Sadness, Fear and Hope for the Future

Just posted on FB by a Rwandan friend and felt fitting!

Not all of Rwanda’s tourist qualities are happy animal safaris, waterfalls and hiking volcanoes. This country is still healing, and the many memorials that dot the country are a testament to this very notion. I won’t go into the details of the genocide itself here, if you want to get a relatively comprehensive view, I recommend the book called We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow You Will be Killed with Your Family. As for our Sunday, Sophia and I planned to go on a relatively depressing adventure out to Murambi Memorial. This memorial is located within what would have been a technical school outside of Butare (Huye) by about 30 km. The school was a place that during the genocide many people had gone after pastors and others told them they would be safer there. The local government had promised protection to those a Murambi, but as most places of protection for Tutsis and Hutus that were Tutsi sympathizers; this was to be a broken promise. The trust of these internally displaced persons in their local leaders was strong, and their fear of the other alternatives was great. In that way, it seemed like a viable option- safety in numbers right?

Sophia and I weren’t sure quite what to expect at the memorial, if it would be open when we arrived or even how to get there. (A lot of things to not know for a one day trip, but since we knew how to get to Butare, we decided that was a good first step. So, a 2 hour bus ride later, we got off at a Kobil station in Butare and began to ask around. Sophia needed a bathroom, so we figured we would find that our first. In doing so, we also told the two helping us that we were trying to get to Murambi and weren’t sure about our next step. The girl we had come to talk to said that a moto would not be the way to go the 30 kms we had left to go, so she helped us to find the proper bus, and we continued on with a driver who knew where to boot us out (the end of this buses route as it turned out- Nyamagabe). The girl had not been to the memorial, but knew exactly where it was. She’d lost everyone, but her sister. When someone opens up like this, I always want to unleash a flood of questions, but I don’t. It is too hard for people to recount what happened; often there are no words for it anyways, so to ask would just to be creating a reliving of the most traumatic part of their lives. It’s been 18 years, but shattered so many lives and so much trust that rebuilding both of those things will take generations. The development that has occurred helps, but it is not everything.

When we got off the bus in Nyamagabe, Sophia and I bought tickets home before leaving the station to avoid being stuck out of Kigali for the night. Then, Sophia and I looked for motos to take us to the site. This turned out to be relatively challenging, but one of the bus park attendants helped us along. For some, they just had to get gas before they could take us, but one driver was visibly upset- even angry. For the first time I thought- I am a tourist, one who’s never experienced pain- how thoughtless could I be to go to the very town that people died in Murambi and expect that a moto driver (about the age to be a child during the genocide) would be willing to drive me to the memorial to see the bodies of their relatives? Or those that their relatives had killed? And how do the locals even feel about the memorial? Clearly those working there want to share the story, are willing to be there day in and day out to make sure people get what happened and hopefully help to avoid it happening again. To reassure people that peace is the sanest thing to keep, no matter the cost. His reaction triggered guilt in me for wanting to visit Murambi, to see the bodies being preserved with lime- 2,000 of them on stark display. How did the families feel about them not being buried? Are there even relatives left for those skeletons on display to speak for them? People did bad things, but how can people move on with the constant reminders of their families past? As I have said time and time again, Rwandans are incredible people- they keep going. On what? I am not sure, but I hope that it is faith that amends can be made and people can trust again. It could just as easily be survival instinct or hope for vengeance, but I think it is not true expect perhaps for a few individuals here and there. Overall, I think people want to trust, they are religious and want to love their neighbors as the Bible tells them to, and mostly they want to feel safe from themselves and from others.

As we arrived, the memorial was technically closing, but the director was there and allowed us to enter nonetheless. He said, ‘to have come so far, there is no way he could turn us away.’ I told him that the website was lacking hours or a number to call, so perhaps they will put one up for the future. The reminders of how fragile live is are all over Africa, but it is on display here. It shows starkly of not just our ability to starve to death during a drought, contract diseases, but to hurt each other. When we talk about war, we talk about causes, effects, and values- we talk about philosophy and what is right. We rarely focus on the humanity of killing, saving, dying, or being left behind. This memorial talked about all of these pieces. It reminds you of the true goodness people are capable of, and the truly vile things that good people can be made to do in fear. There is a saying that it is better to be feared than loved as a leader, and this visit made me question the effectiveness of my own preference for being loved. Fear creates monsters within people, it eats at them and forces a person’s love to be used against them with threats. Many Hutus joined the killing to avoid losing their own families, selfish- yes, love- yes, but fear is to me the defining characteristic that forced the hands of many that would never have imagined picking-up a machete or a grenade. A heartbreaking reality.

Murambi’s evacuees were attacked and more than 27000 were killed, only 20,000 bodies were recovered and 18,000 of those are buried within a mass tomb outside the school buildings, big gashes in the earth still exist where the bodies were initially exhumed. 2000 of the bodies are on display, babies, mothers, fathers, children, people. You can’t tell their ethnicity, they are all covered in white powder that is only contrasted by the occasional pair of panties or tuft of hair remaining. The bodies are in what would have been classrooms in Murambi. Open air rooms with tarps covering the unfinished or grenade open building sides. The bodies decompose even with the lime, and the memorial will be only pictures in the future, but currently those aren’t even formally allowed for fear that they will be shown to Rwandans who do not wish to see what we saw. Room after room of bashed in skulls, broken bones and contorted positions. It’s horrific really and brings out so much sadness in one that wasn’t there that I cannot even begin to imagine the emotions that would hit a Rwandan seeing it for the first time. The director said many only make it through the first few rooms. Sophia and I saw them all. To me these things are horrific, and you want to tear yourself away, but they couldn’t leave? And what they saw was far worse, so out of respect for those lost, how could one leave? To me it is unfathomable not to take in each and every body for who they could have been. Clenching rosaries or cradling a baby, to avoid any of the rooms is to avoid reality, to deny the very extent of the deaths.

I don’t want this experience to come across as a tourist must do. It is only for those who have an understanding of what happened. The story of the genocide portrayed at the memorials often ignores the realities of people who stood up for themselves and others, so to go without foreknowledge is to learn about rather than be able to experience all the detail. It’s overwhelming, but if you know more, then you can truly give live to the statistics, you can emotionally take in what 2,000 people looks like and imagine what that times 14 would be. Numbers turned into realities, into fathomable non-computer generated volumes. It leaves one speechless at first with nothing but the question, “how the hell did this hellish thing happen?” Beyond that, there are many people who have sought to answer it, and in the end I think there is no perfect answer, only an aligning of events, passions, fears and betrayals. It is important that the Rwandans themselves ended the killing, and all I can say now is that I pray they as a people never experience the horrors of war again. I hope Congo’s fighting stays in their own borders and that Rwanda continues to develop and generations begin to trust each other again.

When we arrived back to town, we needed some tea or something to get rid of our goose bumps and passing by a pair of older men playing Igisoro, we couldn’t help but chuckle- oh how the show must go on.