This blog entry is going to be at the top of the page, but it’s the fourth of the last four entries I’ll have posted that I’m writing. I wrote the other three over the past few days and just finished writing the pretty intense one called “Things I have realized about myself” and now I don’t know how much I’ll be able to write for this entry. It seems kind of selfish to have an entry about me me me be far longer than things I’ve learned about people, but I study anthropology and so much of my life has been dedicated to learning about people I figure I can cut myself some slack for that. This reminds me of a line from a movie I enjoy that went something like, “I had spent so much time learning about the lives of others that it was keeping me from having one of my own,” spoken by the main character who was an anthropology student. But I digress.
Given the nature of what we’re studying here in Rwanda, we often have to grapple with very heavy topics. It is far easier to read about genocide in a history textbook than it is to be in a place where it happened, see places where horrifying acts happened with evidence that has been preserved, and to look at the faces of people and not be able to imagine what they have lived through. It’s easy to read a narrative when it’s just black ink on a one-dimensional page, and far more complicated to look into the eyes of somebody telling their story trying to understand with the heart what they are saying, while at the same time being aware you never truly can. To illustrate this idea I will bring up two visits we had with certain people during our trip to Butare around two weeks ago. (I meant to write sooner, but as I mentioned, time flies, and I’ve had very limited access to wifi.) Note: we had SIT staff translate from Kinyarwanda to English, so of course, my reproductions here of what they said are paraphrases of paraphrases.
The first group was a women’s cooperative called Courage of Living. Somewhere in the Rwandan countryside, we sat in a little building with benches low to the ground and no lights with a few members of this group who were there to speak about their experiences. They were all older ladies, and in times shortly after the genocide were affiliated either with victims or perpetrators. Meaning, some of these women lost their husbands, children, and families to the husbands of the other women, who had been imprisoned. Understandably, it took some time for them to even be in the same space as each other. But somehow, through their own strength and through the counseling of a priest in the area who wanted to restore faith among the people and saw reconciliation as a way of doing it, they were able to eventually learn to live with one another. They at least had in common the fact that they had to learn to live alone, with their husbands either in prison or no longer living. They organized activities where the victims and wives would tell their stories and perpetrators’ wives asked for forgiveness, which led to them checking up on each other and their progress, and as their leader said during the introduction of the group, it turned out that “the love was already there.” They realized that in order to heal, they needed to do so as a community and learn to depend on one another. As time went on, they formed a group with their children in order to teach them about reconciliation and unity.
It all seemed pretty unbelievable, so we had a lot of questions for these incredible women who served as living proof that reconciliation is possible. Someone asked about what happened once the husbands were released from prison. One of the women answered that during their time in prison, the husbands felt guilty, so they appreciated the initiative the women’s cooperative had and didn’t wish to spoil it. A husband would be ashamed upon his release, and the survivor would actually approach him, the perpetrator, first to break the ice. Then she would give him a testimony of how the women were living in unity now, so that he too could feel that spirit. She added that life has been restored, and now the children from the two different “sides” are growing up together or even marrying each other, which is a cause for celebration for all of them. Another question was how you as an individual find peace after all that anger. One of the women answered with her own personal thoughts–she used to think that she would never find that peace because of the very bad things that had been done to her and her family, but then she realized that she was killing herself by continuing to feel that way; she knew that she had to somehow convince her heart that she had to live, take a different direction so that she could forgive, be happy, and have peace, because what she lost would never come back. She felt like once she joined the conversation happening between the group of women, she had found another family, and told us that “You just accept what happened to you because you can’t change it; don’t let the past affect your future.” From what I could see, the women had successfully created a future for themselves and their children that they could be proud of.
Besides the women’s cooperative, two men who were rescuers during the genocide, Samuel and Reagan, also came to speak to us. They defied the roles that the government wanted them to fulfill and chose to save lives instead of taking them. While I won’t go into too much detail with their specific stories (feel free to ask me and I will tell you), there was a question that they addressed where each of them had answers so contrasting but so logical that I’m not sure what to believe. When asked about the role that religion played in their decision to help save Tutsis rather than kill them, Samuel replied first. He said that his faith played a big role in his decision, being an adventist. Teachings from the bible helped him do what he did, since he was aware that killing is a sin. Reagan had something completely different to say. His answer went something like this: “If I do wrong to you, I don’t say it’s Satan who made me do it. If I do good, I don’t say it’s God. I’ve never seen God. I don’t involve God in what I do, there is nothing to involve Him in. I just believe that if I want to live a happy life, my neighbor has to live a happy life too. I do things for my own sake without believing that God will reward me somehow. Even religious people participated in the killings; I gave many testimonies of what I’ve seen priests do.” Then he finished by saying something about the church being a business. I wrote that part in all caps in my notebook since he made it a point to emphasize. At the end of the talk, Reagan scathingly brought up the fact that the UN did basically nothing to stop the genocide from happening even though it was in their power, explaining that he had to do their job for them. He told us that if the UN ever came to Rwanda and acknowledged them, he would show them the number of people he was able to save without material help. After their testimonies, I got the chance to go up to them and thank them personally for what they did and even give them each a hug. If only I knew enough Kinyarwanda to tell him that one day, if in the future I do end up working for the UN, I would try and bring them to Rwanda to give him the recognition he deserves for what he, Samuel, and so many other ordinary-extraordinary Rwandans did.
People have long fascinated me, but seeing what they are capable of here in Rwanda–of such brutality and such forgiveness–has gotten me thinking a lot of how beautiful and how ugly humanity can be all at once. As a group of students, we’ve been asked a lot what we would have done in the varying situations Rwandans found themselves in during and after the genocide, and it’s just so difficult to come up with an answer. I honestly don’t know what I would have done. Just thinking about the immense potential for “good” and “evil” each individual has within them is enough of a task in itself. One thing that the women and the rescuers all wanted to stress for us was to use their stories and experiences as proof of what can happen as result of discrimination and intolerance towards other people, but also as proof that healing is possible and goodness exists even if it seems all has gone to hell. These are things I have read about and have wanted to believe, so even if I have felt disheartened and shocked, I feel more reassured and hopeful than anything. Considering the state of affairs of the world today, I’m glad to have human evidence to support these beliefs.
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