After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, everyone in the country was traumatized and there was a great need for reconciliation. In 2003 people in Rwanda developed the program, Healing and Rebuilding Our Community (HROC), to address these issues. The program has brought thousands of victims, perpetrators, and others together in three day workshops and follow-up days to promote healing. HROC has since spread to many African countries through two HROC international facilitator trainings per year.
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda left all people in Rwanda traumatized by the events. There was great enmity between the victims and perpetrators. This led to a great need for individual and societal trauma healing to promote healing and reconciliation rather than revenge and continued societal conflict. Twenty-five years have now passed and the trauma has often been pasted down by parents and relatives to the younger generation who have little understanding of the 1994 events.
The Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities (HROC) was developed in 2003 for individuals and the society to heal from the wound of the genocide. The basic workshop is three days long with a follow-up workshop. The HROC Center was started to hold workshops and train facilitators. The program was so successful that in 2011, HROC international trainings of facilitators began. Through this HROC was introduced into Burundi, DRC, CAR, Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan, northern Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and the US.
By this time thousands of HROC basic workshops have been conducted for tens of thousands of participants. Feedback over the years has been uniformly positive. Individual trauma healing and reconciliation from deadly conflicts has been shown to be possible and necessary. The HROC Center continues to work with local communities in Rwanda. The program has been successful with families in conflict, teachers to work with their students, handicapped people, and HIV+ and vulnerable women.
This project has provided additional documentation in a XLSX file (projdoc.xlsx).
