Students set out to enhance their understanding of societies around the globe with fact-finding trips in distant countries during Tufts' winter break.
Five students traveled to Rwanda in early January seeking to expand their knowledge of the country and provide perspectives for research.
Rwanda is hardly a typical vacation destination for Americans. The country is known worldwide for the brutal ethnic violence that took place there in 1994 between two rival tribes, the Tutsis and the Hutus.
But sophomore organizer Jessica Berlin conceived the trip - called the Amahoro project, after the Rwandan word for peace - to explore how country is now recovering and carving a new identity out of its bloody past.
The group members traveled throughout the country, speaking to individuals and groups that offered different perspectives on the Rwandan development and reconstruction, "ranging from government officials to NGOs, volunteer groups, students, genocide survivors, ex-combatants and women's leadership advocates," Berlin said.
The delegation set up these visits and all other contacts through their own initiative. "It was a very good system," Berlin said. "We got to meet with some very important people in the fields that we were looking at."
The 12-person trip to Turkey was organized by the New Initiative for Middle East Peace (NIMEP), which seeks to develop new means of dialogue in and about the conflict-ridden Middle East. Like the Amahoro project, NIMEP is a program of Tufts' Institute for Global Leadership
(IGL).
Previous NIMEP delegations have conducted similarly structured fact-finding trips to Israel and the West Bank, Iran, and Egypt.
The group decided on Turkey due to the complex developments in its domestic politics.
The purpose of the trip was to "allow students to get a hands-on, birds-eye view of the complexity of Turkish politics," said Matan Chorev, a first-year student at the Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy and one of the trip's organizers.
"We felt Turkey was undergoing so many changes domestically, it was truly a unique time to observe and understand what's happening in Turkey. We felt that we could only do this by immersing ourselves in traveling there," Chorev said.
Traveling by bus and by air, the students began in Istanbul and traveled to other sites that included Ankara, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep and several other regions.
"We covered such a breadth of perspectives and saw so much of the country in such an short amount of time," Chorev said.
According to Chorev, the group met with veteran diplomat Gunduz Aktan, head of a leading think tank in Turkey, the Center for Eurasian Strategic Studies. Chorev said Aktan was able to communicate the Turkish nationalistic perspective.
The group also traveled to areas populated by Kurds, an ethnic group that has historically clashed with the Turks. Here, students met with different figures, "including many people who'd spent time in prison for their participation in the Kurdish movement," Chorev said.
Other contacts included attorney Sezgin Panrikulu, President of the Diyarbakir Bar Association and a widely recognized human rights leader. "He'd really been in the thick of things and spoke with such pragmatism and such determination," Chorev said.
The students made all travel, lodging, and meeting arrangements themselves.
According to Chorev, NIMEP's work is unique. "It's a special thing we have here; it's a credit to the Tufts community that it realizes value of venture like this," he said.
Although student-led, both groups received funding from the Institute for Global Leadership, the Undergraduate Research Fund and private donors.
According to Heather Barry, Associate Director of the Institute for Global Leadership, the students had to undergo an intensive process both in preparation for and following their trips.
All students will present research papers on their findings from the trip. Topics will include topics ranging from women in Rwanda to Turkish admission to the European Union.
The IGL sponsored additional student travel over the winter break: Other students traveled to Argentina, Turkey, Egypt, Ghana, the Philippines, Israel and Guatemala.
