Robyn Short's Blog

By Robyn Short

Just over a week ago, the hashtag #MeToo began trending. I first saw it on my facebook wall. I immediately felt myself withdraw.

I felt the all-too familiar shame many women associate with their memories and experiences of sexual assault and abuse. My most salient memories, the memories where my life was truly in danger, came flooding back to me. What also came flooding back to me was the way the criminal justice system protected the perpetrator, a known perpetrator in my colle...

As a student of A Course in Miracles, the Trump presidency has created a bit of cognitive dissonance for me. As a student of the Course, I deeply believe that what we focus on we create. This means that if my focus is on opposing the Trump agenda in all its various forms, I actually give energetic power to the very thing I am opposing. For instance, rather than opposing the Muslim travel ban, the border wall, and all his various policies of hate that are designed to further disenfranchise the...

Photo: Clay Enos/Warner Bros. Pictures

The age of Trump has brought fear into the hearts of women across America. Never in our wildest imaginations did millions of American women believe that our country would elect a man who had admitted and joked about sexually assaulting women to the most powerful position in our government. Never did we imagine that we would be fighting to protect health care rights that were secured in 1973 — rights many of us have never lived without. Yet that is the re...

The authors of the U.S. Constitution had the foresight to recognize that members of Congress may at times choose to conduct themselves in such a way that they are no longer suitable to serve in the House of Representatives or the Senate. And while individual States do not have the authority to expel (or “un-elect”) a congressional representative from office, both the House and the Senate have the authority to expel a member by a two-thirds vote of the membership of the respective body who are...

For the past six days, we have covered hundreds of miles of Rwandan countryside visiting genocide memorial sites and NGOs that serve vulnerable populations still struggling to recover from the events of 1994. Everywhere we went we saw women laboring in farms and carrying mass amounts of their harvest in bags and baskets on their heads as they made the long walk to market. We saw men carrying huge bundles of grains, chickens and bananas on their bicycles. Intuitively, we new they were taking...

Mother and child in rural Rwanda

Before traveling to Rwanda, I read Jennie Burnet’s brilliantly researched book, Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda which provides detailed accounts of personal narratives of the women who survived the Rwanda genocide along with insights into the challenges and difficulties many of them have faced in post-genocide Rwanda.

Their stories are shockingly horrific. When asked by a genocide survivor how the personal stories made me feel, I res...

There is nothing that challenges one’s ability to understand what it means to be human more than visiting a country that has a history of genocide and to experience the resiliency and strength of the human spirit in the nation’s collective effort to recover, heal and transform decades of conflict into sustainable peace. And that is the story of Rwanda.

Several days ago, we visited Les Enfant de Dieu, an orphanage and school for children who were forced into a life in the streets due to abando...

When Arlene Brown retired at the age of 65, she thought she would enjoy a life of leisure and travel. But after two years of traveling the world, she came to realize that her real joy came from living a life of purpose and contribution. This desire to live purposefully is what led her to join a team of Methodist missionaries in 1996 to provide aid to refugees who had escaped the Rwanda genocide by fleeing into Congo. It was not until much later that she realized the refugees were genocide per...

Nyarubuye Cathedral, Rwanda

April 15, 1994, nine days after the start of the Rwanda Genocide, more than 7000 Hutu militia marched down a narrow lane toward the Nyarubuye convent and cathedral — a sacred place known to be a place of refuge for the vulnerable and those in need, which on this day was between 5,000 and 10,000 Tutsi Rwandans.

The mayor, Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, commanded the police to shoot all Tutsi and quickly the local Hutu followed suit — hacking, slashing and bludgeoning their...

Children of Les Enfants de Dieu Drum Performance

Like many African countries, Rwanda is a country that struggles to properly care for its children leaving many children to suffer with a difficult life alone in the streets. Street children, as they are commonly referred to, have either have no families at all or have fled or been forced into the streets due to poverty, abuse, neglect or abandonment, and their numbers are on the rise. While the exact causes of the increase in children living in...