Wednesday July 22 2009

Tuesday began with going to an academic conference on the genocide. There were some Americans there, but also a Belgian or two, three Israeli's, and a whole group of faculty from the netherlands. Just like an American conference, egotism and narcissism ran rampant. Some people were there to promote their books, or their ideas, others to give their opinions to Rwanda at large. That said, there was a good talk on the gacaca process. Even though justice was necessary for the restoration of Rwanda, there are so many guilty or potentially guilty people in Rwanda that they overwhelmed the criminal justice system. Gacaca is an adaptation of the Rwandan communal village justice process to post genocidal justice.

Tuesday evening we went to a church service at John Baptiste's evangelical church, the church of Zion. There was singing, dancing, a good deal or prayer and preaching, casting the devil out of Rwanda and waiting for God. Although foreign to my Western sensibility, I think it is very healing for them. Later I met with the pastor who welcomed me graciously, mainly because of my association with Yeshiva University and the Jews. He knew a few messianic jews if Jerusalem, and so had heard of Yeshiva University.

This morning we visited a primary school in Kigali. We got to it because a man we asked directions of on the street was a teacher there. The children were very curious and very welcoming, once they got over their initial astonishment and shyness. They sang for us, not traditional songs as you might expect, but Rwandan rap. One of them danced for us, showing us a Rwandan version of Michael Jackson's moonwalk. The rest of the class clapped and chanted along. After a while Denise joined them with her hip hop moves. The class also told us how much they like Obama, who the called the first African president. As we walked on the road to the school,and as we left, the local kids who were not in school (it was vacation, so most classes weren't in session)shouted out something in Kinyarwandan. I don't remember the words exactly, but the translation was "White people passing."

We just got back from another visit to the Kigali genocide memorial. It was even more overwhelming for me seeing it a second time. It was Denise's first visit, and she seemed overwhelmed to me having seen it all. It takes about 3 hours to walk through the museum, and all of it is painful. Besides the Rwandan genocide, there are displays of other genocides: the Armenian, the Cambodian, other massacres of African peoples, and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

It is all painful, but the most painful for me was the final section, titled wasted lives. This shows photographs of children who were killed in the genocide, along with little descriptions of what they were like. For example Alain's favorite food was milk from their cow, his best friend was his mum, his ambition was to be a doctor, and his last words were "mum, where can I run." He was hacked to death by a machete.

Everything in the museum is unthinkable, unimaginable, and yet it all happened.