April: Remembering Rwanda

It’s April in Maui. The sun is hotter, the ocean is warmer, and the whales have begun to head back to their summer homes.

In Rwanda, April is a month of mourning.

One of the first questions I am often asked when someone hears I visited two summers ago is if I felt safe. If I felt scared.

Eighteen years ago this April in Rwanda, the killings began. In the short span of one hundred days, eight hundred thousand men, women and children were killed, many by machetes. It’s hard to wrap the mind around. Before my visit, I began to read about the genocide. I wanted to understand a little of the history of this place where I was headed. I brought the books with me.

Rwanda means land of a thousand hills, and the hills ripple in the distance like a vast ocean of green. Every day for the better part of three weeks, I walked a dirt path with my colleagues. Along the way from the orphanage where we were staying to the school where we were working, the green hills dazzled as we took in our surroundings: thatched houses, children in threadbare clothes, women drumming, people carrying water, leaves, branches on their heads, sorghum piled high outside homes, laundry drying on the tips of shrubs.

As we kicked dry, red dirt up behind us, the villagers in this small, rural town would call out, Mwaramutse! Good morning! When we passed back through, they'd call out, Mwiriwe! Good afternoon! We greeted them in return, and were rewarded by smiles and laughter. Others watched us silently.

Sometimes as I walked alone in my thoughts, the only noise would be that of the women hacking away at stalks of maize with their machetes.

800,000 people. Neighbors killed neighbors. Family killed family.

Most days, our thoughts and talk revolved around daily life. Our work, the teachers and the children, our meals of boiled potatoes and tough meat, our daily habit of buying Coca Cola in glass bottles from the bare walled room of a house that doubled as a shop. In the evenings, the teenagers at the orphanage played Jenga with us and listened to 50 cent.

One night, we stopped at a gas station on our way back from a trip to the city. The electricity was out and the gas station’s shop was lit by candles. In the dark, we picked out snacks from almost empty shelves - British cookies and chocolate. Later we learned that the cost of our nighttime snack was equivalent to that of the vice principle’s monthly salary at the school. Our van continued on. As we wound round the country road towards the orphanage, someone pointed to a mine. That’s where the dead townspeople were thrown, someone said.

I stopped reading about Rwanda’s genocide when I was there. I was too immersed in the experience itself to be able to process the history. Also, I’d had a couple of bad dreams. So, instead, I read Julia Child’s My Life in France. Under the mosquito netting and by the light of a bare bulb, I read about fish fried in butter, bottles of wine, apple tarts.

Now and then, a few of those I met in Rwanda email me or find me on Facebook. They tell me about their studies, their friends. One young, women with whom I’ve stayed in touch gifted me big, brown, woven earrings when I left. She is beautiful, but also kind, one of those people whose hope and goodness seems to radiate out from within. Her Facebook pictures show her dressed up, laughing and dancing with her friends. She is in love with a young man who is away studying in New York. They see each other once a year when he returns home. She works in an office to help pay for her university studies. Her father was murdered in the genocide when she was four. He was drowned in the river.

I was afraid only once. It was night and my roommate, another teacher, and I were awoken by a flurry of voices outside our room. It sounded like a crowd gathering. She and I peered through the window shade at the shadows racing by. We crouched beneath the window and wondered what to do. And though I didn’t say it, I thought it: I’m in a country where the people killed masses of their own not so long ago.

The crowd dissipated. In the morning, we learned it had been a crowd of our own students having a welcome back party for a friend.

It’s April in Maui, and I find myself thinking of those I met two summers ago. I think of their past, their survival, and their incredible ability to live life in the present.

This past week, I was stand up paddling on a serendipitous Tuesday morning. A pod of dolphins played nearby and two swam right in front of me, their backs rising side by side from the water. At the same time, a family of humpbacks rose to the surface. My friends and I paddled quietly alongside the whales for a quarter of an hour.

Every morning

the world

is created.

- Mary Oliver, from Morning Poem