By Ronica Stromberg
Samuel Nshutiyayesu may need a bigger suitcase.
He came to University of Nebraska-Lincoln in September to build his knowledge and skills in conservation agriculture and learn the latest in remote-sensing and GIS and GPS technologies. He plans to return to his home country of Rwanda with that knowledge and, possibly, equipment, but he has discovered something else he’d like to take home . . . Nebraska nice.
“I want to take this culture back home,” the 45-year-old doctoral student said after his first month in Nebraska.
Nebraskans have shown themselves to be “loving and welcoming people,” offering in so many ways to help him, he said. Even the Nebraska way of holding a door open for the person following after you caused him to marvel about the goodness of residents in the Big Red state.
“Maybe you can see it as reasonable, but when someone goes in front of you and opens the door and keeps the door for you to come. Maybe for here, it's just normal, but for a newcomer like me these small gestures carry significant weight,” he said.
Nshutiyayesu works as a conservation ecology lecturer at the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture. He plans to alternate work at RICA with studies at Nebraska over the next few years, traveling back and forth, and then return home to Rwanda as a professor at RICA.
Read the rest of the article at https://snr.unl.edu/aboutus/what/newstory.aspx?fid=1191