|
|
What happens when two UUP members who don’t know each other unexpectedly meet while on sabbatical in Rwanda?
They become friends.
That’s what happened with David Reed and Shaun Irlam, who crossed paths on the street in Kigali, Rwanda, last November. The professors were there doing research on aspects of the war-torn African country.
Reed is an associate professor of emergency medicine at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse; Irlam is an associate professor of comparative literature at SUNY Buffalo.
"It was pure chance that we met," Reed said. "I saw a white guy walking down the street and we started talking and it turned out that he was from SUNY Buffalo and I was from Upstate. We got to be friends and we spent the next five days or so together.
"It was a pleasant surprise because we both spoke English and we were both on sabbatical studying the history of Rwanda," Reed said. "It was a great way to explore and understand the culture."
Reed was in Rwanda to study current health care capabilities and prototypes for health care in rural Rwanda from a medical point of view. Irlam was there to study the post-genocide regional literature in the country, using writings about the genocide – much of it written in French – to describe the events.
Together, the professors explored Kigali, including a visit to the Ministry of Defense site there; that’s where 11 Belgian United Nations soldiers were killed while trying to protect Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana during the early days of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide. Uwilingiyimana was assassinated, one of nearly 1 million people who were killed over a three-month span.
"I asked some guy in the street to take our photo at the Ministry of Defense site," said Reed. "You can see many holes in the side of a building in the photo. The holes came from a spray of machine gun fire (from the genocide)."
Reed said he didn’t think he would have gotten as much out of the trip as he did if he hadn’t met Irlam.
"I had no idea who he was, but it turned into a great relationship," he said. "We had common goals to understand the culture."
– Michael Lisi