All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [73]
I meet up with Trish and the rest of her group, including a sociology professor, his students, and a couple of coffee importers. We spend our first days in and around Kigali, touring the sites of the genocide—at a million deaths in a hundred days, one of the most brutal episodes in human history. I have been to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and Rwanda’s memorial sites are as chilling and horrifying, perhaps for being more recent, the genocide having taken place only a dozen years before, during my adult lifetime and the Clinton administration, to its everlasting shame. We visit one brick church where thousands of Tutsis sought shelter from the rampaging Hutus and nearly all were massacred. There are bullet holes in the altar and enormous crypts in the back filled with boxes of bones and row upon row of skulls, lined up like books in an enormous library. At another church, women’s pocketbooks are still left behind in the pews, scattered among teenage T-shirts and baby shoes, those small daily objects more heartbreaking, somehow, than all the skulls.
I am astonished by our upbeat translator, Alice, who is in her early twenties, whose entire family was killed while she was away at day school and whose uncle was massacred while she watched from where she was hiding. She is able to relate the history of the genocide calmly, as if it didn’t happen before her eyes. The only time she becomes emotional is when she tells the story of a boy who grew up with her in an orphanage. While standing in front of the church where these events happened, she describes how the boy’s Tutsi mother threw her baby out of the church to a Hutu woman when the Hutu militia started shelling the building. The woman held on to the baby, but the Hutu soldiers recognized that it wasn’t hers and threw it back into the burning church. The woman dashed into the church, rescued the baby, and ran back out to safety, initially taking the boy to the orphanage where Alice grew up, afraid of reprisal if she kept it herself. Eventually she adopted him and raised him, with mixed ethnicities, as his mother. Alice wipes tears from her eyes—the only time I see her cry—from her happy-ending story.
The next day Alice takes me to visit the Rwanda Widows’ Association to interview the director, a genocide widow herself. This group, in its plain and tidy offices, has an insurmountable task—trying to give psychological, economic, medical, and social support to the widows left from the genocide, more than two-thirds of whom were raped and half of those left HIV-positive by their attackers. The stigma surrounding rape left the women unable to testify in the local gacaca courts, which attempted a sort of village-level justice for the genocide, so the association offers surrogates. Many of the survivors gave birth to babies fathered by their rapists and either gave them away or had to cope with their older children taunting the younger ones, “Your father killed my father.” Others have no other children left. Some of the women live in dire poverty, in a situation where, with their husbands dead, they can’t own land. “We live like ghosts,” the director tells me. “Our lives are over, and we only keep going for our children.”
The woman, so full of dignity, almost begs me to publicize the plight of the Rwandan widows. “The world has stopped giving economic aid to these women because they say that the emergency is over,” she tells me. Journalist