All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [184]
I was reminded of an image from my visit to the genocide museum on my first morning in Rwanda. Outside the building there are graves where thousands upon thousands of genocide victims were buried en masse. The slabs that cover the graves are fifteen feet wide, twenty feet long, several feet above the ground (the graves are so deep, so deep), and go on for as far as the eye can see. In the poured concrete that is the final resting place for bones hacked by machetes, I saw a white flower, tinier than my pinky fingernail, growing out from within the flat cement of a massive tomb. Rwanda is like this flower, a thing that is blooming out of the detritus and wreckage of the absolute worst humanity has to offer.
The wheel of time turns: Life, death. Life, death.
Life.
Chapter 21
THE REPUBLIC OF RAPE
(right to left) Kavira, Kika, Solange, and Stuka, adolescent survivors of gang rape, at a HEAL Africa clinic.
Quand on disait “plus jamais” apres L’Holocauste, cela concernait-il certaines personnes et pas d’autres?
(When you said, “never again” after the Holocaust, did you mean that for some people, and not others?)
—APOLLON KABAHIZI
Alternative translation:
When you said, “never again” after the Holocaust, did you mean that just for yourselves? Or us, too?
Or
.…. did you mean that for everyone, or just yourselves?
he border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo resembles nothing more sinister than a gate connecting the pastures on our farm in Tennessee, but what a shocking difference a few feet makes. On the Rwanda side of the crossing, in the city of Gisenyi, the roads are tidy, maintained, lined with tiny, colorful flower gardens. The breezes lapping the shores of Lake Kivu are serene, and the people are friendly and helpful. Passing into the DRC, however … Oh, my God. We were leaving a country with virtually no official corruption to go to a place where bribery and coercion are a way of life. It took me, Marshall, Papa Jack, and our driver an hour to navigate through the immigration and customs routine—which involved Papa Jack reaching into his pocket for a steady presentation of $20 bills. We joked that he should be used to it as the parent of a teenage daughter. As soon as we cleared the border post, all color seemed to drain from the earth, and we entered an urban wasteland of some eight hundred thousand people, most of them displaced by war.
As soon as we cleared the gate, we were stopped by a group of uniformed “police” carrying heavy weaponry. No traffic violations, just a simple and typical moment of attempted extortion. James, our driver, spoke Lingala and told them we didn’t have anything to give them while I nervously sat on my laptop, suddenly imaging it, and all of my writing, being taken from me.
The lead extortionist shrugged and waved us through. DRC is essentially a failed state, and government, army, and civil service jobs pay nothing. Some are specifically directed, when they begin their jobs, to “live off the land,” meaning the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting. Crimes, from the petty to those that qualify as war crimes and crimes against humanity, are committed with impunity.
A few hundred feet later, the road opened up and I saw the notorious city of Goma for the first time: a vast, relentless, dusty slum. There was rubble, garbage, filth, people covered in muck and grime, buildings that were nothing more than lean- to shanties. The earth was gray, drab, choking with dust and ash, courtesy of a volcano just north of town that had been erupting on and off for several years.
Our first stop was a clinic run by one of PSI’s partners that specializes in family planning, maternal and child health, and the treatment and prevention of malaria. The clinic’s doctor was waiting in his office in a white stuccoed cinder-block building; his hours were painted in a sweet shade of blue paint, and