has the report she wrote at the time, with a cover of yellowed construction paper and typewritten pages.

Later, after graduating from college, Malu spent four years as a Peace Corps volunteer, serving two years in Rwanda and two in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then known as Zaire. During these years she met her now ex-husband, who is Congolese and the father of her two children.
Then, in 1981, she moved to Inwood, where she lived with her two sons, and eventually her dog, Oreo. “I wanted to move to Inwood after reading a column in The New York Times,” said Malu. “The fact that it was community-oriented, and diverse and near nature was really important.”

She was active in her community, including in the Inwood Little League teams of her two sons.

"She was instrumental to me in meeting people in the neighborhood," said friend and fellow Inwoodite Kate Shackford. “I’ve met a whole group of people I wouldn’t have met otherwise.”

The thought of returning to Rwanda didn’t cross Malu’s mind until 2007, when she was assigned a student teacher named Jean-Gratien Uwisavye, who was from Rwanda. As the two got to know each other better, she considered going back, and eventually applied for the Fulbright grant.

Malu has a unique connection to Rwanda, Uwisavye said.

“She’s going back to Rwanda as someone who was connected to Rwanda before genocide,” he said, referring to when more than 800,000 people were killed in 1994. “She’s the rare person who went back.”

But in the intervening decades, Malu’s experience with Rwanda has also shaped the way she interacted with the Inwood community. As a white woman raising two biracial children, Malu connected with other mothers in interracial relationships in Inwood and Washington Heights. Calling themselves the Obama Mamas, the group traveled to Philadelphia together to campaign for Barack Obama during the 2008 election.

Malu hopes to use her time as a Fulbright scholar not only to teach Rwandans, but also to promote mutual understanding between Rwandans and students in the United States. In the past several months, she has gone into classrooms in New Jersey and given presentations about Rwanda. Then, once she is in the country, she’ll talk with the students using Skype, an Internet video application.

Malu did a role-play activity with the students of a Teanfly, NJ middle school to teach them about the roots of genocide and violence in Rwanda. She had half of the students stand on each side of an imaginary line, and instructed the two groups to try to do whatever was necessary to make the other group cross the line.

“They were violent, and lied to each other and pushed each other,” said Malu.

“Nobody thought of negotiating,” added teacher Juliana Meehan, who is also Malu’s former student.
One sixth-grader was so inspired by the activity that he told his teacher he wants to study why people are so susceptible to coercion and mob-rule dynamics. He said, ‘"I want to know what it is in people’s brains that make them act like that,”” said Meehan. “He saw something really ugly but significant in human behavior.”

Teachers were often the targets of the genocide, and as a result about one million young Rwandans aren’t in school, said Mula. “One of the things a dictator or horrific leader does is to get rid of those people who think,” she said. “They think teachers are dangerous because they give people knowledge and information.”

“She’s helping this country climb back out of that abyss of the horrible genocide,” said Meehan. “One part of that is bringing back teachers.”