Genocide.  It is not a word often heard outside of conversations about the holocaust, but a recent conference on the Gustavus Adolphus College campus attempted to change that.  Nearly 1200 students, faculty, staff and other members of the Gustavus and St. Peter community gathered in Christ Chapel on Saturday, March 8th 2008 to hear from keynote speaker Paul Rusesabagina, survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, author of the book “An Ordinary Man” and focus of the Academy Award-nominated movie Hotel Rwanda.  The sold out conference also featured workshops hosted by Gustavus alum and Rwanda survivor Jean-Paul Bigirindavyi, Dr. Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, the Genocide Intervention Network’s Ellen Kennedy and Mark Turbak from the Center for Victims of Torture.  The final event of this student led workshop was an action element with Minnesota based Kids Against Hunger.  The organization set up a mobile packaging center in Lund Center at Gustavus Adolphus College and the student body with help from the local community packaged 48,000 meals to be sent directly to Rwanda and Haiti.  KGSM, the campus radio station, spoke with Asitha Jayawardena and Jing Han Soh—the student organizers of the conference—as well as Virgil Jones, faculty advisor, about the conference.  Greg Boone compiled this half hour long radio documentary to keep the message and spirit of awareness generated by the conference alive, and to make it reach even further beyond the confines of the Gustavus campus.

Music: 9 Ghosts I, 10 Ghosts II, and 12 Ghosts II from Nine Inch Nails, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.  More information at ghosts.nin.com

In act two, we visit with the new (and first) Provost at Gustavus: Mary Morton. She talks about individual and institutional vocation and her journey to Gustavus. Enjoy.