UPDATE ON KIGALI
Team Rwanda has just arrived in Kigali (the capital city), after a month of teaching in Butare. I regret that we’ve been short on blogging; it has been such a busy and incredible month for us, and finding a reliable internet connection is difficult.
We’re staying for a few days at a house owned by a professor at UWO. I was overjoyed to find that the house has hot water and internet! And no ants crawling over the bathtub, or dead cockroaches littered around my bed. The beds here even have pillows and blankets, so we don’t have to sleep cocooned in two jackets and a mosquito net, like we’ve been doing over the past month. All these things have made me realize just how many small things we usually take for granted, and I will certainly be more aware from now on of the small privileges that we have, as well as the big.
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THE STORY OF RWANDA
There is so much to talk about in terms of the lessons that we have learned on our journey here. Rwanda is a country marked by historical struggles and modern achievements. 18 years ago, the genocide destroyed all physical and social infrastructure, yet today, it is one of the fastest developing nations in Africa, and spoken of in the same breath as African giants like Kenya and Tanzania.
The leaps and bounds that the government has been able to make in Rwanda over the past 18 years often makes me forget the impact that the war had on Rwandan people; on the surface, it seems a distant memory, an ugly stain in the history books that people have moved on from. But speaking to people, both in social settings and through the research project, has made me realize just how irrevocably steeped in its history Rwanda really is. Many people talk about the genocide as the major turning point in their lives; they use it as a demarcation: there is life before the genocide, and there is life after the genocide. I wish I could share with you some of the stories that people have told me, because they are both intensely shocking and inspiring. Sometimes I’m awe-struck by how much people have lost, and how they’re able to carry on with their lives and look optimistically to the future despite everything that has happened to them.
To me, Rwanda seems a country of many layers. There is the sprawling metropolis of Kigali, and everything that it represents: development, modernization, the future. And beneath that shining surface, there is the mosaic of Rwanda’s past, the stories of people who have survived, and those who did not. For anyone who comes here, I think it’s necessary to talk to as many people as possible in order to understand the true story of Rwanda. It’s easy to be fooled by the glimmer and pizzazz of an aspiring global city like Kigali, and fail to truly appreciate the struggles and resilience of the Rwandan people.
GIKONGORA MEMORIAL SITE
We recently visited Gikongora, the second largest genocide memorial site in Rwanda. 18,000 bodies laid in a mass grave, marked only by bouquets of wilting flowers. 2,000 more laid in the classrooms where they’d sought shelter, where they’d been herded like cattle, where they’d died fighting for their lives. The smell of limestone was overpowering, and I think that I will always associate the smell of it with death. The corpses were twisted and mutilated. We saw a mother clutching her baby to her breast as they died, children huddled together, a child with his feet cut off so that he could not escape.
Many here died fighting, hurling rocks at their attackers, like doomed Davids to an insurmountable Goliath. They’d been subdued with machine guns and machetes.
We walked to an outcropping marked as the location of “Operation Torquise”. After the mass slaughter, French troops were deployed here as a symbol of the world’s defiance of the genocide. A lonely plaque stood on the outcropping: “This is where french soldiers played volleyball.” A few feet away, in a moat-like ditch surrounding the outcrop, several more plaques stood, proclaiming: “This was a mass grave.” Grass had grown over top, as if to redeem the land, but the images conjured here–of a country plunged in chaos, of a people’s suffering, of international denial and the flippancy of foreigners–still chill me to the bone.
Before I leave Kigali, I hope to visit Gisozei, the largest genocide memorial in Rwanda. Each memorial has its own history, its own unique memories and stories to tell. It is an experience I look forward to with a somber heart, but one that is as necessary as the existence of the memorials themselves. Thousands of bodies, coated in limestone, may never be put to rest. But for their suffering, Rwanda hopes that the world has learned a lesson: that the mantra of “never again” is one meant for all peoples, not only some. The human capacity for cruelty is shocking; for denial, even more so. We can only hope that our capacity for forgetfulness is less enduring.