The past two weeks

Last weekend was my first full weekend with my host family. On Saturday morning, two of my host sisters and the woman who works for the family and I went to the neighborhood outdoor market. There were people selling all kinds of different wares and it was divided into different sections based on the different products. There was the clothes section which consists mostly of used clothes from Western countries, there was the meats section (I avoided that...), the fruits and vegetables, the housewares, and so on. It was a whole morning affair to go to the market and shop for the food for the week, very different from the in and out mentality of a trip to the supermarket at home. My sisters would see people they know and catch up, greet community members, and bargain on the prices for each item. In most situations here bargaining is expected and is a friendly social practice. There is this green leafy vegetable that is boiled when it is prepared (it tastes like steamed spinach)that is very popular here. We bought some at the market, and waited for an hour while the woman ground it with an enormous mortar type thing. I couldn't help thinking that people in the US would never be patient enough to wait for this! I appreciated the fact that it felt more community-based, like the community came together to buy from each other, sell their products and for some people, to catch up on the week's events. At the same time, however, it did not seem like the care-free attitude of a farmers market at home. It was very hot out, and there was almost a sense of desperation and urgency. You could really tell that people's livelihoods depended on selling these goods, and there were young children weaving through the people with various types of fruits and vegetables on their heads, also trying to make a living. My host sister told me that orphans often start working from a very young age in order to make money to live.

On Sunday, my family took me to church with them. It was an enormous room that looked like a big gym or community center, with very little indication that it was in fact a church. The service was conducted both in Kinyerwanda and Swahili, with two people leading the service in two languages at the exact same time. I was definitely a little confused about what was going on at first! A couple of minutes into the service a man came and motioned for me to follow him. He took me to the side of the front of the church, where two chairs were sitting side by side. Another man came and sat down beside me and told me that he was the translator. He sat next to me for the entire three hour and 15 minute service, translating everything into English. The songs were beautiful, and it was clear that the service was affecting many of the congregants strongly, as some started crying or were singing with looks of pain, anguish, or hope on their faces during the different songs. Religion is a very big part of life here and has played a very interesting part both in the genocide and in reconciliation efforts, but i will write more about that when i have more time.

Last week, my group spent the first three days in a city in Southern Rwanda called Butare. We were staying on the campus of the National University of Rwanda. On the way to Butare, we stopped at the Murambi Genocide Memorial. Before the genocide, they were building a vocational school on this hilltop. When the genocide began, messages spread on the radio told Tutsi to go to the school to seek refuge. It was all a trap, however, because one day in April in 1994, Hutu militia came to kill everyone that was hiding there. About 50,000 people were killed, and only four people survived. After the massacre, the bodies were thrown into mass graves in order to hide what had happened. After the genocide, the mass graves were dug up, and some of the bodies were preserved with limestone and placed back in the classrooms in order to show people the awful things that occurred in this place.

I wasn't sure how i was going to react to the memorial- would i be emotional? Would i shut down and feel numb? I had only ever seen one dead body up close, and that had been my grandmother right before she was buried. I knew that the bodies wouldn't look like she had, because we would be seeing them 16 years after their last heartbeat. My first impression when we got to the site took me by surprise. I was struck by how beautiful the surroundings were. There were rolling green hills, houses nestled into the hillsides, and wildflowers spread throughout the grass creating patches of bright, beautiful color. However, my thoughts of the beauty of the location were quickly surmounted by the immense gravity and deep sadness of the situation that had occurred there.

