Immediately after my nap today, I got word that Nathan and Andrew were being escorted to the Genocide memorial. I have known that this is something I need to see, but have been dreading it, and had hoped that I could go with one of the nuns. I felt very much un-braced for the experience, having just woken up, not preparing for it, and going with Teacher Ernest instead of one of the sisters.
The Memorial is a Catholic church, and it stands as a testament to some of the most brutal events that have ever and could ever occur in human history. In 1994, Tutsis throughout the area flocked there for asylum when their neighbors took up machetes and violence began to escalate. 10,000 Tutsis crowded there, but counfd no asylum. The interahamwe (militia) came for them, first with machetes and hand weapons, then later with support from the army, guns and grenades. There was no real door on the church, only a barred metal gate. Our guide showed us how the original gate had been blown with a grenade, but I could imagine that long before the militia could reach the gate, thousands would have been slain outside. For more on the Rwandan Genocide, this article isn't bad. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1288230.stm
We walked through one of the mass graves. First we walked down a narrow ladder into the crypt. There were shelves on either side, stacked to twice my height. The shelves contained coffins, which we learned had about twenty people in each. Beside the coffins were human bones—shelves and shelves of skulls and longbones.
Afterward, Nathan and Andrew asked the guide some questions, and I listened—or didn’t listen—silently, feeling strongly that only silence could pay any tribute to what I had just seen. I felt that I could only bear witness; there was nothing more to be said in that moment. I felt the rawness of Rwanda and the vulnerability of having such an event in their past. How exposed they were, letting us strangers see this atrocity. Of course they want to keep it from happening again, of course they wanted to honor their dead. But how could they be sure we’d understand? How could they know that we wouldn’t judge their country as violent and inhuman? Because after all, how could we really understand what happened, or why, or truly believe that there but for the grace of God go we?
Later, at home, Andrew and I debriefed with Providence about the experience of seeing the memorial. My sweet Providence told her own story. She explained that during the genocide, when she was only 8 years old, her family fled to a church near their home, where their neighbors, the interahamwe, pursued them. Her father, uncle and cousin were pulled out from the church. They begged for their lives but were killed anyway, with machetes. This may have happened in front of her eyes: I’m not sure. She says that only by a miracle were the rest of them saved, but she wouldn’t go into detail.
This history, I think, is integral to the identity of this place, because when a people have hit rock bottom in atrocity and in grief, there is nowhere to go but up. It is this very tragedy which I think inspires the people of Rwanda to the remarkable and widely noted development of the past decade and a half. I think, too, that bearing such loss allows people to hold humanity close to them. I see this in Sister Juvenal, in Providence, and in others.
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