Of course, I'd read about the genocide in those dark months of 1994, when neighbor turned against neighbor and the machine gun and the machete reigned in the rolling green hills of Rwanda. And I knew about the shameful record of the UN and the major powers – including Bill Clinton – who stood by and let the tide of blood engulf cities and villages until one million people were slaughtered, three million sent into exile, and three hundred thousand children became orphans. But I'd been to the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, and I'd lived for two years in Dachau and visited the melancholy sites. And I'd read about Pol Pot and Stalin and all their murderous kin around the globe and throughout time. So when People-to-People invited me to join a one-week mission in understanding to Rwanda, I decided I could handle the sadness visiting the scene would surely cause.
President Dwight Eisenhower founded People-to-People in 1956, to promote understanding and friendships between ordinary citizens as a way to lessen the hold violence and war have on the planet. I'd traveled with these citizen ambassadors before to China and Tibet, and I'd found their intelligent mix of visits to schools, hospitals, universities, orphanages, farms, artists' cooperatives, combined with conversations with diplomats and professionals working in the country, both American and native, appealed to my brain as well as my heart.( I've never been happy sitting in a tour bus and seeing a country a day.) Come and see for yourself the rebuilding of a nation, People-to-People's invitation said.
Rwanda surprised me on both counts. The hotels in capital city Kigali and on the shores of Lake Kivu are modern, easily four-star, with eager if not always prepared staff. In sheer beauty of the hilly countryside it resembles Switzerland but with eucalyptus and bamboo in place of pine and fir. The intense work that's going into reconciliation and healing, the frenzied rebuilding of infrastructure, the overall optimism and warm friendliness of the people is impressive. And the dark shadows cast by the genocide that still linger were far more wrenching of my emotions than I could've anticipated.
Faced with the physical and emotional devastation left by the genocide, not to mention over 120,000 suspected of being perpetrators crowded in prison, the government realized it was time for unusual methods of tackling the problems and making sure the horror never happened again. The first problem was to take care of a population's physical needs for food and shelter. The countryside, poor to begin with, had been devastated, homes and farmlands laid waste, even much of the wildlife fled from the chaos. (Later, in Kenya, a wildlife guide told us that chimpanzees had streamed across the borders to find sanctuary in Rwanda's neighboring countries.) Only the scavenger birds had it good, feasting on corpses that littered streets and fields; when I commented on the size of some ravens we saw in one village, our guide commented wryly the birds weren't as big as they had been a few years ago. The keys to a better future were education and the elimination of poverty, major players in the climate of hatred that led to the genocide.
Primary goals were to build housing for everybody including returning exiles, give everyone a small (by our standards) plot of land on which to grow food, maybe a couple of goats that were kept tethered in dirt yards and by the roadsides, encourage the growth of tea bushes on neatly terraced hillsides, and the founding of craft coops to market a few baskets or carvings or handwoven garments to help supplement the diet of homegrown vegetables and occasional meat when the goats were too old to give milk. Rwanda is a very small country; as a visitor from a Western state, driving through the countryside on the way to visit an orphanage, I was struck by how little empty space there was. Outside of Kigali, the land is parceled out into tiny green squares of potatoes, maize, beans and spinach, interspersed with small banana plantations, for family consumption; the ubiquitous hills are terraced to grow tea, Rwanda's major export after coffee. These were not huge holdings as I might've seen out west, but communal efforts to raise a few cash crops to send to market. The houses were tiny, one-room affairs of wood and the adobe-like red clay, few having more than dirt floors. Smoke from cooking fires exited through the roof rather than through a chimney, serving to kill the insect life that swarmed in the thatch. Plumbing was often a hole in the ground, surrounded by stones to keep one's feet out of the mud, running water a luxury that will have to wait a while in most places. Barefoot children tend the goats or sit by the roadside and wave enthusiastically to the new sensation: foreign visitors! Women hawk honey poured into recycled bottles of South African liqueur they obviously never had the money to taste, and eggs bound up in beautiful palm leaf baskets. These are surely among the poorest in the world, yet they are hospitable, anxious to share a skewer of barbecued goat meat, a roasted potato, a mug of banana beer with visitors, proud to display their dances and their crafts. They don't beg from tourists, though they are grateful when we leave behind items of clothing to make room in our suitcases for souvenirs.
