The authors with participants in the Rwanda Resilience and Grounding Organization (2026) | Anna Muller / Courtesy of the author
We arrived in Rwanda at 2:30 a.m, jet-lagged and not knowing what to expect. Our hosts greeted us as we staggered out of the airport, offering a few words in English, then promptly hustled us to a nearby hotel. We had come to the land of a thousand hills, the green heart of Africa, and the site of one of twentieth century’s worst genocides, at the invitation of the Rwanda Resilience and Grounding Organization (RRGO) to participate in a series of workshops focused on trauma, resilience, and practices of healing.
It was January of 2026, and our own country was boiling over in the frozen city of Minneapolis as ICE agents invaded the streets and met active protest, resulting in two violent deaths. (By the end of the month, six other people had died in ICE custody.) While watching that drama play out from afar, we waded into the history and culture of a country still recovering from its own devastating civil conflict.
We were an unlikely trio: Anna, a Polish historian transplanted to the United States, Paul, a White American sociologist from the suburbs of Chicago, and Tamir, a Black American from Detroit. For Tamir, who is both a graduate student in criminal justice and the assistant director of Nation Outside, a community organization that advocates for formerly incarcerated people, journeying to Africa was a realization of long-held dreams, a return to a cradle of ancestry.
Despite many differences, there was much that we shared: a commitment to prison reform, to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men and women who are also our students, teachers, friends, mentors, and mentees, and to practices of dialogue and empathy, grounded in the belief that human beings can build trust even when they disagree. We understand that behind each incarcerated person is a sea of hurt people, direct and indirect victims of crime, but we also know that many of these women and men will one day return home. This was the impetus for our visit to Rwanda: learning more about the methodologies that RRGO used to facilitate resilience and strengthen community while acknowledging harm and the need for accountability.
In 2019, when Paul and Anna traveled to Rwanda for the first time, we were struck by the tangible presence of past violence. It was there—in the flowers around us, in the memorials, in the stories people told. This is a country where you cannot avoid being reminded that neighbors once killed neighbors.
On an arranged visit to a Reconciliation Village, perpetrators of genocide stood next to survivors, and together they narrated their stories. That spectacle was something that we debated after we witnessed it for the first time. How authentic was it to simply demonstrate what we wanted to believe, that such reconciliation was possible? If so, was it ethical for us to witness it in this way, as a kind of choreographed performance? These questions hung over us on our return to Rwanda.
One night in Kagali, Felix Bigabo from Prison Fellowship Rwanda told us more about the difficult process that lay behind the public face of the Reconciliation Villages. In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, Rwanda’s new leadership came to grips with the reality that it couldn’t permanently imprison all those who had participated. There were simply too many, and they were needed to rebuild a country that was broken.
Those who had been incarcerated would eventually return home, but how could communities prevent ideologically driven violence from happening again? The process of reintegration required patient work in the villages—speaking with both survivors and perpetrators, and rebuilding trust as communities were persuaded to accept the possibility of living together again.
Community courts (named “Gacaca,” which means “in the grass” in Kinyarwanda), were held all across the country. Local people were empowered to hear confessions and decide appropriate sentences for those who had participated in the genocide, including ways they could make amends and rejoin their communities. Those who planned the genocide were referred to higher courts, and received the longest sentence.
Rwanda is often used as a case study example of restorative justice implemented at the national level, and this informed our 2026 visit: What wisdom could we learn? What methods could we bring back?
We were keenly aware of the challenges facing people leaving Michigan prisons and returning home. There is little support for adults returning, sometimes after decades, to families, neighborhoods, and a world that has changed completely. Many ties must be restored.
During one recent exercise at the prison where we conduct our classes, one man spoke about the shame that is carried not only by individuals but by families who once held great hopes for their children and must now live with the consequences of their crimes. Alongside guilt, fear, trauma, and uncertainty, shame shapes the fragile terrain of return.
Anna: Return as restoration
In Rwanda, the end of the genocide has been framed as a process of reconciliation—the recognition that relationships have been broken and must be restored. This work requires the efforts of many people and organizations that provide basic necessities, knowledge, and, perhaps most importantly, spaces for conversations about accountability.
We see echoes of this challenge in the work of organizations, like Nation Outside, that serve formerly incarcerated people, where the formal end of imprisonment, like the end of war, does not resolve the relational consequences of harm. These organizations refuse to view carceral spaces simply as places where people are tucked away in Foucauldian heterotopias, where problems are presumed solved once those who embody them are removed. At Macomb Correctional Facility, the Theory Group—formed by alumni of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program—runs a restorative justice class for men preparing to return home. In these meetings, participants speak openly about their pasts and their futures, learning how to manage shame, fear, and trauma, and how to imagine return not simply as release, but as a process of rebuilding relationships.
Paul: Trust as vulnerability
There are moments when trust does not feel abstract but physical. As we moved through cities, villages, and communities in Rwanda, that sense of vulnerability took on new meaning. We experienced it as we plunged down steep hills packed together in a minivan, our driver dodging through the chaotic Kigali traffic of bicycles, motos, and walkers, and as we were welcomed into dances, embraced by people whose words we could not understand. Most viscerally, we felt it through joining in rounds of laughter yoga, one of the grounding practices used in reconciliation work by our hosts in Rwanda.
Laughter, we realized, is a form of exposure. To laugh with someone is to relinquish control, even briefly, and to place oneself in the presence of another without defenses. Laughter makes all of us vulnerable; it makes all of us equally ridiculous and human. To laugh with someone, to expose yourself, to put yourself in their hands, is a practice of trust. It emerges slowly, through repeated encounters, through gestures that signal openness rather than fear.
Tamir: Return as making
As a Black man born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, with ancestral roots in Dolomite, Alabama, I was raised to embody vigilance, resilience, compassion, pride, and intellectual curiosity. Yet, like many shaped by structural inequities and life’s unpredictable terrain, my path led to incarceration. I served 13 years within the Michigan Department of Corrections.
It was in restorative justice circles that my journey of restoration began. Through study, reflection, and exposure to scholarly thought, I began to reconstruct my sense of self. In those circles, men practiced speaking honestly, imagining what return might look like—not as a single event but as an ongoing effort.
What struck me in Rwanda was the structural support that made restoration possible. Community organizers provided stipends to honor participants’ time and labor, and the process appeared to have strong governmental backing. At times, participants seemed to follow a shared narrative structure when telling their stories—perhaps a reflection of training within the reconciliation model.
While this narrative consistency may signal the strength of the system, it also led me to question how institutional presence shapes personal expression. Does support ever blur into expectation? Can restoration remain authentic—specific to an individual and their community—when it is guided so closely?
Concluding thoughts
In the poet Ovid’s retelling of an ancient Greek myth, the mortal Arachne challenged the goddess Minerva to a contest of weaving. Arachne created a flawless tapestry that revealed uncomfortable truths about the rape of humans by gods. For her audacity, she was condemned to weave without end, and hung herself to escape interminable labor. Leaving Rwanda, we carried with us a different reading of that story. Weaving baskets—a prevalent sight in Rwanda—is slow, repetitive, deliberate work that, to an outsider, appears as a series of gestures of continuity. Living together after violence—or after incarceration—requires a similarly stubborn commitment to keep working on the threads that bind us, even when the tough fibre cuts our hands.
Perhaps all societies that survive rupture must become weavers—not to recreate the fabric of the past but because without the work of weaving, nothing holds. Weaving, like trust, begins in the body: with hands, with touch, with laughter, with the willingness to place oneself in the proximity of pain that comes with working at this project alongside one another.
