Mourning Person

I’ve had lots of emails lately about my emotional state, very mixed emails, in fact. Some say I sound really up, like I’m having a good time and really enjoying myself. Others say I sound sad and depressed, like I’m seeing too much and not digesting it well.

I feel like I'm doing okay, better than okay, in fact. There's enough good to balance the depressing, but Rwanda's a tough one. For one thing, it's the worst month to visit, when there's rain virtually every day and the mist just wraps around the towns and makes those gorgeous terraced hills disappear and you feel not only like you'll never see the sun again, but that there may be nothing out beyond that mist but more mist.

I went to the genocide memorial on Monday. I was doing fine through the display about the history of the genocide. I've read lots about it and got some grounding from the weeks in Arusha. It's a really professional, western-style memorial, with lots of placards and information boards and little touchscreen televisions that show little short films and interviews.

One, all on its own, with no pictures around it, showed one scene after another of piles of bodies, skeletons in the river, massacre sites, church courtyards with bodies piled up against the walls, some with the skin deteriorating. Little kids with machete wounds to the head. It was only a minute, maybe not even that, but it was... terrible.

Around the corner was this picture of Ntaramara church, where there was a huge massacre, something like 17,000 dead and there was a picture of this corpse. It was taken with a wide angle lens and the photographer was right down by the hand. The corpse was on its back, its skull facing upwards, its mouth open as though in terror, as though it was in mid-scream when it fell. Most of the teeth had been knocked away. The decay had already taken its eyes, but the dark holes of its skull seemed somehow lifelike, like they were dark, dark eyes boring holes into you. Most of the flesh on its face, arm and hand was gone, but there was still enough to give it a mummified effect and there were still nails on the skeletal fingers. The photographer was a woman named Corinne, who once worked for Reuters. I met her in Dakar. She works for Human Rights Watch now and has a five year old daughter.

I watched the video loop through twice, shaking my head and feeling my eyes fill up with tears. But it wasn't until I went upstairs to see the display called "Stolen Tomorrows" that I really lost it. The exhibit was on children who died in the genocide. It was incredibly simple, just a few blown-up photos with some simple placards underneath, telling the viewer about the child's personality, their favourite food, maybe their favourite song or best friend. And how they died.

So right off the top you get this gorgeous 12-year-old girl whose last words were: "Mum, where can I run to?" and then you turn the corner and there are these huge blown up photos of kids with chubby knees and big, lightbulb-sized eyes, who liked to eat chocolate or rice, whose best friend was their dad or their sister, who liked to ride bikes or play hide-and-seek. One was stabbed through the eyes. Another was smashed against a wall. Sisters were killed when a grenade was tossed into their shower. One boy, 10-year-old David, had ambitions of being a doctor. His last words were: "UNAMIR will come." He was tortured to death.

And on one wall, on etched glass, a quote from Rose, aged 10: "When I am in the market, in the midst of a large crowd, I always think I might just find my brothers."

And so.

I had to go to the bathroom and get some toilet roll to use as Kleenex.

In 1994 I would have been finishing high school and heading to journalism school. I just kept thinking, what was I doing 12 years ago in April, when these little kids were hiding in attics, trenches, neighbours' outhouses, in the bush, in the dark, soaking wet and starving, freezing in temperatures that feel like Canadian fall?

What were any of us doing?

On the anniversary of the start of the genocide, some British women who I met at the hotel went for dinner with some Rwandans they know and I tagged along. The boys are all athletes, top tennis or squash players who’ve lived in Europe or the U.S., and were about 11 to 15 when the genocide began. As the night progressed, there were stories dropped here and there about one sneaking food through the roadblocks to his cousin. The cousin was the only one of his family to survive and as the night wore on and he got progressively drunker, his stories got less coherent and more emotional. He watched his seven year old sister, his only remaining relative, be killed by a friend. And now he sees that “friend” most days in town, roaming around free. The man whose house we’d invaded was sitting in the corner, staring morosely into a mug of tea. He’d walked all the way from Kigali to Goma during the war, which is more than 200 km. He was probably only 14 at the time.

At a certain point I wanted to leave as fast as we could. I knew the night was going to be melancholy, we’d been invited and warned that although they might have a lot on their minds, four Western women would be a welcome distraction. But we were pitiful. It was hard to know whether to keep the stories going or whether to simply try to gently change the topic to something less bleak. We all seemed to have different approaches. Two of the girls, finally succumbing to jetlag after arriving two days prior, fell asleep on the couch. The other tried to keep the radio cranked and the mood light. I just sat, not really making conversation, waiting for the guys to decide which direction they wanted the conversation to go. It was excruciating, not only to be surrounded by such raw trauma, but to feel so helpless in the face of it. It’s not a Rwandan culture or custom to show emotion or to dwell on the past and it was hard to know when you’d crossed the line from being interested and supportive into intrusive and voyeuristic.

Towards the end of the evening, when we’d definitely outstayed our welcome but were having trouble getting a cab to come to the door, one of the guys turned to me and told me that he wished he were a journalist and if he was, he’d stick it to the politicians. When I asked him what he meant, he essentially said he wanted to get people like war criminal Theoneste Bagasora in a room and demand to know what they were thinking, what they were doing. Essentially, he wants the war criminals to face the aftermath.

At a few times that night, I would certainly rather have been hiding in a cell in another country rather than facing a generation of distraught and damaged young men.