Our guide told us a little bit about the school that was being built there, how it had turned into the site of a massacre, and the role that the French soldiers played when they set up camp there shortly after the massacre. We then walked to the first block of classrooms. I was towards the back of the group, so I saw everyone walking into the first classroom, and the looks on the faces of the first couple of people who walked out. As it was my turn to go in, I hesitated and had a moment of panic about what I was about to see. However, I continued to put one foot in front of the other, almost as if in a daze, and was then standing beside a row of preserved bodies. Some of the bodies were missing hands or other limbs, heads were separated from bodies, and some faces were forever stuck in looks of fear or pain. I felt torn between wanting to avert my eyes so that I was not staring at the bodies of these people who were killed in such cruel circumstances, and the urge to really look at them and implant their image in my mind so that i would never forget the affects of what happened there. One of the things that struck me about the bodies as I walked through the classrooms was that I could create no real picture and almost any picture in my head of these people, because from looking a these preserved bodies, they could have been anyone. Many of the Tutsi were identified during the genocide by their looks, however these features that had led to their death have faded into anonymous, partly decomposed body parts. While it did feel connected to all the Rwandan history i have been learning about, it also felt like a universal genocide memorial because it made me think about how these bodies could be the remains of anyone.

When i began to think of how each of these bodies had been a real person with hopes, dreams, problems and pasts, it became very overwhelming. It became even more overwhelming when i thought about how the bodies were just a small percentage of the people killed in this massacre, let alone in the entire genocide. However, I tried to control these thoughts and focus on the place i was in and the images that i was seeing in the moment. The thought that kept running through my head was, "what a waste." The lives of so many people were ended prematurely because of a lot of hate a socially constructed differences. From learning the history that led up to the genocide, I understand in a step-by-step sort of way how it happened, but on an abstract and ideological level, it is still so difficult for me to comprehend.

As I walked through the rooms of Murambi, I was somehow both numb and internally emotional, but not externally emotional. Though it sounds impossible to be both numb and emotional and the same time, it was such a mix of thoughts, emotions and feelings cycling through my head. The moment it all became real for me was when as i was coming out of the last classroom, I caught a glance of one of the four survivors from the massacre standing about 20 feet away. He was just standing there, watching us experience only a tiny portion of what he had experienced here 15 years ago. While this was a topic of study for us, this was his reality. He had sought refuge in this school and had been one of the extremely tiny percentage to come out alive. Seeing him made the whole thing so much more real because it somehow gave a face to those nearly faceless bodies, because though he was alive and they were dead, it could have just as easily been him in one of those rooms. That sounds absolutely awful to say, but it struck me really hard and it was at that moment that my emotions really took a hold of me.

As we exited the main hall of the school and walked to the hillside where the mass graves had once been, I was partially transported back to the present day. Though those harrowing images were still stuck in my mind, the sun was shining and i could hear children laughing and playing nearby. It seemed like such a strange contrast, but it showed me that life really just does have to go on. The genocide survivors who i have met here have all said this and it has been hard to comprehend, but it is true. It does no good to live solely mourning the past, and it is necessary to move into the future. The sound of children laughing was the most beautiful sound after just seeing such death and destruction, and left me with a sense of hope for both the healing of the people of Rwanda and humanity as a whole.

We were staying in singles in a hostel on campus, and none of us wanted to sleep alone that night. We moved all the furniture out of two of the rooms and moved all of the mattresses into those two rooms. After such an intense and emotionally draining day, we wanted to just be together, listen to music and try to get our minds off of the bad things in the world. After dinner, all 13 people in my group (12 girls and 1 guy) put on our pajamas, grabbed our pillows and headed to the room dubbed the "sleepover room." It was so nice to just relax, flush through some of our thoughts together, and then sing really loudly to bad (and good) american music. The door barely opened because of all the mattresses filling the room, and at one point the nun who works there knocked on the door. We immediately jumped onto Lewie (the one guy) so she wouldn't see him, but we realized that was pointless since the door only opened a couple of inches anyway. Luckily, she had come to ask what time we wanted breakfast and not to tell us to stop singing or ask about out crazy rearrangement of furniture. It must have looked truly bizarre though. Needless to say, we slept in the two mattress filled rooms (well, besides Lewie), happy for the company of friends.

We stayed in Butare for two more days, but i will have to write about the rest next time because it is beginning to get dark and i have to get home! But get excited to hear about this past weekend, I'll give you a sneak preview: it involves knee-deep mud, a gorilla and a volcano!