4 Dec 2009

Intro

Hello all! It has been a busy month since last posting…Running around like a mad woman, trying to do research, writing my papers, finishing up my big internship projects and my week of vacation. While I cannot post the pics I promised last time (because my computer currently will not turn on, grrrrrr!), I do have a few fun ones from my work and around my house. I’m working frantically to finish my big final paper and have some time in Uganda to be with my friends. Next weekend we are going up to Murchison Falls to go on a game drive and see the falls which are supposed to be amazing. I am looking forward to it! I travelled to Gulu recently and by coincidence ended up at a restaurant where Betty Bigombe was having lunch…If you don’t know already, Betty Bigombe is from Northern Uganda and was directly involved in convincing the government and rebel group LRA to sit and have peace talks. They stalled, but she was almost singlehandedly responsible for opening that channel of commincation, absolutely one of my heroes. So I was sitting having lunch after taking the Post Bus up, a six and a half hour journey that is none-too-comfortable, and the woman I was with pointed her out. Later I got to meet her and chat for a little while. Despite the fact that she is so important, she was treating the waiters with respect, she took time to chat with me and my friend Kiran about what we were doing in Uganda, she was a genuinely nice, warm, amazing, inspiring person. She radiates intelligence and power. Wow!!!

Rwanda

Earlier in November, Rach and I went to Rwanda for a few days to see the genocide memorial and sites. Arriving to Rwanda was like arriving to the inverse of Kampala. Where Kampala is dirty, Kigali was clean; where traffic is at a standstill, Kigali traffic flowed easily; when crossing the street in Kampala you should pray first because it might be the last thing you ever do, in Kigali, the drivers stop for you, use turn signals and are generally well-mannered and disciplined; in Kampala boda-boda drivers harass you night and day, in Kigali, they ask if you would like a ride and if you say no, they thank you! In addition to this, Kigali has fountains, tree-lined streets and park-like areas where there is vegetation and a breath of fresh air. Kampala in comparison is a series of ditches and trash heaps… It was an awakening as to how many things grate on me in Kampala, and how I felt like I could breathe in Kigali. It is not as if I am not happy in Kampala, but some things drive me crazy.

As Rachel and I arrived, everything was closed for a community work day. Apparently the last Sunday of every month, from 7 am until noon nothing is open for people to do community enhancement projects: digging ditches, cleaning up rubbish, trimming hedges, etc. What a fantastic idea! I think this should be replicated in all communities: it instills responsibility for shared space and builds relationships at the same time…fantastic approach!

What was eerie about Kigali was that if you didn’t already know about the genocide, there were few traces of it to be seen anywhere. I am sure that is different in the communities where the gacaca was working, where neighbors killed neighbors, where families walk past the one who killed their loved ones…But in Kigali you had to look for genocide sites and traces. It almost seems as if any place that is not overtly a memorial has had all traces of it washed away. One example, we tried to stay at this place called St. Paul’s of the Pastoralist (or something like that), but it was booked, so we walked past a large church called St. Famille and to another little church that had a guesthouse. When we got to the official memorial, we found out that at St. Famille, the priest, Fr. Wenceslas, had cooperated with the Interahamwe and thousands of people were killed inside the church. And that at St. Paul’s, the priest who just two years before was head of St. Famille had refused entry to the Interahamwe saving thousands…And we were sleeping in between these two places. After that we went back to look more closely, but there was nothing commemorating either the heroic actions of St. Paul’s or the betrayal of St. Famille. What is more, there were people worshiping in St. Famille. I think I would have a hard time praying in a church where thousands were massacred. I mean I guess you would want to reclaim that space, but it seems to me that after a church openly cooperates with evil people would be having a crisis of faith. I suppose this has happened throughout history: the church being on both sides. Perhaps that is how people sustain their faith despite horror stories.

Part of what draws me about this is the idea of memorialization. As I am reading for my thesis about art and healing, memorializing and commemorating play a fairly consistent role. But neither of these churches had even a commemorative inscription on a plaque. I guess I am searching for the right balance between remembering and forgetting. I know some work has been done on that in South Africa, but what about Rwanda? It strikes me that there is something unfinished, something hovering under the surface. There is still that unresolved tension there, and that is evident in Kigali. The city is too quiet, too orderly, too well patrolled. I am certain that things are not as they should be, but I had only a taste to try to understand what has taken decades to create…

Then we went to the official genocide memorial in the center of Kigali, which is incredibly well done. It is a good mix of history: the ugly and the hopeful. My favorite part of the exhibit was a section on everyday heroes—people who saved five, eleven or twenty-two, not thousands. They saved them by digging ditches and planting crops over the ditch so people had cover and food. They saved them by lifting up their bed a few more inches so someone could have space underneath. They saved them by telling the soldiers not to enter the shrine or evil spirits would take them. They were just ordinary people who did good in the face of evil. It is inspiring to read about people like that and remember that not every peacebuilder is a Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. The hardest part of the memorial wasn’t the section on the actual genocide where they had video footage of one of the roadblocks that the Interahamwe set up—I have seen gruesome stuff like that in my research for Verdeja’s genocide class. The most heart-wrenching part was a section devoted only to children. They did their research and found out an interesting fact about each kid, like what their favorite food was, who their best friend was, their favorite present from their last birthday…They put that, their name, their age and how they were killed below an 8×10 (or larger) picture. Somehow for me, it is always the children that get my heart…

