DavesRwandaTrip 20081018, Ntarama memorial, and miscellany.
Pictures will be here eventually, though not right away. The net has been too flakey recently.
http://www.thecathouse.homeftp.net/Filez/20081018
We had dinner last night at the Flamingo, the only Chinese restaurant we’ve been to. It was upscale, way over in the nicer part of town, a 5000 Frw taxi ride away. It had a gorgeous view of the horizon, which was especially cool as a thunderstorm rolled by on the other side of the tallest hill. Striking contrast against new buildings going in, a construction crane, city lights and the main road through town. I found myself wondering what power plant they use and where it is, and how their grid is set up. Mandy spoke of a night with storms where she saw (from the Sky Hotel) a huge section of the city go dark, but then come back on in relatively short order. They probably have manual control and switching stations rather than computer automated ones, but clearly the grid is relatively modern with redundant connections.
Thankfully the rain stayed distant from us. We started walking back as there were no taxis outside our restaurant, and got to enjoy the stars away from the lights (good security around these homes wall-wise, but no lights). Not that I can recognize many constellations, but the stars clearly look different from here. It just feels foreign, looking at the sky 46 degrees tilted from what I’m used to.
Looking again at the high walls with spikes on top, I thought about it in the context of the genocide, and suddenly this level of security made sense. I’m sure there are many people who are still living in fear that it may happen again, though from my current perspective it seems very unlikely. We passed many students and others in our walk- interesting in the almost complete dark (even though it was only 7:30ish), you can’t really see people until they’re almost on top of you. We caught a taxi at the next restaurant we passed though, and made it home in short order. If you’re ever here, don’t fear being able to get places. The driver from downtown knew right where the Flamingo was, and the driver we found partway back knew right where Restaurant Chez Robert was (the Magnolia isn’t a good landmark, but the restaurant is right next door). It’s easy to get around, and cheap even if you’re bad at negotiation, though we’ve gotten a bit better by now. Today we talked our driver down from 60,000 Frw for our day trip down to 40,000 Frw. And I think we both thought we were getting a good deal. ☺
One thing I forgot to mention from before, which I thought of today as I saw workers burying huge spools of cable, they decided last week, or maybe the week before now, to switch their national language of education from French to English. The decisions is largely based on interactions with nearby countries which are more Anglophone, and a view of the international community in general, where English will get you much further than French. Even the internet is mostly in English. So they just made this decision, and we were talking with Georges and Faustin about it. Georges pointed out how big of a challenge it will be educationally- how they don’t have enough teachers right now, and how it’s harder to teach teachers (older) a new language anyway. The kids won’t care, they learn so quickly, but changing those above will be hard. But suddenly there’s a huge new market for English textbooks. ☺ And they’re working on installing fiber cables to reach all the villages to provide instructional materials that way as well. So you’ll have mud huts surrounded by dirt road and farms, with fiber optic grade internet access inside. And Coke. Lots of Coke. An exciting transition. This is so much a country on the move, a country busting their asses to progress and do well. What are we doing? What are we busting our asses about in the US? Competing to see who can whine the loudest about the economy as far as I can tell. ☺ I’ll so never take any complaints about economics in the US seriously anymore.
Also, just to document since I found my notes from then, the professors we met with in Butare were:
1) Evariste Ntakirutimana - a linguist, working for the international tribunal doing translations, and other things. He’s a professor at the university, though he came out Tuesday night to meet us at the Ibis since that’s what fit in his schedule.
2) Georges Rwamasirabo again, Wednesday morning in his office at the University.
3) Deo Byanafashe - the dean of the equivalent of the school of LS&A I think.
4) Jean-Marie Kayishema - another professor in that school, one who used to be a Comp-Lit professor, and thus was a good match for Mandy to chat with (alas in French, much to my misunderstanding ☺).
5) Faustin Rutembesa, the history professor and first one that Mandy had met with before. He again met us at the Ibis, so he wouldn’t be swarmed by students.
I just wanted to make sure I had all of their names down - they’re hard for me to remember normally since I’m so unused to the style. And they’re so long! ☺
A couple of other corrections/additions from previous journal entries, as much for my own future reference as making sure I’m not misleading any of you poor suckers reading my journal as if it contains actual correct information…
The correct spelling of the president who was in power for most of the 60s through 90s, and who’s assassination in the first days of April 1994 was the starting gun for the genocide, was Habyarimana. I think I’ve misspelled that about 5 different ways previously. By most accounts I’ve seen he was a corrupt despot mostly concerned with his own power. The army that was organized, less informally than many tried to pretend, to was called Interahamwe. Remember what I said before about a large population of unemployed impoverished discontent young adult men? That was them. Also, I referred to the UN military force (UNAMIR) commander who was here, and who saw it coming but wasn’t given the authority or manpower to stop it, that was the Canadian Major General Roméo Dellaire.
