Above: Valley News reporter Sonia Scherr takes notes before the start of a life skills workshop for children affected by HIV/AIDS in Kigali, Rwanda. Below: Scherr (not wearing a school uniform) is pictured in May 1988 in the Moscow public school she attended for several weeks. Standing beside her is Polina, the classmate she became closest to during her time there. (Photographs by Debra Archambault, above, and Scherr family)
Reporter's Trip to Soviet Union
Two Decades Ago Still Echoes
By Sonia Scherr
Valley News Staff Writer
When I was given the opportunity this winter to chronicle the experiences of three Vermont high school students in Rwanda, I had no inkling that their journey would inspire me to revisit my first and longest trip overseas nearly 20 years ago.
In the spring of 1988, before the breakup of the Soviet Union, my family traveled from our home in Norwich to Moscow, where my father was leading a Dartmouth College foreign study program. I was 9. We stayed for one month, living in dorm rooms at Moscow State University. Except for one week when we traveled around the country, I attended third grade at one of the city's public schools, where students wore shiny red scarves over their school uniforms to signify membership in Young Pioneers, a Communist youth group.
Watching Kylie Butler, Lizzy King and Rebecca Young-Ward, all high school juniors, try to make sense of what they encountered in Rwanda reminded me of my time in the Soviet Union. I was younger than they, of course, and wasn't a racial minority or a witness to extreme poverty, as they were in Rwanda. But their range of feelings as they tried to connect with peers in Rwanda's capital — discomfort, boredom, frustration, confusion, excitement, delight — was also what I experienced attending school in Moscow as a young girl.
My father and I rode the city bus together each morning, but after he dropped me off in front of the drab school building, I was on my own for the next several hours to navigate a world that was foreign in almost every sense. In my classroom, where 42 students sat at assigned desks arranged in rows, the events that unfolded sometimes seemed as mysterious as the numbers that I copied uncomprehendingly from the chalkboard into my blue book during our math class. Why was the teacher, gray-haired and strict, yelling at the blonde girl who sat next to me? Why were students required to stand when they addressed the teacher? Why did the drink that accompanied our snack of bread and cheese always consist of weak coffee or tea, never milk or juice?
The students did their best to answer my questions; their English, while not fluent, was much better than my Russian. And my impressions of them were similar to those that the American students took away from their interactions with the Rwandan teenagers. I loved how they were immediately friendly, including me in their games, showing me around, translating for me because our classroom teacher spoke no English. A girl explained in English a Russian poem that they were supposed to memorize; a boy joined my father and me on our walk from the bus stop to the school. I also noticed many similarities between my American classmates and these children, including the way we enjoyed sports and collected sports cards, though theirs were usually hockey or soccer. I became especially close to a girl named Polina, who had straw-colored hair, light blue eyes and a sweet smile that made me feel instantly at ease; we corresponded for more than a year after I went home.
My stay in the Soviet Union took me out of a rather sheltered existence in a privileged Vermont community and showed me that life elsewhere could be completely different from anything I'd experienced or imagined. Its impact stretched far beyond the four weeks I spent in the Soviet Union, shaping my outlook in ways I perhaps still haven't fully grasped.
The trip awakened my curiosity about foreign countries and cultures, inspiring me to study the Peace Corps for a research project in eighth grade. It helped attract me to journalism, which offered another means of learning about unfamiliar people and places. Ultimately, I think, it drew me to Rwanda, to write about the experience of three Vermont teenagers as they also encountered a country vastly unlike our own.
And once in Rwanda, on my first visit to Africa, it shaped my reactions to what I encountered there. Being a foreigner in a Communist country on the cusp of change made me more comfortable with my outsider status in Rwanda. The earlier trip also gave me a global context for some of what I witnessed in Rwanda; the mass graves in Kigali recalled those I had seen years before in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), where victims of the Nazi siege of Leningrad were buried. Though they resulted from genocide and "conventional" warfare, respectively, seeing the cement vaults on a Rwandan hillside after visiting the grass-covered mounds in Russia underscored powerfully how the deaths of civilians in war have continued through history in various parts of the world. It made me deeply sad to think that as I had stood before the mass graves in Russia, the genocide in Rwanda was yet to come.
But my focus in writing my articles was on the students' responses. I tried to capture something of how the trip gave each of them a new perspective on themselves and their lives. However, I realize their stories are necessarily incomplete; the physical journey is over, but the inner one will likely continue for years.
And as I reflect on the lasting influence of my trip to the Soviet Union, I wonder where this intangible journey will take them. Perhaps, as I traveled to Rwanda, it will lead them back to a developing country to learn or serve in ways that are informed by their earlier experience.
Or perhaps, at its most fundamental, it will evoke memories — a face, a conversation, the discovery of a shared interest — that will speak of the possibility of connection, offering hope in a world that seems increasingly fractured, and far from peace.