Local psychologist and writer Pat Pasick looks at portraits of people from Rwanda on her laptop in her Ann Arbor home. The portraits go along with a project Pasick has been working on in which she brings different generations of Rwandan relatives together to share their life stories.

Lon Horwedel | AnnArbor.com

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.”

The project brings elders and youth - it could be a child and parent, an older and younger sibling, or a child and a mentor - to talk about family history, culture or traditions. And sometimes the genocide. 

“The stories are about how people have managed despite their suffering,” Pasick said.

By recording stories from the past, Rwanda regains its legacy, lost after the genocide with a conspiracy of silence, Pasick said. 

“People wanted to divorce themselves from the legacy of the past," she said. "The elders want to protect young people from the pain and suffering and to just focus on the future and young people don’t want to disturb their elders and ask about these painful stories.” 

Stories For Hope doesn't just record accounts of the genocide. There are stories about life before the genocide, about culture and tradition.

Close to 20 facilitators have been trained to collect stories, Pasick said. Her last trip to Rwanda was in September, and she plans to return to in February and again in May and August.

Pasick is looking for funding, including grant and private dollars, and needs at least $60,000 a year to run the project.

Facilitators have collected 60 stories that are being translated and uploaded to the Web site, http://www.storiesforhope.org/main/index.php. Pasick hopes to collect at least 200 stories.

There’s Kajuga Augustin, a 70-year-old Rwandan man who tells his 20-year-old son about his youth when poor children didn’t wear clothes and how a father would arrange a marriage. It’s a cultural message and makes no mention of the genocide.

And there’s Gahonagaire Emelda, a woman who became the guardian of a boy who lost both parents. She tackles the genocide head-on. 

“I witnessed what happened in Rwanda with my very eyes. I was even telling him (her adopted son) not to be hurt in his heart when talking about it. The message I can give him is to fight against anything that can make genocide happen again,” she tells him. 

When he asks how it came that Rwandans could turn against each other, she answered: “They would tell us that hatred was brought by white people, that they brought discrimination among Rwandese. They used to say that this one is a Tutsi and that one is a Hutu.”

The first time Pasick traveled to Rwanda, she had no plans to launch Stories for Hope. In 2006, she accompanied her husband, Rob Pasick, who was delivering leadership training to Rwandan government officials for the University of Michigan's business school.

She met Jean-Pierre Karabaranga, secretary general of the Ministry of Sports, Culture, and Youth, who asked her for help to address the needs of the next generation. 

“He had relatives killed in the genocide and he asked about what he should tell his children. It started as a very personal question,” Pasick said. 

Pasick has used storytelling in her practice as psychologist in Ann Arbor. She was co-director of Narrative Family Therapy, Ann Arbor Center For the Family.

Storytelling, she said, can help heal the wounds of Rwanda. “Rwanda is a country beckoning for help from people who respect the fact that Rwanda wants to help itself,” Pasick said.

The Rwandan government certified Stories for Hope for an INGO - an International Non-governmental Organization - and it has become a Michigan non-profit.

Some of the stories have been painful, Pasick said. 

“But they’re not just stories about loss and trauma and conflict. They are stories about resilience, hope and determination.”

Janet Miller is a freelance writer for AnnArbor.com. Reach the news desk at news@annarbor.com or 734-623-2530.