Marissa Roy says she didn’t quite know what to expect when she went to Rwanda on the 2013 Problems Without Passports trip – and she wants this year’s class to have the same experience.

Now a first-year student at Yale Law School, Roy graduated from USC in 2014 with a bachelor’s in philosophy, politics and law and a master’s in public diplomacy. She became interested in taking the USC Dornsife Problems without Passports course Rebuilding Rwanda: Memory, Testimony, and Living Together after Genocide after taking a course on international law, and wanted to learn more about how law is implemented after genocide.

She said a two-week intensive session at USC before the class went to Rwanda for three weeks was very beneficial. In these two weeks, the class read about the history of Rwanda and the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide, watched testimonies of Rwandan Genocide survivors in the Visual History Archive and learned about trauma and psychology. By the time they arrived in Rwanda, they had gained a “nuanced view” of the genocide and had a historical perspective that helped them understand the country and its past.

For her research project on the ground in Rwanda, Roy focused on the Gacaca Courts – the local, community trials of genocide perpetrators that were held in villages across the country after the genocide – and how they changed what NGOs thought about how justice should be achieved in Rwanda.

Roy said Rwanda was different than she expected. The country is developing so quickly and is very fast-paced, she said, yet the genocide still has a significant effect on people’s lives.

“There’s a liveliness about it and so much life, and I expected the opposite,” Roy said. “But the genocide is always under the surface. It hasn’t left. It’s still in people’s hearts.”

One of the most important lessons she learned from Rwanda was how important it is to take culture and people’s experiences into account when administering the law. Though Americans are often taught that the law is objective, Roy said Rwanda showed her that law is in fact always subjective, based on people’s gender, socioeconomic status and other factors.

Roy didn’t want to give this year’s class too many details about what to expect in Rwanda since it’s important that they have the experience of discovering the country for themselves. But she encouraged them to talk to as many people as they could, from government officials to people they meet on the streets or in the market. “You learn so much from that human perspective,” she said.