We managed to download another daily show last night - my computer being dead hasn’t slowed us down too much, since I can easily authorize Mandy’s computer to my iTunes account. Hooray for compatability! So we’re caught up on the latest news and everything. ☺ You can, however, tell that I’m using Mandy’s computer to write this, as it auto-replaces my colon-parenthesis with these actual little smiley faces. I usually turn all of Word’s auto-correction off, not that I don’t have lots to correct, it just irritates me out of proportion when it changes something I don’t want it to.
Today we hired a taxi to take us down to the Ntarama genocide memorial site. It’s about 25 km south of Kigali, so we had the taxi just wait for us for the return trip as well - he’s the one we negotiated down from 60k to 40k Frw.
I took a million pictures of the countryside and villages and city on the way down and back, I’ll post those when I get faster internet. We were also stopped at one point by the police (who I didn’t take pictures of, lest they take offense, though they were very nice). They just stood in the road and whistled to get our cab driver to stop. Then they checked his license, and checked his trunk. I believe they were making sure he had a spare tire and other safety equipment as required by law, but I’m not sure- his French wasn’t so good, and his English was worse. The officers were happy to chat with Mandy and I though. They didn’t ask us for passports or anything. They asked where we were going etc. and what our relationship was. Apparently we’re engaged now. ☺ We’ve gone from friends to boyfriend girlfriend to fiancées to married depending on who’s assuming what and how much trouble we’re having communicating and how much we care to correct anything.
I make the very sad observation that apparently there are no trains in Rwanda. Granted it would be a nightmare to cut through these hills to a small enough grading for them to work. But it still seems sad to me.
I also randomly note while watching the people we pass on the road, usually carrying or pushing or balancing heavy loads, that while I may not ever again have hair as long as most women in our country, I currently have hair longer than most women here. About 90% of the women I see have close buzzcuts or are bald, and the men have even less hair. I’ve seen a few with long hair, and some in between, but it’s quite rare.
As we get to our destination the cab driver has to stop a couple of times to ask directions, but they are readily given. We pull off the main road onto a dirt road, passing a sign for the memorial we are visiting. Ntarama is a small village - not as destitute as some I saw, especially in the northern province- but nowhere near Kigali or Butare. There were several concrete buildings, but more mud brick buildings, and a very high ratio of farmland to building. But the farms seemed healthy and well, as did all the people we passed, trucking goods to and from markets and farms (we passed a huge market on the way there- a good example of how the real Rwandans buy and sell stuff, as opposed to the foreigner targeted supermarket that looks like Walmart here downtown ☺). Asking the guide, assuming she understood me well and I understood her, she said there were about 3000 people living in the village and nearby.
This makes it hard to understand how they managed to kill 5000 people at this church. It is a small brick building, with rows of concrete pews. Apparently they pour the pews and the floor at the same time, and then sometimes put wood boards across, sometimes not. A relatively small parish, with a nearby rectory, and a wood/mud brick kitchen out back. There was also a smaller building that was a Sunday school for children. In the main building they had obviously new metal racks set up. That’s where they lined up the skulls and bones. There were hundreds of them, neatly organized by body part rather than body- the skulls on a couple of shelves, femurs and tibia on the next, hip bones and similar plates off to one side. The rest of the building was lined with the clothing of the victims, hanging from rafters and walls. At the front were a few actual caskets. There were more racks with the meager possessions of those who had been slain. And there was a sign that our guide translated as something like “If you knew me, if I knew you, could you still have done this? Could you still have killed me? It was the first time I’d been so close to so much human death. Hopefully it will be the last time too. Mandy cried. I did not. I felt kind of emotionally paralyzed… becoming calm and rational and distant. I studied the cracks in the skull that were not caused by man - the 3 plates that break when we are born and reform as we grow, which look like brutality but are not. Some of the skulls were very small. The guide was not squeamish, touching one of the skulls to point out the nail punched through the top - from one of the typical weapons used in the genocide, essentially a heavy club with nails stuck in the end. She was solemn, but obviously had done this so many times that she was largely so out of respect for our emotional response.
