Butare

June 8, 2013

We just got back from Butare, which is about 2.5 hours away from Kigali at the southern border of Rwanda.  We left yesterday morning and once we got there we had lunch, went to the National Museum of Rwanda and then the National University of Rwanda, where I wop-ed at the university bar and managed to gather a crowd. But that’s another story.

This morning we went to the Murambi Genocide Memorial.  On the way there, we passed a bunch of prisoners working in the fields. In Rwanda, prisoners serving time for acts of genocide wear orange jumpsuits while all the other prisoners were pink.  We see people all the time and wonder about what their role was in 1994. Were they survivors? Were they informants? Did they help to hide Tutsis? Were they perpetrators? But it’s strange to see a man and know that they were killers, perpetrators of the genocide. 

Butare is considered the intellectual area of Rwanda and genocide there didn’t happen at quick as it did in Kigali.  Murambi is basically like a technical school where Tutsis were told by to government to seek refuge.  However, the government used the school to ultimately round up all the Tutsis in the area so it was easier to get to all of them at once.

Once we got to the memorial it started out as a kind of walk-through museum with a lot of information about the events leading up to 1994 and how the genocide was carried out alongside the civil war.  We walked toward these buildings (I think there were 4 or 5) which served as mass graves.  In these buildings, bodies were preserved and shown to visitors.  You can see the looks on their faces, the limbs missing from mutilation, and worst of all, the small skeletons of the children who died in Murambi. 

After going in the room that was designated for children, I just stood there for a few minutes, and I guess I had a disturbed look on my face because the guide put his hand on my shoulder and asked me if I was okay. Here was this Rwandan man, who was probably at least 10 during the genocide and probably lost many friends and family members in 1994, asking me if I was okay. Me, who didn’t know a single person who was a victim of genocide.  Me, who didn’t even know about the Rwanda genocide before last year. Me, an American, whose country didn’t do a single thing to stop what happened in 1994. No, I was not okay.

The kindness of people in Rwanda inspires me. Most of them have lived through horrible atrocities that no human being and no child should ever have to go through, and yet they are still some of the sweetest and most caring people I have ever met.