The grief is debilitating. I would walk and feel my legs becoming heavier, almost immobilized, as I slowly moved through the mass graves. At times I was close to passing out and I’d have to sharpen up mentally and reconnect with my breath. At other times I felt hyper-alert to the point of panic and had to slow my breath — it would be coming in heaves. I would feel pain so deep the rest of the world ceased to exist and I would be swallowed entirely in it. If I had been able to think in those moments I would have thought my life was over; nothing else was possible, except maybe to crawl silently to somewhere quiet to sit, to hide, to huddle. Three women with a faded color photograph gripped in their hands staggered through the graves. One fell to her knees and her sisters stood alongside her as pillars. When she recovered slightly it was the other two women’s turn to keen. I wanted to run to their group and throw myself on them, like we were a pyre, sobbing, howling, “I am so sorry, I am so sorry.” Perhaps they would have appreciated such a validating outburst of communal sorrow, perhaps culturally that would have been wildly out of order. I barely restrained myself as I passed by them, brushing one lightly on the back. She said, “Thank you.”

I am muzungu, a white person. I wish I had gone with my instinct and reached out more to the women. Part of the pain about the genocide is the lack of validation.

Prayer did help as I was sucked inexorably further into the memorial. When I would start to lose my mind I would start to pray for the souls of the dead. (I haven’t started to pray yet for the perpetrators, the way Archbishop Tutu’s daughter has taught me, but I will. I will.) May you rest in peace. May you rest in peace. May you rest in peace. One million and more times, may you rest in peace.

One of the round rooms of the exhibit had victim’s clothing suspended in midair by filament. The arrangement of the clothes suggests the posture of the body that had occupied them; the empty garments expressed surprise, violence, pitiful and useless self defense. The clothes were all sizes, and I stood, weeping and haunted, in front of a child’s colorful sweater, filthy from where the body had lain in the muck. At that little child’s age, that would have been my favorite sweater, it was so cheerful. It reminded me of the rainbow painted on the entrance to the tunnel from Marin County to the Golden Gate Bridge, so optimistic! Next to it was a tattered Superman sheet. God have mercy on us all. Was the person sleeping and hacked to death in his bed? Had a family tried to flee their mud hut, the sheet grabbed in a mindless fit of modesty? Had a wildly panicked mother grabbed the sheet to tie her youngster to her back so she could run from her rapists?

Another room had horizontal rows of filament, to which survivors pin photographs of their loved ones. Rows, rows and rows, images from family parties, official documents, snapshots of reluctant-looking elderly which perhaps an amateur family historian took to have for future generations. The room is devastating. It is almost unbearable. “Murder, murder, murder!” it silently screams.

I paused at the memorial guest book. I couldn’t see the page for my tears blearing my sight. What do I say? How do I tell the survivors of such horror anything consoling? How does one apologize to the dead? Feeling useless and incompetent I wrote, “I am sorry, I am so sorry.”
Afterwards I was asked to say a few words to our local staff and the media. In the morning, I had thought to talk about the Rwandan government’s extraordinary action in rebuilding itself, a veritable Phoenix rising from ashes, and to salute N.G.Os. (non-governmental organizations) and initiatives like President Clinton’s, which have accomplished so much. It was not, however, the right time; this needed to be about genocide, regret, accountability. In this moment, I found the division between the intellect and the emotional in order to be able to speak in public and not simply wail. I took responsibility certainly for my government’s inaction, pledged to do my part as a citizen to ensure no genocide happens again and to serve Rwanda’s people as living amends. I also mentioned this Chinese ship full of arms that was trying to dock in Zimbabwe earlier this week. Are people out of their minds? Nothing, absolutely nothing good can possibly come of such arms coming to Africa. Are we forgetting, even as this memorial exists, that the genocide was committed with .50 machetes from China? I vowed to call my legislators and you bet your ass I did. That ship needs to go back from whence it came, thank you very much.

These writings will not be entirely about the genocide, but today’s is. It inescapably informs everything in this country, and most certainly Population Service International’s public health mission here. It is the background, acknowledged — if unspoken, it has set Rwanda’s stage.

We also visited an infamous site — a church where ten thousand children, women and elderly were slaughtered. In the mayhem of the bloody free-for-all, a group had fled to the church, naturally expecting some protection. Instead, they were tortured. The Hutu madmen began by throwing grenades into the packed throng (the church is not big — just one open room, ten thousand people in it — inconceivable). The shrapnel damage is still in the church’s tin roof, letting small bits of sun come through. Over a short period of time, the ten thousand were hacked to death, one brutal, agonizing death at a time.

Rwandan society held a special place of honor for its elderly, but in the genocide they were treated with a particular cruelty. Everyone was, really … the Hutu just found different twists on the same fundamental insult. The elderly had bred cockroach Tutsi, women gave birth to cockroach Tutsi, men married cockroach Tutsi and so on and so forth. But I feel a singular grief at what was done to the elderly. No more so than children, but … it’s a different aspect of the pain. Maybe because I spend a little time each day honoring my grandparents, thanking them for my life, coming to peace once more with the fact that they are with me in spirit but not in the flesh. That someone would set out to ruin an old person’s life, when I long each day for more old people in my life, hurts.

I haven’t said much of rape, but it happened (and continues to happen, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo, en masse). A typical example of rape as a tool of genocide happened in this church. A woman was strung up, crucifixion style, and raped over a period of days by hundreds of genocidaires, until she expired. Her bones hung on the tortured scaffolding until recently. Her remaining family asked for them to be interred just recently — they had enough of her bones as a historical teaching point.