Heroes Day, 2013

February 1^st was heroes’ day. This meant a public holiday and reminders to remember official and unofficial heroes, and articles in the paper, as there are every year, to remember Fred Rwigema, leader of the early rebel excursions from Uganda into Rwanda, and the Hutu former  prime minister, Agathe Uwiringiyimana,  who was murdered in the opening hours of the 1994 genocide along with other politicians who rejected extremist anti-Tutsi policies. And the children of Nyange, students at the secondary school where, a few years after the genocide, gunmen with automatic weapons burst into a classroom and ordered Hutu and Tutsi to separate. In an article in today’s paper a man who was a student that day and in that classroom, spoke of how they knew what that meant, the murder of the Tutsi and so they all refused. They cowered under their desks but some shouted out, we are Rwandans. The survivor interviewed for heroes’ day said they had learned from their teachers to be united and that they were friends without discrimination in this boarding school high on one of Rwanda’s hills.  (For more on this story, go to blog archive for August, 2010, ‘Nyange High School’.)

Another hero, who has a small profile in the ‘peace making after genocide’ exhibition which is slowly coming to completion (and why we are back in Rwanda for a few months), is Sister Felicite Niyitegeka. Felicite refused to turn over a group of girls in her charge to the killers and instead accompanied them to their death.

All this talk of heroes, though, makes me just a little nervous. How to emulate a hero? What was it that drove these people to action, to risk and lose their lives for others? How do I know how I would behave if I was pushed to the wall? It’s not that I begrudge these astonishing individuals the recognition they are receiving, it’s just that I want see them as ordinary people, who took extraordinary action perhaps because of some deep motivation in the moment, perhaps some sense of empathy or connection, perhaps some awareness that allowing others to suffer and die somehow diminishes the whole of which we are a part. If I see it that way I don’t have to leap from my imperfect ordinariness to heroics; I just have to discover and lean into my deepest intentions to act in a way congruent with my values, moment by moment, bit by bit.

Heroes’ day meant that I didn’t have to go to work and instead we set off for a walk, first up to the big market which was closed up because of the holiday, and then followed roads and paths to a damp green valley. The valley holds grasses and crops and cattle, two young herdsmen and people cutting grass for their livestock, and a flock of white egrets and chattering weaver birds working endlessly at their round nests that dangle from the bare branches of a tree. The valley is an encroached oasis; to get to it we walk through new housing developments that are colonizing the landscape. When finished the houses will have gates and fences, the middle class will move in and the poor communities that are still interspersed amongst the building sites will be gone.

Street after street in Kigali sports gates and walls. I live behind a spiked gate and a high wall covered with bougainvillea clipped too close. I don’t know my neighbours; in the month I’ve been here haven’t even seen them although I say hello to their gardeners and house help and guards who do hang out on the otherwise deserted street. Only a block away the gates end and the street is full of life, small shops and people talking and walking. It makes me reflect on heroes because a study released here a year ago, a study that interviewed those who rescued others during the genocide, seeking motivation, discovered that those from lower socioeconomic groups were more likely to help. It makes sense, empathy comes from connection and relationships, and I guess also from not having too much to protect.

The day after heroes’ day we visited a hero. She was a child in 1994 and she rescued a baby. Her story is in the peace making after genocide exhibition (see blog February 2012, can you help?). We are in her simple home to show her how her story is being portrayed through a series of graphic illustrations and to gain her final consent. I watch her face as she looks intently at the computer images and watch her slowly relax into a smile of approval. I am thinking, she is just a woman struggling to survive, she is a woman who has suffered hard times; probably she is kind sometimes and not so kind at others, just like most of us. She is an ordinary woman who was somehow motivated to do an extraordinary thing. She rescued a baby during a crazed time of killing, she wrapped that baby in a bloody blanket and carried her on her back and then she raised her.

That question, what would I have done in such circumstances, would I help another if my own life was endangered?  That question can’t be answered, none of us know what we would do. But you can ask yourself, have I been kind today? Have I let something go by when I might have spoken up or acted? Is my heart behind a gated wall or is it open and receptive? That’s a question you can answer.