Today marks the beginning of Kwibuka20, Rwanda’s three-month commemoration of the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.

In the spring of 2000, I agreed to become the president and chief executive officer of Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the predecessor of USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education. My family and I were then living in Chicago, but the hectic pace of preparing to move to Los Angeles did not prevent my wife, Margee, and me from stealing away for a weekend to celebrate our 30th anniversary. We found an isolated beach and flew off, knowing that we would return to the inevitable chaos of moving to LA.

USC Shoah Foundation’s mission to Rwanda ends Tuesday after the delegation attended the Kwibuka20 commemoration ceremony and delved into USC Shoah Foundation’s work in education and archive-building.

In April 1994, the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis officially began, even though the persecution and killing campaign had gone on for decades. In 100 days, close to 1 million women, children and men were slaughtered and tortured to death with machetes, metal sticks and knives. The conflict gained momentum when Belgium became the colonial power in Rwanda after Germany’s defeat in World War I, and further highlighted and reinforced the distinctions between Hutus and Tutsis.

The Problems Without Passports trip to Rwanda ends today after a busy second week that included visits to some of Rwanda’s most stunning nature sites and opportunities for the students to meet politicians and international representatives.

To help combat the stresses of working with genocide, USC Shoah Foundation hosted a Trauma Education workshop for Aegis Trust and Kigali Genocide Memorial staff in Rwanda last week.

Today marks the last day of the USC Shoah Foundation’s 100 Voices to Remember Twitter project, a string of daily quotes from a different witness of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda for each day of its duration. The atrocities claimed as many as one million lives over the course of about 100 days in 1994, when government-backed militias of ethnic Hutus went on a mass killing spree, targeting the country’s next largest ethnic group, the Tutsis.