Funeral

The mourners travel in a caravan, dozens and dozens of cars with hazard lights flashing, headed by a vehicle holding the coffin, pale blue blinker on the rooftop. The procession exits central Kigali, travels on an asphalt road for some distance before turning onto packed and rutted red earth side roads. Past market intersections, men on bicycles with loads of grass or milk cans, women with baskets of mangoes and avocados on their heads, staring children, clean swept simple mud walled homes, towards a heavy blackness with a message of imminent rain. Somewhere in or beyond that blackness is the new cemetery, the one in the city full and closed.

The cars come to a halt as the sky breaks open and the rain slams violently onto roofs and fields and instantly the ditches are running high, the road is slick, and the people disappeared to whatever shelter is closest. The mourners sweat in the vehicles that have closed all windows against the rain. They had sweated earlier in the Pentecostal church, under tin sheet roofing supported by pillars wrapped in pink paper. The steamy church had multiple sections of pews facing a central podium, including some sections raised close to the ceiling where those seated vigorously fanned themselves. The brother and sister, whose mother has died, tenderly and tearfully described her last moments while people wiped their eyes and sighed aloud.

The rain stops, and hundreds of people emerge and being to walk through slippery and clinging mud under a suddenly blazing sky. Shoes and sandals accumulate great gobs of wet earth, becoming heavier with each step. The people walk and walk, no sign of a cemetery anywhere, a river of people walking past small houses and nicely cultivated bean fields and chickens and banana trees. Walking, walking, until finally gathering on a steep hillside. The cemetery is so new that there are only a few sealed graves, each tombstone holding a picture of the deceased.

Several men, perhaps villagers benefiting from this new intrusion into their quiet lives, are turning the cement, adding water to get the right mix, and then grinding their shovels into the gravelly heap. They toss the cement into wheelbarrows, which are then slithered towards the grave. The cement will seal the coffin. The men are barefoot, their plastic sandals set aside. One wears a black t-shirt inscribed with the words, ‘out of nowhere.’

I cannot see the grave or the coffin being lowered, there are too many people, but I can hear the soft singing that spreads through the mourners as the sun descends over the western hills. The heat remains awhile, but I push my sunglasses up onto my head and listen to the singing, and I’m thinking of the Rwandans who never had a chance to bury their dead peacefully on a green hillside, never had a chance to sing as mourners file by to place flowers on the now sealed grave, never had a chance to say good-bye. I’m thinking, as I stand beside my colleagues from the memorial centre, mostly genocide survivors themselves, about how the rains have greened these quiet hills, how the air is fresh, how the land and the people are beautiful and inseparable. I’m feeling love for this place where the hills go on forever and as the singing continues I’m wishing for Rwanda a future in which funerals and death are a natural part of life and that the violence and brutality of the past never comes again.