First visit to my workplace

I am crammed in the middle of the back row of one of the small mini-van buses that provide much of the transport in the city of Kigali, verging on claustrophobia until the van lurches forward and air streams through the open window. With several companions, I am on my way to visit the genocide memorial centre, where I will be working to support the development of educational programming at the centre.

Unfolding our legs and ducking our heads we exit the mini-van. We hop onto ‘moto’s’, donning green helmets that don’t fit, pulling the cracked visors down over our faces, then travelling a well paved road up a soft green hillside, red earth showing through. On the sidewalk a stream of people carry yellow jerry cans. The cans swing in hands on the way down to the creek in the valley, weigh down arms or backs or heads on the trek up.

Arriving at the guarded gate of the Kigali Memorial Centre at the same time as a group of Rwandans, I step aside for the young women who carry bouquets of flowers. This is a memorial site and the bones of over two and a half thousand people have been brought here and interred in mass graves.

The uniformed guard sits with a rifle across his legs. The security check is serious scanning and checking. Taking photographs is forbidden. Cell phones are turned off. Every morning I will be going through this security check and walking to the entrance of the centre through a pleasant plaza with benches on one side and mass graves, covered with large flat concrete slabs, on the other. There are two rows each about twenty by one hundred feet, then two more rows stepped down a hillside that looks across to a slum settlement rising on the other side. There is an open grave for bones that are still being found, covered with a sheet of paned glass. Beneath the glass, white and purple cloths with large crosses covering the bones beneath. Below this, another open grave. Bones have been brought today, and a couple of hundred people are surrounding the grave, soft hymns rising.

The Rwandan genocide began in early April, 1994, and in a hundred days over 800,000 died, Tutsi and moderate Hutu. Those hundred days are commemorated every year, a flame burns in the plaza, and survivors come to remember their dead. If I am to stay present in myself and in this place, I cannot walk past these graves every day and pretend that they don’t exist. I will need to find a steady open place within myself. I will have to talk with these bones, offer loving kindness to the dead and to the living.

Inside the centre one enters a curving space with displays on one side and a solid wall on the other. No escape. I will be in daily proximity to Rwanda’s story, one of colonialism that deliberately divided Hutu and Tutsi and the cultivation of the Tutsi as proxy rulers. Shifts of power and colonial alignments lost the Tutsi power, leading to massacres, decades of discrimination and the eventual eruption of a ‘final solution.’ I will sit above stories of cruel death and the shaky voices of the survivors.

I will have to accept that telling people where I work will generate diverse responses although many, perhaps most, of these will not be spoken aloud. Doors will close and doors will open. When a taxi driver asks me what I am doing in Rwanda and hears my answer, he falls quiet before telling me that he was in Uganda during that time, at boarding school. His parents were murdered, he says, and ten members of his family. There was no more money for school and he eventually found his way to an aunt living in Kenya, who supported him to take a driving course. He feels lucky to have a livelihood, although his dreams of finishing secondary school and studying at a university died with his parents.

The grounds of the Kigali Memorial Centre also hold tranquility, an oasis of quiet and green at the edge of the city. I don’t exactly understand why this is so but this is a good place to sit in silence and consider the questions that arises repeatedly, how did this happen? And why have I come to Rwanda?