The school is on a hill, the view is spacious, the breeze is slight but fresh.
Term is over and there are no students, but J. finds a teacher who is wearing a suit jacket over a Paul Kagame t-shirt. “He will tell us what happened here and I will translate,” J. says, and so we follow the teacher to the side of the school where there is a tomb.
“Let us first have a moment of silence,” says the teacher, placing himself at the foot of the tomb. He stands with legs slightly apart, hands clasped in front.
The teacher knows the story he wants to tell. Everyone in Rwanda knows the story. The half dozen villagers who have accompanied us to the tomb know it well and yet they have come to listen to it again and they listen with a deep and concentrated attention. A young boy, perhaps nine, stands unmoving throughout the whole story, a homemade soccer ball curled into one arm, head tilted forward, his eyes focused only on the speaker. We know the story too because it has been told in books and dramatized in movies.
“That day,” J. said later, “That day, everyone in Rwanda cried.”
After a shared silence, the teacher begins to speak. His voice is clear and soft, his stance is humble and open. “This is the tomb of Chantal Mujawamahoro. She died in 1997.”
“There was still fighting in the country then. The rebels came to this school with weapons and they demanded that the students divide themselves into Hutu and Tutsi. The students refused."
"‘We are Rwandans,’ they said. Seventeen students were wounded that day and eight died.”
“Chantal was one of them. She was a boarding school student and her home was far away, so she was buried here. The others were buried at home.”
He pauses and contemplates the tomb before continuing. “These students have been declared heroes by the government. There is a plan for the others to be re-buried here in a proper funeral. The parents have all agreed.” He says that someone from the government is coming soon to arrange this.
I ask how the community has responded. “Everyone in this community wants to be a hero,” he says. “Students want to come to this school, they are proud to attend this school.” The villagers are still listening carefully, their eyes showing agreement with the words.
Me, I understand the healing power of this story because I’m experiencing it right in the moment. I’m standing on the hilltop at dusk and I’m feeling it in this story of life emerging from death. I’m feeling safe with the villagers and the dignified teacher, with J. who has wanted for so long to come to this place, with the quiet respectfulness of Phil and our friend Zoe. I feel the continuity of time and place here in a way I do not when facing rows of skulls and carefully stacked arm and leg bones. Here the story is embedded daily in those who live here, in the youth who study in the room where the murders took place and who are inspired to take a stance against hatred. The story evolves with each student who comes and lives here and then carries it away with them, with each teacher who holds in his or her heart the knowledge also that the rebels returned and killed four teachers two days later, with each villager who chooses to remember and strives for heroism. The story sits beside another story, one the teacher also told us, that in a nearby church 7,000 were massacred during the genocide.
I relax into the clean air on this quiet hillside and I allow sorrow for these unnecessary deaths. An enormous gratitude rises in me; gratitude for the opportunity to come to this place, gratitude for this living story that continues to influence the land where it took place, that offers a vision to the nation, that speaks to the best in post genocide Rwanda. A story with the power of myth to gather the courage inside of each of us and bring it to a flame.
Between Chantal’s tomb and our van is the school’s playing field. As we make our way across the listening child springs into joyous action and the soccer ball soars across the field.
As we drive down the rutted track to the paved road to Kigali, J. says, “I like how that man tells a story.”
In this photo, the building on the left is the one in which the youth were killed.
Zoe on the hillside near the Nyange school.
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