In Their Shoes

“Violence, genocide, war and poverty: these are not yesterday’s horrors,” says Siena Anstis, a Concordia Journalism student and director of In Their Shoes.
In Their Shoes aims to educate high school students about genocide; not only about the more infamous Rwandan genocide and the holocaust, but also the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian killing fields, the crisis in Kosovo and what is happening in Darfur today.
Anstis founded her own non-governmental organization after working in Gulu, Uganda, in the summer of 2007 and attending the International Conference for the Prevention of Genocide hosted by McGill University this fall. At the conference on genocide, Anstis met a woman who inspired her, “she had raised her child reading the ‘world’ section of the local newspapers, browsing BBC clips for international news, and facing the realities of poverty, both at home and abroad. The child supposedly now runs the human rights group at their local high school.”
So Anstis decided to start her own NGO and to take things into her own hands.
Anstis said, “We want to help kids, to bring them towards their first steps to becoming global and engaged citizens.”
When she was in Rwanda this summer; she said she visited a genocide memorial. “It really hits you when you are there. I didn’t know about the Rwandan genocide until I started university,” she said.
Anstis also said that one of the things she learned in Uganda is that we have so much free time here, which we don’t use. She said the only thing “They care about, where I was staying, is to feed their families.”
Starting February 2008 and running until June 2008, In Their Shoes is planning to offer presentations for high school students, using “a combination of multimedia, survivor accounts, personal animation” and direct student participation to create awareness among teenagers. They say they will offer a “unique chance for students to learn, ask questions” and understand what happened in the Rwandan genocide by getting involved in mock trials.
Anstis said it is hard to get the money to start off with, but she also said people have complimented her on how marketable she made the program.
At the moment Anstis said they are between 12 to 15 people volunteering, but they are always open for any new volunteers.

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