The Gift of Reconciliation

Oakman teacher Jeremy Brown is connecting his classroom to the African continent in a special way.

Words by Thomas Ingle | Image by Justin Hunter

Rwanda is known as the “land of a thousand hills.” The country is landlocked in the Great Rift Valley of Central Africa, with mountains dominating the west, numerous lakes throughout, and savannas taking control in the southeast. Rwanda once garnered worldwide attention for the mass genocide that occurred there in 1994. Today, this genocide has a connection to Walker County.

Jeremy Brown, a teacher at Oakman High School and Pastor of Providence Baptist Church, is connecting his students to the tiny Central African country through a class he teaches on genocide. Not only are they gaining knowledge of the atrocities that occurred, but they are also connecting with individuals who lived firsthand through the ordeal.

Brown grew up in Walker County, graduating from Walker High School in 1990. From there, he went into the military and served his country in field artillery as a U.S. Marine. When he got out of the Marines, however, he was lost and was having a hard time finding his path in life.

“I wasn’t involved in church at that point in time, but I got involved in church and started working in the youth ministry,” Brown said.

During this time, he met his future wife, Monica, and got married. The couple began to talk and pray about the direction of their lives.

“I felt like it was going to be me going into something like education because it was more of a call for me than a job,” Brown said. “The reason I feel like God led me into education is that I needed somebody when I was younger, and I really had only a few people.”

Those people helped him through difficult times, especially when his parents got divorced when Jeremy was five years old.

After making the decision to become a teacher, Brown went to The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to obtain his teaching degree. His time at UAB would change his life forever.

“When I started my teacher training, I went and did a classroom visit with a teacher at Simmons Middle School,” Brown said. “She was doing a unit on the Holocaust. I had heard about the Holocaust but knew nothing about it.”

Brown soon began to thirst for more knowledge about the Holocaust. His teachers suggested that once he began teaching, he should sign up for a conference at the Holocaust Museum in New York City. This eventually led him to two-week-long conferences in Washington D.C. and New York City, a month-long conference in New York City, and a month-long study tour through Poland, Israel, and Germany.

He then became a teaching fellow with the museum, training other teachers how to teach about the Holocaust. 

From this, he met a man named Carl Wilkens. Wilkens had been the only American to stay in Rwanda when the genocide took place. Soon, an opportunity presented itself for Brown to travel to Africa with Wilkens and a group of students and teachers.

“I learned about Rwanda and what took place there,” said Brown, “and man, I made a connection with the people.”

Brown took his second trip to Rwanda this past year. This time he visited schools, preached at different churches, spread the Gospel, and even chipped in to buy a cow for a family.

But what stood out about this trip was his visit to a reconciliation village. Reconciliation villages are places where perpetrators and victims of genocide live together and work together in forgiveness.

“One of the things I wanted to find out was how the people that were victims forgive the people that were perpetrators and how do the people that were perpetrators accept the forgiveness of the victims,” said Brown.

Brown gets to bring these experiences and knowledge back to the classroom at Oakman, where he teaches government, economy, history, and a class that focuses on the Holocaust and genocide studies. He also brings Rwanda to Alabama by conducting meetings via Zoom. Other Rwandans have visited the States in person.

“A couple of weeks ago, we had Serge from the Rwandan children’s place come to the school and talk to us,” Brown said. “The kids took up money and bought about seven goats.”

This spring, Brown wants to connect his Holocaust and genocide classes to a class in Rwanda. He hopes the two classrooms can collaborate through Google Classroom to finish an assignment together.

Overall, Brown says he wants to teach his students how to think. He wants them to walk out of his classroom being able to think for themselves, but at the same time, respecting somebody else’s opinion as well.

“Our kids need to know that there’s a world outside of where they live, and they need to go see it,” he says. “If they can’t, I want to bring it into the classroom for them to see.” 78