We continued through the buildings (the main one was the first we entered), looked around, sat and talked, then walked through the buildings again. Too much to take in all at once. Then we sat and talked some more. We were there for probably about an hour, though the first walkthrough took less than 15 minutes. It is a beautiful memorial - there are beds of flowers, trees, birds chirping, bright sun. Then there is a wall, like at the Kigali memorial, similar to the Vietnam memorial in DC, where they are starting to etch the names of the fallen. They have only a few dozen so far. I commented on the beauty of the area, during the bright warm sunny day, and said “how could people come here, see this place, and still end up killing each other? How could they not just sit down and talk about it instead, and find some kind of peace?” Okay, granted, the flowers and neat paths and butterflies probably weren’t there in April of 1994. But the rest probably was - Rwanda is an intrinsically beautiful country - looking out over the hills and valleys surrounding you and the farmland all around…. I can understand academically the mindset and the history that led up to this point… I can logically understand that given where they were they could have done it and would have felt they had to… but at the same time I just don’t get it, I can’t put myself in that position, I can’t imagine a set of conditions that would lead me to slaughter with clubs and machetes a band of civilians hiding in a church.
The first time we went through I had my camera out taking pictures outside, but Mandy asked me not to take pictures inside, so I didn’t. I could understand. This isn’t a vacation spot, a flower to capture, this is something so much more important and serious. But as we sat and thought and talked, I changed my mind and the second time through I did take pictures, one from each end, in the main building. What drove me to do so is thinking about why we are here, what we mean to accomplish. This isn’t entertaining, it’s horrible, and I very much want to just push it all away and not think about it or deal with it. But at the same time it enrages me. It makes me want to fight. It makes me want to be violent to the people who did this violence… which tendency is probably part of why they were able to get to the point of this violence in the first place. We humans are broken and dangerous animals without the proper education and civilization. And lessons like this are part of that education. And I don’t trust my words to convey the images well enough alone. So here we are…. Except that my stupid server at home seems to be down still so I’ll have to post them later.
We talked about what makes an appropriate memorial. I conclude that I think this one is very well done. It seems very shocking to us Americans to see bones… but it occurred to me that the villagers here are probably used to killing, cleaning, and cooking chickens and goats and such all the time - so the pure anatomy of it is not so distant. I remember that we keep ourselves very carefully sheltered and distant from such realities. And yet some shock is required… so that the importance of the message sinks in, so that it’s not just another sign to read, or a picture to see. These are actual bones, this really happened, these once were real people who did not die of natural causes.
At the same time, you can do too much. You can put in so much shock and horror that you become inured to it, at least then, and worse yet in general. That goes too far. The memorial in Kigali was a good balance. There were bones there too - albeit behind glass walls, and pictures, and some movies showing people. But not too much, and it was as the exclamation point to the text and diagrams and news stories and other historical information. Enough to make the point. Enough to make it really serious to you. But not so much that it’s gratuitous.
At the same time there’s the issue of respect for the dead, and more importantly in my mind, respect for the survivors. The dead should be treated with respect and not ill-used. But these were not that either- they were in neatly organized rows, not in our usual fashion that we’re accustomed to, but still treated with dignity, not haphazardly thrown in a pile. And they were inside a church. And the surrounding grounds were beautiful and well maintained (I picked up a straw wrapper, and a sliver of one of the ubiquitous MTN airtime cards, but otherwise the grounds were litter free). This would be a comfortable and decent and dignified place for mourners to come and try to find peace.
And at the same time it’s a good place to learn. A good place for Rwandans to come and re-enforce their message of “Never Again”. A good place for foreigners like us to come and get a feel for what it was like, and to see how the nation is recovering, and to take away a better sense of the reality and importance of such things so that hopefully we may act more quickly the next time around. We were alone as visitors this day (and I was glad for it), but the guide told us that many people still come, both foreigners and locals.
We asked the guide how they people nearby dealt with it, and was it hard to live with such a thing. She shrugged, and didn’t talk much about it. It seemed she was used to it- this was her job after all, she was here every day. But she told me that the children nearby also visited, and got to see it. And when they left they were happy. (I think this implied not scarred by it, her English was broken and not too complete, so we only got sentences here and there.) And then they liked to come back and see all of the strangers who came to visit. And indeed there were several children and some villagers outside the fence as we walked around. I felt a bit self-conscious at first, but that passed quickly.
Overall I think they did a very good job with it. And there are memorials like this all over the country. All over.