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.