The next day, Rach and I decided to go to the churches. They are about 40 km outside of Kigali. We took a taxi out to Nyamata, the first church where once the bodies had been removed to mass graves in the back of the church, nothing else was touched. There were machetes on the floor mingled with the clothes of the dead. There were shoes overturned and notches in the tree out front from cuts by machetes. Down in the area where I assume baptisms used to take place, there are about 100 skulls, some of them labeled with people’s names, and a casket that contains a mother and child. The woman was given her own casket because in the past she was on display to show the brutality of the Interahamwe (who speared her and the baby on her back, intersecting them so the spears formed a cross), but people found it so visually disturbing that they decided to put her in a casket. Unlike in the US, the skulls and bones were not behind glass or behind a rope. There was no distance between you and this person who had been murdered. I could have reached out and touched his or her skull, felt the indentation where the skull cracked after a wicked blow. There were 10,000 people murdered in the church and surrounding courtyard, all in the course of three days. We were lucky, when we got there, one of the seven survivors was there telling his story. Charles. He must have been my age, making him about 10 when the genocide happened. He walked around with us, showing us where different people he knew were killed, where the Interahamwe stood, where he hid…He did a good job of never calling them “the Hutu” he always referred to them as the perpetrators or the Interahamwe.

Rach and I wrote down his story afterward, as much as we could remember. I will try to transcribe it soon so I don’t forget. He took us to the mass graves that are at the back of the church, but he left us there and said that he would meet us out front when we were ready. Rach and I spent close to two hours there, not because we wanted to, but because we felt compelled to. I took many pictures, hoping somehow to be able to capture this devastation for someone who has never seen it. It was like being in Austria again when I went to the concentration camp. I felt compelled to take pictures and sick at the same time… Perhaps part of it too was that there was no barrier, no separation from it, and so I needed the camera to give me some kind of distance through the lens. Maybe it was safer for me that way, maybe I didn’t have to be there in the moment as much. But I am haunted by it. Which is what it is designed to do… I felt silly taking pictures.

At Nyamata, we ran into a group of East Africans in Kigali for a conference on water preservation. We struck up a conversation with one man from Kenya, Joe. He reminded me very much of another Kenyan Joe, from the LLMs last year. His group was going to the next church, so we hitched a ride rather than taking public transport. As we left, Rachel and I got split into two different vehicles and I was sandwiched between a man from Burundi and a woman from Tanzania. We talked the 25 minutes to the other church about the memorial and what we were doing here. The second church—Ntarama—was for some reason even more difficult to see than the first one. I think at the first one the clothes and the bones and everything that was there was untouched, but they were things I expected to see. At this church, people hid out and lived there for two weeks before the Interahamwe finally came. And so the remains that were left were those of lives interrupted—mattresses rolled up and stacked in the corner, teapots set over a fire pit, children’s toys, rosaries, broken glasses, forks and plates, bullet casings, bloody machetes, a book that looked like a diary… While the clothes were a reminder that there were real people who were massacred here, it was the everyday things that really hit hard. I began to think about the fact that I had seen the bones and graves of over 20,000 people in one day. I mean how do I comprehend that? 20,000 people? That is bigger than the student population of Notre Dame. And that was only a fraction of the people who were killed. I don’t know how to make that real. I have no concept of 1 million people killed by machetes. I don’t know how to make sense of it either.

Nymata Church, genocide memorial: There were 6,800 people massacred inside the church alone. Their bodies have been removed, but their clothes remain. Another 4,000 people were killed on the ground outside the church because there was no room inside. The tree outside the church has notches on it from where machetes were embedded in the trunk. It smells musty inside and is so still. The thick walls give a false sense of security. The two men at the front are two of only seven survivors… At the back of the church are the mass graves. The coffins are stacked floor to ceiling and in each coffin are the remains of 10-30 people, often times entire families if they could be identified by their killersà I killed that one over there, this is the daughter of him who I killed…In the church on the lower level is a coffin which contains the remains of a Tutsi woman who refused the marriage proposal of a Hutu man. She married another Tutsi and had a three-month-old baby on her back when she sought refuge in the church. The Interahamwe found her and decided to teach her not to refuse a Hutu man. They put a spear through her vagina through her skull and another through her chest impaling her child as well. After the genocide, everything was intact, clearly showing what had happened, her crucifixion. Only recently did they put her in a coffin because so many visitors—foreigners and natives alike—were disturbed.

The story told to me and Rachel on 1 November 2009 at Nymata Church outside of Kigali by one of the seven survivors, Charles.