The schoolrooms seem dark and bare to western ideas of educational environments, lacking maps and books, and the pupils were grateful for our gifts of crayons, colored pencils and soccer balls. It's not uncommon to find a ratio of forty children to one teacher. But I did see old Apple computers from the early eighties still chugging along, and the children are all learning English – mandated by the government for everybody as a second language in place of French. “Give me my pencil!” the children chanted, hands outstretched, as soon as they escaped the watchful eyes of their teachers. (I suppose it's their version of “la plume de ma tante” that English-speaking children learn when first tackling French.) Since they hadn't mastered much more, and I knew no Rwandese beyond “hello” and “thank you,” I mustered up some French to reply which invariably sent them into fits of giggles. A doctor at a small medical clinic far from the capital city told of the lack of equipment, the shortage of drugs, the prevalence of AIDS in the female population (deliberately induced through rape by the perpetrators of genocide), the difficulty of instilling modern practices of hygiene into his patients. The dying lack palliative drugs to ease their pain, but he was proud to have made childbirth safer for mothers and reduced infant mortality rates. At the university, the professors said, “Send us people to train our people!” The generation of intellectuals that are so badly needed to help the country rebuild and advance in the modern world was wiped out in the genocide.
But you can't escape the hopeful mood that permeates everyone and everything. This is a country that is committed to healing its wounds and moving forward because it really doesn't have any other options.
The wounds, on the other hand, are grievous.
Several days into the mission, after giving us enough time to see all the hopeful signs – and perhaps inoculating us against despair -- the organizers took us for a history lesson at the genocide museum. I don't know which was more moving, the news videos of terror, the recorded personal accounts, the skulls in a display case, each with a machete gash testifying as to cause of death, the “before” snapshots of smiling individuals and families celebrating weddings and graduations, victims all, or the rows of children's clothes waiting for wearers who can never return. Mary Eisenhower was with us, granddaughter of the president, and she laid a wreath at the huge tomb of thousands, often still unidentified victims. Few of us had dry eyes.
That wasn't the worst, at least for me. In the countryside there was a Catholic church (most of the population is Catholic) where 10,000 people took refuge during the slaughter. Their priest walked away, abandoning them. When the killers broke in, they began to machine gun and hack until nobody was left alive. A statue of the virgin was damaged by deliberate gunfire, the walls and roof peppered with holes from bullets; the altar cloth, once white, is still there bearing the dark brown stains of blood. The guide, a zombie-eyed woman survivor who has made it her life's work to tend the church and remember the unnamed dead still contained in its crypt, pointed to a row of dark stains along one wall, about a foot from the floor. “The killers returned the next day to see if anybody had survived, but they found only infants trying to suckle from their dead mothers' breasts. They picked them up by the feet and dashed their heads against that wall.”
And I lost it. I'm not a particularly religious woman, but I've never doubted the existence of God. Somehow I've always managed to rationalize this belief with the knowledge of great evil in the world. Now however, I found myself furiously angry with God, angrier than I've ever been. Not just because such atrocities happened, but that there's no guarantee they won't happen again – or that I myself don't get caught up in the streaming propaganda and fear and reach for my machete. How could a God of love, I raged, give us free will knowing how imperfect we are? Who, calling themselves a loving parent, gives her child an AK47 and says, “It's your choice whether you use it or not”? I don't know what the answer is, or even if there *is* an answer, but the Rwandans are wisely not wasting time trying to find it. Instead, they're moving on with the work of healing and reconciliation.
The way forward, they decided, did not begin by trying to forget the past. Instead, they decided to remember it in all its horror. They computed that it would take them three hundred years to process legally all the accused genocide criminals in prison – obviously not an acceptable option. The real leaders of the atrocities were assigned to spend their full sentences behind bars. The foot soldiers, those who got caught up in the action but are also guilty, were given a chance to express contrition. If they did so, they were to be released after serving one third of their sentences in prison, followed by one quarter of the sentence in special education to overcome old hatreds. But they weren't to go scot free. They were sent back to their communities to face the “gacaca,” traditional tribal ways of administering justice. Here, they were confronted by survivors bearing witness to the crimes committed and expected to show remorse and ask for forgiveness of the entire community. The community was given the opportunity to vent anger, sorrow, fear. If the perpetrators were judged – by the same community – sincere, their penalty was to spend the rest of their sentence making amends to their victims: building houses, tending fields, all for no pay. If they failed to do this, prison awaited. At the end of their sentence, if all went well, they were allowed their own plot of land on which to build a little house and accepted back into the community, survivors, returning exiles and perpetrators living side by side. In the meantime, all involved no matter their role were given intensive and ongoing counseling and education, tools to get beyond the atrocity and forge a new nation, not composed of Tutsis and Hutus, but Rwandans.
Breathtaking in its compassionate wisdom! But perhaps foolhardy? No one can say for certain yet what the final outcome will be, and certainly no one I met was making confident statements about the future. There are, after all, still rebels lurking across the border in the forests of Congo. Yet it seems to me that the Rwandans have taken the one road leading out of Hell, and if they succeed they'll be able to teach some important lessons to the rest of this suffering world.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
