12/13/13: KIGALI, RWANDA: GENOCIDE MEMORIAL & COMPASSIONATE LISTENING MEETING

Garden Art at Genocide Memorial 1

Garden Art at Genocide Memorial 2

12/13/13: Our first full day in Rwanda 

The box

We went along with Mary and her driver, Juvenal, to her dental appointment. While we waited for her, we talked strategy with him about where to take the box that we were shipping ahead to Uganda.

Yesterday, we went to DHL, the international shipping company, who was happy to take it to the tune of $152! The contents weren't worth even close to that, so we bailed. Juvenal had a close friend who is a bus driver, but he was already in Uganda. He had called him yesterday and the estimate was $50 to ship it. We decided to drive to the bus terminal and see what we could learn. To our good fortune, he ran into his friend's best friend and fellow driver, Sam, who was about to leave for Kampala. Sam said he'd take the box to Kampala and make sure it got on another bus to Mbale, the town closest to Nabagoye Hill where we were headed to work with the Abayudaya. All for a mere $15, 1/10th of the DHL cost! It was hard to believe our luck. Plus we heard tonight, which is Saturday night, that the box arrived safely and Aaron already picked it up this evening!  Box problem solved!

Visiting the Kigali Memorial Center

mass genocide graves

garden

When we arrived here, we were briefed on the layout both inside the building and the grounds around it. We have been to many Holocaust museums and Yehudah has visited mass grave sites in Ukraine and Poland, so we knew what to expect, but of course this place has it's own particular power. For one thing, there are the remains of 250,000 people in the pits beneath these concrete lids. That's 1/4 of a million or about 25% of those 100 days of terror in 1994. There were 3 terraces that each had 3 concrete lids 50 feet long. Placed side by side, they would cover a football field. Staggering! 

walkway along mass graves

flowers left by relatives on graves

view of memorial site

memorial garden art 3

On our way back up to the museum we stopped into the little gift shop. I found a little phrase book for both Kinyarwandan and Kiswahili. Yo started talking with the clerk and he asked me where we were from and why we were in Rwanda. The conversation soon turned to religion and he described himself as being more connected to the natural world than the formal religion he was born into. Later, he was talking with Joanie about God and I read him a statement from a book jacket off the shelves. It was written by the UN General who had been sent there to be a peacekeeper. He said that he knew there was a God because he has seen and touched the Devil. Yo commented that this was remarkable in that many people lose faith in God, even doubting the existence of God, after experiencing the horrors of events like these. 

Joanie talking with student

We went at our own pace through the various rooms describing the events leading up to the genocide and the genocide itself. Massacres started occurring in 1959 and could be sourced to the Belgian colonists who encouraged feuding between the Hutus and Tutsis who had lived in peace for centuries. They chose to ally with the minority Tutsis who tended to be more prosperous and whose facial features were more acceptable to their aesthetics. They made them the leaders of the country. Yo immediately thought about how the Polish landowners had made the minority Jews into tax collectors and thereby doomed them to the hatred of the peasants in Eastern Europe. 

Yo watched all of the short videos in this very comprehensive exhibit. In several, there were interviews with survivors talking about witnessing the horrific and brutal murders of their parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, and relatives. One woman testified that the perpetrators, only some of whom were trained killer soldiers, were evil. "Not all of them are evil. I'd say 5% were good, 5% neutral and 90% were evil." Obviously, this was the starting point for those working on reconciliation following the genocide. I'm sure many of us have listened to Holocaust survivors who were able to forgive and heal and others whose hatred never let them loose. Of course, we cannot judge them, but, for us, only listen to their stories compassionately. The last room on the first floor was focused on the reconciliation work that had begun the healing process. 

Part of the second floor was dedicated to the children who perished. There were only a few of them represented with pictures and a plaque that described their favorite food, toy and how they were murdered: smashed against a wall, killed with a machete, or, only one killed by a bullet. The rest of the floor documented other 20th Century genocides, including the ones in Armenia, Bosnia, Cambodia, elsewhere in Africa, and Germany and Eastern Europe. 

In a separate building, the Archives, a half dozen or more people were bent over computers. On the walls hung some abstract paintings by a particular artist. The one pictured here shows a skull being sliced in half by a machete.

Our meeting with our "team" of organizers

Outside the building, we hitched a ride down the hill with a woman heading out with a private driver, who directed us to the bus to downtown.  I made friends with the young woman next to me who spoke English.  She told me that she has a sponsor in California who pays for her schooling, room and board and who sent her a necklace that she showed me.  She shared that she is an orphan and that she misses not having a mother.  She only shared at my prompting.  I suggested that she might practice her English by asking me questions.  

Violet, the girl's name, wound up walking us to where we caught the bus for The Peace House location up from the Kucichiro Market.  She walked into the bus after me to say good-by.  I believe she went out of her way to help us. This was the first of many experiences of young people going out of their way to help us.  Once on the bus we spoke with a man and established that he was going near where we were to get off.  Yehudah dialed up Baptiste, the organizer, who told the man where to direct us, which he did, and we managed to find our way to Sopa, a factory, then turn right up a dirt road, where we met our next helper ,who worked as a laborer at the Peace House.  Getting places is just as much part of the journey as arriving!

The meeting went well with Bonheur and Baptiste.  Theo, the head of HROC - Healing and Rebuilding our Communities - was exhausted from a weeklong training he had just finished conducting, and came in to see if we had any questions, but really had no energy left.  Bonheur and Baptiste both told us: 1. Don't ask anyone if they are a Tutsi or a Hutu and 2. Don't say you miss your dog or cat.  Rwandans miss their family but not animals. Mary thought this last sentiment was connected to dogs eating dead human flesh post the genocide.

Baptiste is a motorcycle rider. - the guy for whom I brought the leather gloves - so he offered to take one of us home and to find a second moto for the other.  I jumped on his moto, allowing Yehudah to get on the other.  It was a fun ride back to Mary's. This was our style of transport throughout Rwanda.

Dinner with our hostess

For dinner we went out to an Asian fusion place down the road a bit.  Mary, who is the Secretary to the Ambassador from the US in Rwanda, lives in an upscale, gated building, with a guard from 6 pm to 6am in a little guard house by the front gate.  She has a maid on a daily basis. She shared her stories with us, her adventures.  She is currently writing her memoirs, which will be most interesting.

Joanie, Yehudah and Mary Metzger dining at an Asian-Fusion Restaurant in Kigali, Rwanda

Back home we prepared ourselves for the following day - our first training!