We landed at Kigali International Airport just after dawn. The air was cool — cooler than I remembered from last April — and smelled of red clay and rain that hadn't fallen yet but was on its way. Someone on the team joked that the sky looked the same as Texas. I didn't agree. The sky here feels closer.
The drive from the airport to the school takes about forty-five minutes, depending on traffic. We passed motorcycle taxis weaving between minibuses, women walking with baskets balanced on their heads, children in school uniforms the color of freshly washed sky. I've made this drive eight times now. It never gets routine.
"Trauma-informed care isn't a program you implement. It's a posture you inhabit. And nowhere has that truth landed harder for me than in this van, on this road, watching Kigali wake up." — Dr. Laurie Bailey, field notes
The Gate
When our van turned off the main road and onto the dirt path toward the school, we could already hear them. Twenty, maybe thirty children pressed up against the metal gate, fingers curled through the bars, screaming in Kinyarwanda and English and a mix of both that doesn't need translation. Our interpreter, Claude, laughed. "They've been waiting since yesterday," he said.
That's the thing about this work that I can't fully explain to people back home. These children have lived through things I will never fully understand. And yet they run. They reach. They want connection with the same desperate urgency that every child wants it — because that urgency is biological. It's neurological. It doesn't go away just because it's been hurt.
The urgency to connect doesn't disappear when it's been hurt. It just goes underground — and waits for someone to be safe enough to run toward.
Setting Up for the First Session
We spent the afternoon getting oriented — meeting with the school's director, reviewing the schedule, and unpacking the supplies we'd carried over. Watching my team pull stethoscopes and counting blocks and composition notebooks out of their checked bags in the school's main hall is one of my favorite moments of every trip. You can feel the weight of it. Literally and figuratively.
Tomorrow we start with the first educator cohort: Pre-K and Lower Primary. Three hours, English and Kinyarwanda, and the Three Pillars framework that I've spent the last three years refining for exactly this context. Safety first. Always safety first.
More dispatches coming as we go. If you want to follow along or support the trip, head to the supplies page — we're still carrying items with us for the school. Trip runs May 24th through early June.