More Dead People Than They Know What To Do With

The following blog entry is a transcript of an audio memo I made with my ipod, in the absence of a computer. I don’t know how to post audio memos to the blog. The transcript differs from the audio memo in one place only: in the audio memo I could not remember the name of the church where we had been. In the transcript I have included the name of the church. I made this audio memo while sitting on the verandah outside our room at the Centre Bethanie while Linda and the gang went to Napoleon Island. I was reflecting on my trip to Bisesero earlier that day, and the 55,000 people who had been killed there, and their bravery at holding off the killers for so long, and the complicity of the French. I was feeling a little overwhelmed, and I was trying to make sense of what I had seen. I should also point out that there is a difference between spoken speech and written speech, so if this entry does not seem like it has my usual finesse, it is because it is a transcript of a spoken word entry. The first two photos above were taken at Bisesero. These are the extra bodies that still need to have space made for them. The bottom two photos were taken inside the church at Nyamata. There was no room for these bodies in the mass memorial graves, so here they sit, in plastic bags in the back of the church, waiting for space in the mass memorial grave. The possibility exists that these remains could be moved to the genocide memorial in Kigali.


One of the more remarkable things that I have noticed about this genocide is that at a couple of the memorials we’ve been to, maybe three of them I guess, there have been more bodies than the memorial basically knows what to do with. So at that first church we went to, Nyamata, the one where they tossed the grenade in and there was blood on the altar cloth, at that one at the very back of the church, there were these huge plastic bags, opaque so you couldn’t see through them, but huge plastic bags of bodies, like bones and skulls and stuff, and the guide says, well we don’t have room yet, we still have to build more space to put these bones in, but of course, they can’t get rid of them, it’s proof of genocide. And by getting rid of them I meant, there were mass memorial graves there but they just didn’t have enough room for all of these bags of people. And today at Bisesero in a corrugated steel warehouse were all the skulls and leg bones, thousands of them, of skulls, I’ve got the pictures, of people that they didn’t have room for in the mass graves that they dug, and for me, I’m going to hold that as one of the more remarkable parts of this trip – that there were more dead than the mass graves, memorial graves could hold. And yet, they have to be dealt with in a dignified manner, but here we have these bags of bodies in the back of a church getting ready to make more memorials for them. And I found that pretty sad.