Notes from the field, by student Jeannine Plamondon: "Trying to know the unknowable"

McGill Reporter - Notes from the field

Special feature: Two tales from the heart of darkness

As the following Notes From the Field articles demonstrate, not all classrooms are created equal. Some of the most valuable lessons cannot be contained in four walls, cannot be brought to life by words on a page and cannot be hammered home by a mid-term exam. Sometimes you have to live the lesson, breathe the lesson, touch the lesson...

Over the course of their respective seven-week internships, Jeannine Plamondon (who worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) and Sarah Woolf (who collaborated with the Rwandan Widow’s Association in a sustainable bee-keeping enterprise) had a crash course in harsh reality. Theirs was most definitely not a PowerPoint introduction to genocide. They met, talked to, worked with and, most importantly, learned from survivors of unspeakable atrocities.