100 days of darkness

       Mishek, my cab driver, picked me up at nine in the morning.  He spoke Kinyarwanda and French, the languages spoken in Rwanda.  Fortunately he spoke bits of English and Swahili as well.

       “I’d like to go to the genocide museum.”

       He nodded, “nyamata and museum.”

       “What is nyamata?” I didn’t know that word. He held up two fingers.

       “There are two parts?”  I was a little confused.

       “Ndio, nyamata na museum, you go?” I hadn’t read that in my research, but the third time he gave me the same answer I said, 

       “Ndio tafadhali, nyamata na museum.”  Yes please, nyamata and the museum. He lives here, so he must know.  We drove 30 minutes out of Kigali.  I thought the museum was located in town so I asked him several times,
       “Memorial?” 

       “Ndio, ndio.”  Yes. Yes. 

       We pulled up to the back entrance of a building, which was draped in purple fabric. The parking lot was empty with one man sitting in a chair by the door.  My driver handed me over to him. He spoke English.

       “Welcome to the memorial genocide site of Nyamata.”

       I stared at the big metal door, which was bent and twisted, and my eyes scanned down to the tile floor, which was destroyed with a hole blown out. A grenade had done this.  I looked back at my driver questioningly and he solemnly nodded for me to follow the guide.  We stepped inside out of the sun. A pungent smell filled my nostrils. I was looking towards the ceiling as my eyes adjusted to the dark. There were holes in the roof, hundreds of holes with the sun piercing through each one.

       “Bullet holes.”  My guide had seen the question on my face.  My eyes dropped to follow the tiny beams down to the rest of the room.  A gasp came out of my mouth as I covered it with my hand, my heart stopped.  This was a church.  A church.  On each and every bench were piles and piles of clothing, old clothes, dirty and stained with blood.  This was the site of the massacre of ten thousand people. 

          In Rwanda, in the spring of 1994, Hutus killed over eight hundred thousand Tutsis in a span of one hundred days. Many Tutsis sought refuge in churches, believing the Tutsi-hating militias would not enter the site of a sacred place.  They hid in every possible space, in cupboards, under floorboards, thousands of them, trying to escape the atrocities of this war against them.  Many priests, nuns and church officials fled Rwanda when the killings began.  Others stayed, luring the unsuspecting inside, complicit in the bloodshed.
       The militia did come into the sanctuary one day during that April, their guns firing towards the ceiling.  What followed were some of the most gruesome acts upon men, women, children and babies, of torture, rape, mutilation, and death by machete.  A bullet would have been a welcomed way to die.  A few survivors made it out alive, by lying still and pretending to be dead.  Their wounds turned to scars, but the ones in their heart remained festered, barely healing, their stories too painful to recount.

        I was unprepared for this, standing in the middle, touching, feeling, and breathing in the most heinous crimes against humanity.  How could this happen? I cried tears of sorrow studying the articles of clothing, realizing they were once filled with a being just like myself.  One who wanted to be acknowledged, to experience life, realize dreams, to love and be loved. My guide stood beside me in silence. I don’t know how long he waited.

       “There is more to see…”

       He took me to a lower level.  Downstairs were personal items and ID cards, along with skulls and bones.  Outside, in the front of the church, my guide took me down another small flight of stairs to the site of the mass burial.  I thought the graves might be covered over, large drawers possibly, instead it was shelves upon shelves stacked full of tibias, fibulas and skulls. Bones everywhere, anonymous, their individuality prematurely lost forever. How does a country recover from this? How is this degree of hatred extinguished, so that healing is a possibility?  

       “There are fifty-thousand people down here, collected from the surrounding area.”

       I turned towards him and gently inquired, “Are you Tutsi or Hutu?” 

       He spoke softly, “I am Rwandan.  We are all Rwandan now.”

       Some may feel this is a controversial way to memorialize the appalling actions of that spring.  I’ll admit it was difficult to see, but Africa is real and raw by nature; the truth, in your face. The intended purpose was accomplished, searing the images in my mind, making me remember, question, prevent.  As seen now, the memorial won’t last forever.  The sun and the rain make their way through the bullet holes deteriorating the clothing.  The stark and shocking lesson will one day be gone. Hopefully by the time that happens though, we won’t need it any more.

Nyamata

The southern most point of the Nile River is in Rwanda.