Don't Turn Away

Some people who have read my blog have said they couldn’t read every post because some of the posts were too sad, or the photos were too graphic, and they couldn’t bear it.

This is true: Rwanda’s story is a desperately sad one, and the photos that illustrate it are very graphic and shocking. That is perhaps the most compelling reason why we should not turn away. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans struggled to survive this horror, and ultimately, very few Tutsis escaped with their lives. Over eight hundred thousand didn't survive.

It is to these people, both the survivors and the victims, that we owe the duty of looking at the photos and reading the stories. We ignored them while the genocide was happening. The least we can do is look at the aftermath.

Call Me Red

In Rwanda, the dry season is really, really dry. Everything is utterly dried out, and parched. The only plants that survive without being regularly watered are hardy species that can withstand months of not receiving any water at all. Purple hearts like we have in the greenhouse at school grow everywhere. I know from experience just how stubbornly they cling to life in the face of neglect and prolonged drought.

During the dry season soil on the ground dries up too, and then gets picked up on the slightest breeze and coats everything in a reddish dusty coating.

There was never such a thing as a clear day in Kigali: the air pollution is quite pronounced. Some of this air pollution is caused by smoke from cooking fires, some from cars (with 007-like smoke screens pouring out of their exhausts) and quite a bit of it is from the soil blowing through the air.

Even the simple action of walking, or driving, created enough of an air current to lift the dust from the ground into the air, where it would be breathed in, where it would cling to your skin, your hair and your clothes.

I noticed on the morning of the second day in Kigali, as I was making my bed, that my pillow had a reddish, suspiciously head-sized mark right in the middle of it. Hmm I thought. The next morning, the mark was more pronounced. I realized that my hair must have had enough dust in it to leave a mark on my pillow. When I washed my face in the evening, my facecloth came away all orangey-red. When I was washing my shirts (ok, Linda did the washing) the water turned reddish-orange after just one shirt. One of my white Lands’ End polo shirts still has a definite orange-y tinge to it.

Arial photographs of Kigali (the capital city) on Google reveal very little variation in colour: everything in the city is covered with this dust. As we were driving along in the country-side, past banana plantations I remarked to Linda that I did not see how the trees closest to the road could survive, coated, as they were, with a significant blanket of red dust.

My socks were covered in the red dust by the end of each day, my hat had red dust stains around the sweat band, and my shoes still have red dust stains on them. You step outside for five minutes, and you have red dust on your clothes.

The lucky thing was that the country was so dry and cat-free, I had zero symptoms of asthma the whole time I was there.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World - Redux

We spent July 20, 21 and 22 (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) driving around Kigali. The roads were good, and even though we were up and down the mountains, we were still clearly in a city. On Friday, July 23, we left Kigali to drive east to the Akagera Lodge for two days. I hate being a passenger in any motorized vehicle that I am not driving, and that includes cars, TTC buses, trains, airplanes and tour buses.

I especially hate being a passenger when the roads are clinging to the sides of mountains. Our driver, Olivier, skillfully guided us up and down the roads, whether they were paved or just dirt tracks. I began to be seized with the horror that our bus would careen right over the edge of the mountain. It didn’t help that one of the women on our trip had been in a very bad bus accident in Guatemala: her bus had gone off a mountain road, so my fears actually were rooted in some semblance of probability.  If it happened to her bus, it could happen to my bus!

Suddenly the memory of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World flew, unbidden, into my head. All I could think of was the scene when Jimmy Durante’s car flies off the cliff, and everyone keeps repeating “It just flew right out there!” while making a motion of one hand slapping the other and imitating a car flying off a cliff. I believe I started to laugh. Linda asked me what was so funny and I told her, and then she was laughing as well. I could barely speak for laughing so hard. I texted Leslie because I couldn’t remember the exact words about going over the cliff. She texted back saying she really didn’t want to know why I was wondering about flying off a cliff. She knew Rwanda was mountainous.

We made it to Akagera in one piece, thanks to Olivier. And he safely conveyed us to all of our other locations as well. I was thinking about Olivier the other day. I miss him and his quiet good humour.

Once, They Had Names

In the mass memorial graves we visited - the crypts at Nyamata and Ntarama, the cloisters at Nyarubuye, the corrugated steel shed at Bisesero, the classrooms in the former school at Murambi, I saw thousands and thousands and thousands of skulls and many, many more leg bones and arm bones. There were so many more dead people than names on the memorial walls at each site.  I suspect that this is because many of the people who might have been able to identify the dead people were dead themselves.  At Nyarubuye there were two mass graves: on one side of the cemetery were individuals whose identity was known, on the other side of the cemetery, the much larger side, were individuals whose identity was unknown.  At some memorials there were only partial lists of names, at others, no names at all. In some places people were listed simply as "boy" or "girl" or "Family".

They are anonymous, these bones. These stark displays of human remains are a touch macabre, and are made more so by the curious separation of the skulls from the long bones. Perhaps this is less a local style of arranging remains than it is an exigency caused by the manner of death, and the length of time between the death of the victim, and the placement of the victim in the memorial. Perhaps it was necessitated by the sheer numbers of the dead.

These were people: mothers, fathers, children, siblings, friends, neighbours. Once upon a time they probably thought their lives were unremarkable, and it would never have dawned on them that the world would be more interested in them when they were dead than when they were alive. That is the sad way of it, though.

Once, they were alive, they had dreams, passions, plans, a future.

Once, they had names.