In 1992 there was a practice for the genocide in the village. Thousands came to the church to hide. An Italian nun brought food and water and tried to alert the world media to the situation. She was killed for her outspokenness, but no one who took refuge in the church was killed. So in 1994, when the genocide started, people came to the church on the 7th of April because they had been safe there before. It was so packed that there was no room to sit, only stand. They decided to put the children in the back area of the church where they could be protected. It got so crowded that the church was completely full and the people filled up the courtyard (there was no fence then). The Interahamwe came and surrounded on three sides, singing, playing drums and chanting, “We shall kill the cockroaches, we shall kill the snakes!” The two trucks of soldiers came [government soldiers] and put a fence around us so no one could escape. They put bayonets on the end of their guns and jabbed at people. Soldiers went around the village and brought more people in. The general gave the order to the Interahamwe, “Hutus, do your work.” They swarmed in an began to kill everyone in the courtyard. As they were killing people in the courtyard, the priest was baptizing people inside so they could be sure to go to heaven. It took six hours. Then the Interahamwe tried to break down the door of the church, it held. They shot the door, still it held. They threw a grenade at the door and were able to enter then. They took six from the side room and put them against the other door that was not yet open. They cut off their arms and heads and then used the arms to wave to those of us inside, saying, “See how we kill the cockroaches?” Then they found six educated people—the priest, a doctor, the headmistress in the primary school and three others. They tied them to the pillars and used hammers to break their skulls. When the bodies fell dead, the Interahamwe taunted them, “You intellectuals, use your brains and stand up.” There had been three priests in the church previously who had come for baptisms—a Spaniard who fled when the genocide started, a Hutu who also fled to Kigali, and the one whose skull was smashed.

Then, the women of the Interahamwe came in and started killing the children by grabbing their legs and smashing them against the walls because they maybe couldn’t kill the adults. At one point, they found a pregnant Hutu woman who had married a Tutsi man. They asked her why she was hiding in this place. She replied that she could not be like them. One of the killers recognized her and said she was married to a Tutsi. They took her to the alter and told her they needed to remove her sin. They used a sword, slit her and removed the baby. They did this to five other pregnant women as well. AS they were cutting people and beating them with clubs and sticks with 15cm nails pounded into them, the killers offered to shoot people so they could die painlessly if they had money. Many people did. When they had killed many people, they threw grenades into the church to make sure everyone was dead. You can still see the holes in the ceiling and the blood that splattered from that. 16 people survived this and fled to the swamp. The killers pursued them there and only seven of us lived…

My research/Art and Healing as Underutilized Tools in Peacebuilding

Recently I attended an interesting performance, it was a collaboration between an NGO, Invisible Children—that helps rehabilitate child soldiers, and the Uganda National Contemporary Ballet. They showed a documentary, “The Rescue of Joseph Kony’s Child Soldiers,” and then had a 45 minute interpretive dance performance based on stories and testimonies from the formerly abducted. Additionally, they brought a former night commuter and child soldier who escaped from the LRA to give his testimony as well. The documentary was simplistic, but probably perfect for the American audience it was intended for, it reminded me of John Prendergast’s presentation last year: compelling and canned at the same time…It was made by three kids from Southern Cali who decided after seeing the night commuters to try to contact Kony and open a different channel of dialogue. Of course they failed miserably, as everyone who has attempted to get Kony to sign a peace agreement has. But the film was about their journey and motivations. After the film, Innocent, the formerly abducted night commuter gave his testimony, telling how he was taken, how he escaped, how he lived and still lives in fear that he will be taken again. That he has changed schools four times so he is not ever in one place too long, but he still managed to graduate senior secondary in six years. He did a great job with his testimony, was cool, calm, confident. He has definitely had a good public speaking coach. But more than that, he seems to be driven by a genuine desire to tell the world his story and the story of those whose voices are silenced. I find that incredibly inspiring.

The dance performance was interesting in many ways: it was an interpretation through dance of several stories of formerly abducted told to the director of the dance company in interviews. It was divided into several scenes: Kill or be killed, Nightmares, Girl soldiers, Our childhood is destroyed, Life goes on. I was struck by something one of the performers said: (it was something like this) In a world where brutality is the norm, life becomes a violent gift that keeps on giving and war becomes a way of life. This, to me, is the power art has to heal, to bring people together, to untie them in a common cause, to refuse to accept the previous statement.

Moving On

I have to get back to working on my paper now, but I wanted to write a lot since it has been so long! I miss you all and hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. I’ve put up a few random pics, enjoy! I’ll be home in less than a month, crazy!

Relaxing after a long day of rehearsal and ‘worshopping’ testimonies

Yummy avocado as big as my head….

More of the performance

Gertrude, my closest friend

The Drama Group performing for a group of visiting doctors from all over East Africa

I am going to be so sad to leave them…they are my Ugandan family.

Relaxing after a long day of rehearsal and ‘worshopping’ testimonies

Yummy avocado as big as my head….

More of the performance

Gertrude, my closest friend

The Drama Group performing for a group of visiting doctors from all over East Africa

I am going to be so sad to leave them…they are my Ugandan family.