Dark is the Night, Bright is the Morning

The streets of Gisenyi, Uganda are empty under a layer of settled white dust. We are walking up through the village from the beach back to our hostel in a Presbyterian church up the hill. Those few that we see on the street follow us with a menacing air and sharp laughs at our backs - like school bullies laughing weakly in the face of this sad, sad day. The road winding down for one more mile to Goma, Congo is empty and we cross it easily. Not even a sound from the churches, from the fruit stands or shop windows. This border town is as dead as Rwanda was, that 17 years ago.

Today is the last day of Rwanda’s annual week of mourning. The last day of the year to publicly lay bare what, and who, has been cut down in cold blood among these beautiful banana trees. The pure silence of the place tells its story as the hub for Hutu extremists in 1994 from which seismic waves of hatred split the whole of Rwanda. It is a story that continues today to cut its sour course just one mile from here in neighboring Congo. Somehow we are surprised at how peaceful and serene that place appears to us now, just down shore from us along Lake Kivu. Magestic mountains and untouched green shadows are hiding a never ending jungle of riotous bloodletting. But here in Rwanda, we are in its wake. One that is still quite warm and trembling almost two decades later.

Shaken slightly by the strange mixture of guarded grief and menace we meet in the eyes of almost everyone left in town, we make our way anxiously onto the first bus to Kigali that finally peels away at 2pm. Our driver’s reflection in the rearview shows one eye hooded by a brow-to-chin scar, no doubt from the blunt blade of a machete. Outside, the most breathtaking shelves of fertile green hills rise at graceful angles and catch the sun perfectly like the edges of an emerald. On the road, we are stopped at a police checkpoint and wait idling for some 20 minutes to let hoardes of villagers pass on the road back into town. This must be where all of Gisenyi was this morning. A gorgeous pallette they are, clothed in their finest multi-colored cloths, their heads wrapped and draped in blazing colors, their finest clothes pressed and neat. Hand in hand, walking in clumps and in lines in the hot sun back, we watch them pass. At last our driver pulls out into them like a truck into a heard of cattle and they regard us with smoldering solemn gazes. Down the highway we wind through them for miles until at last we see their source up ahead. A small stage in the middle of a field with hundreds of them at its feet listening. Someone, a woman, is presenting. The traditional genocide-commemorating purple ribbons flutter around her and the rich green hills give her a soft and forgiving backdrop. We flurry past the scene and move on through the waves of villagers on their way into the fields in the opposite direction. In a few miles we meet another long line of recessors, trailing from the same scene in another village.

Later we are told that this is called Gacaca - a traditional conflict resolution and trauma recovery system that has been adapted post-genocide. This is where the local victims and their families confront the purpatrators, negotiate accountability and hold dialogue for healing. In this way, the people of Rwanda are attempting to pave each day forward. And for many, that means living in their villages alongside neighbors who hacked, sliced, tortured and raped their loved ones - or living with the memory of having done those things. It’s a feat that to us seems almost impossible - especially for those left behind who bear the images, the fear, the HIV, the disillusion and the scars of those 100 days. But on these village roads it is clear, that everyone in this entire country, was a victim of something much larger.

I don’t want to spend time discussing the details of the horrors that we all know happened here - those blind and bloody stories of the utmost suffering and betrayal are already being told in more important places by more important people. But I thought it merited a post anyway, if only as another reminder for my day to day life. There are those, like myself before I came to Africa, who find it much easier to feel removed from something like this. Who attribute the human wreckage and sociopathic cruelty that swept this previously peaceful country to culture, socioeconomic factors, or under-education. These assumptions can be true but only in part. It often seems to us that the only way to possibly explain such a merciless hand to head wave of mass murder is some--very distant--kind of crazy, the kind that doesn’t apply to us in our high heels on our therapists couches or in our lawn chairs sipping beer in suburban circles. But this is just sadly mistaken. It is a scientifically psychological fact that every human brain is capable of manipulation and morally altered behavior out of perceived self protection, given the right circumstances. The Stanford Prison study is one example that brought the teeth of all humanity to light. Even yours. We are our primal selves first underneath our educated sophisticated ones and our cognitive processes are wired to preserve our survival. In complete and utter fear, humans go blind - like looking straight into the sun. So very very blind.

Why do I seem to digress? Not to dwell on this tragedy, among the others that have bubbled and fizzled and those that continue to ripple through humans on earth. Only to remind myself of the ways in which I act out, in tiny teaspoon measures, that same sentiment of anger, judgment and worst of all, fear. Its amazing, in my every day squabbles with those I don’t get along with, how much education, mental control and cognitive effort it takes to bury the hatchet under a mountain of pride. It doesn’t matter much how big or how small the misunderstanding. The degree of personal insult. Or even the result of the little conflicts that dot my relatively peaceful life. It does matter how I mentally digest them. And how easy they can be to dismantle with just a little bit of perspective.

Kigali today is a gorgeous city, smooth, friendly, clean and self respecting. Regardless of socioeconomic status, the people here dress, walk and interact with a sense of pride and presentation. They have learned possibly the hardest lesson there is to learn on earth. And, individually, they are deciding if and how to forgive - forgive their neighbors, forgive themselves, forgive the international community, forgive their country. And it is a country that is today as beautiful and fertile as ever - arguably one of the most enlightened and progressive countries in Africa. Seemingly, however deep the scars, there is a national commitment to both self improvement, learning, education and memory. A large sector of the population is living with unimaginable trauma that would stop anyone dead in their tracks, unable to continue living alongside that repulsive human reality. And yet… and yet. The country at large refuses to be defined by what happened here. There is a very bright future on the horizon, however long in coming it might be.

Hotel Rwanda, or Hotel des Milles Collines as it is actually called, stands up the hill from where we are staying. It has been transformed into a five star, clean as a whistle, first class hotel. The glittering swimming pool overlooking the city lights is now serene and without a ripple, the same one that refugees in the hotel once drank from to keep from dying. During the day, the scavenger birds still circle above it. As we drank a cocktail in the outdoor garden, it was clear that it remembers. And so will I my learnings here, in so many small ways.

In the Kigali genocide memorial, there is a quote on the wall alongside stories of those who went against the grain to protect and shelter people, neighbors or strangers, from the slaughter. It reads: “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire”.