Kurera Fund

Viateur, one of the Kurera Fund students, after I took his bio.
He wants to be a pilot or a math teacher.

So, while I have been reveling in rainfall and being dive-bombed by airborne termites, Claire, my good friend and fellow volunteer here, has started a non-profit. It is called the Kurera Fund (kurera means "to educate" in kinyarwanda) and matches American donors with secondary school students who need help paying their school fees (about $80 a trimester). It all started when some of her students could not come to classes in the beginning of the second term because they still had outstanding fees from first term and the grace period was over. Claire just wanted to get her students back into class (rather than having them stand around all day, unable to change their financial circumstances) and in her resulting frustration, with the help of some friends and her parents back in the US, came out with Kurera. For this term she is just working with 30 studetns at her school, but hopes to expand to other schools and more students as things get rolling.

I came up to visit her this weekend and help with the start up process. With her headmaster, Claire had already selected the students deemed most deserving. We met with them for the afternoon to take pictures, set up email addresses and write bios, so donors can 'get to know' the student they will be supporting. As the French speaker, bios were my job. "Why can't you pay for school?" is a little harsh for a conversation started, but that's basically what I was asking all of them. Most of the students come from single parent families, supporting many childern (average around 5) by susbsistence farming (cultivating just what you need to eat, with little or no extra to sell in the market). So $80 can seem laughinly impossible (these are families that really live on less than a dollar a day per person). And of course some students had even more difficult backgrounds - orphaned from the genocide, or leading a family because the parent is handicapped (physically or mentally) to the point where they cannot.

And still, after they told me about hardships that would crack most adults I know ("my mother has an illness from the war, so she cannot work... her hands were cut off by machete"), these students would light up talking about how they like to play football (that would be soccer) or sing or plan to be a doctor. It amazed me that they still had the strength and hope to have such ambitions, even when they were facing insurmountable obstacles - I even met a boy who wants to be president!

So this is my shameless plug. Contact me if you would like to participate. I hope I do not need to spell out the equivalencies of $80 in starbucks and movie tickets...

Agony in Countless Forms

Until now, I have consciously avoided the topic of genocide because, while it is the topic most widely associated with Rwanda, it has had minimal bearing on my experience here so far. The Rwanda I have been living in for the past four and a half months is trying very hard to move forward internally and to be seen in a new light externally (as the fourth safest country in Africa, for example). However, this past weekend I visited a memorial site with the teachers of my school, at their insistence that I am part of their community and would not be intruding. Unspoken was the fact that as an outsider, I am, in a way, the one most in need of the exposure. Our headmistress told us we were going to learn together, to see a true reminder of what had happened "rather than listening to the news or the radio". Armed with this firsthand knowledge we teachers would be expected to help the country move forward and simultaneously prevent the past from repeating itself yet again.

The site we went to is called Murambi. It was going to be a school, but before it had the chance to be, it became the site of 28,000 deaths - people from the nearby towns who were rounded up and brought there for safety. If you read the books on the genocide, you might come across the mention of French soldiers in the Zone Turquoise playing volley ball over a recent mass grave. That was here. They have sign indicating the exact spot (an otherwise ideal location, looking down over terraced hills and catching a breeze coming up from Burundi).

The site is on the side of a hill. So on three sides there are beautiful views of the endless green countryside, now covered in organized fields with the tiled roofs of houses tucked into banana tree groves overy once and a while. First there is the main adminitrative building, and then behind it, running perpendicularly down the hill, are rows of classroom buildings each with a few classrooms connected on one side by a covered hall that looks out on the view.

Inside the classrooms are wooden plank tables covered in bodies. They look like plaster models - white, powdery, shrunken and too small, too delicate to be real. But the smell and the dull buzzing of flies confirm the truth. The smell is not overpowering as it must have been 15 years ago, but it clings to you and in your memory, so even days after I am suddenly sure I can smell it again. In some ways the bodies just look like the replication of terror and pain that we associate with horror movies and halloween - your mind wants to see them that way. But each one is different, an individual experience frozen in time and space. Some are screaming, the shrunken tissue on the skull revealing the muscles and tendons contorting like the rest of the body. Some curl up to protect themselves, to hide, or to shelter someone else. Others twist away, frozen in their final attempt of escape. And many others are mangled, in impossible positions, limbs pointing in the wrong direction or ending without the neccesary appendage. A spine seem to twist up through a rib cage. An entire body folds in on itself. A skull is flat. Or not even there. I could go on...

Death is often described as a great equalizing force; everyone looks the same when they're dead and decayed. But the bodies I saw were totally foreign. It's true that their race or ethnicity, religion, politics, gender, etc could not be determined. But I did not look at them and recognize the same shapes in the live people I see around me, in myself. The connection was incomprehensible, the implication sent my brain reeling in disbelief.

And after we went through all the rooms, and saw the volley ball field, and where the French flag had flown, and an excavated mass grave (a pit so massive it required catipillars to dig it originally), and talked to the director of the site with people patiently translating for me the whole time, we left.

I had assumed that the drive home would lack the laughing conversations of the way there, of a group of collegues on a sunny Saturday morning drive, but after a few minutes I was the only one still silent. Everyone else was talking and laughing like it was a normal day, and for most of them it probably was.