Kigali Genocide Memorial and Memorials at Nyamata and Ntarama

On Wednesday we had an early start to the day, and we were happy that we had taken the time to get ready the night before.

We left the hotel and drove through Kigali to pick up a gentleman who was a survivor of the massacre at the Ecole Polytechniqe.  He told us his story, which was desperately sad, and several times he had to stop talking because he was overwhelmed.   He survived, and so did his wife and daughter and son, but they were all injured: he had an arm hacked off, his son was was shot in the head, and his daughter was clubbed in the head with a nail-studded club.  She has residual brain damage.  His oldest child was killed - he had sent her to stay with his mother, thinking they would both be safe, but they were both killed by being thrown into a latrine.  Stories like this fill me with an unspeakable sadness, but also a barely controllable rage.  Seeing this man tell his story, reduced to tears, was very, very moving.

Our second stop of the day was the church at Nyamata.   At this church there were approximately 10,000 people killed in the first week of the genocide.  The church has shrapnel damage in the ceiling, and dried blood on the walls and altar cloth.  People's belongings are piled on the pews.  Our guide, who is himself a genocide survivor, and who had sought, and received sanctuary at this same church during the mini-genocide in 1992, says that the clothes will be catalogued and preserved shortly, that the group that deals with these things was just waiting to have enough money to do this.

At the back of the church there are two huge mass memorial graves in the form of fairly deep crypts, and visitors can go down to pay their respects.  In these graves are thousands of skulls and bones.  and hundreds of coffins.

Our guide told us that approximately 72,000 people were killed in the area, but 10,000 were killed in and around the church.

Our next stop was the church at Ntarama.  Again, this was a place were thousands of people gathered to find safety, as they had done in 1992.  This time, there was no refuge.   The church was blasted with grenades to get at the people inside, and then the people inside were killed, ruthlessly.   There were children in the church school - they were killed by being smashed against the back wall of the room where the church school was held.  The wall where this was done is stained black with the blood of these children.  How does this happen?  Who sees the murder of children as right and necessary?  These are questions that are very difficult to answer, but answer them we must if we are to prevent such a thing from happening again.