I caught myself in a moment of cynicism. In a recent post I said that Rwanda is a place that “shouldn’t be able to produce idealists.” I shouldn’t say that. I’ll try to explain what I meant.
One of my current duties for Shalom, the NGO I’m working with, is to help compose a speech that my boss has been invited to give at an international conference in October. The topic is the role of religion in healing Rwanda after the genocide. (An overwhelming number of church institutions were complicit in the genocide of almost one million Rwandans in 1994. Many bishops and pastors simply stepped aside, or used their clout to flee the country. The Pope refused to officially condemn the massacres. The shepherds failed to protect their flock. But somehow, after the genocide, instead of asking Where Was God? they asked Which Way to Church? 97% of the country now belongs to an organized church or mosque). These’ll be his ideas, organized and hopefully eloquentized by my native English. (I tried to explain that being a Religious Studies major doesn’t really give me the authority to write about it, but he was excited anyway).
So I’ve spent a few hours interviewing him about the details of his Genocide experience – he was 20 at the time. I have, I admit, been blown away by his somehow level-headed optimism. We are humans. This thing happened. But this is community. This is how we heal. I won’t tell his story, but I’ll tell my own. Living in Rwanda, you can’t not think about the genocide.
First, there is an important and obvious note about living in Rwanda: genocide becomes the backdrop with which to compare everything. There is a time called ‘before’ and a time called ‘after’. Any unremarkable statement about the place seems to end with an ellipsis, a dramatic pause before someone says the G word that everyone is thinking. This constant comparison gives you kind of an awful and skewed scale of judgment, but you can’t help it. As I’ve said before, I’ve been lucky to have had Rwandan friends open up to me and tell me their stories – you never pry for them, of course, but you know they’re valuable and incredible – and important – and also dripping with ooohs and ahhhs, and they’re always just below the surface like a precious jewel you’re not allowed to dig for. So when someone opens up, you listen. You lean in and quiet down, your eyes get wide. I remember in great detail some stories I’ve been told – among them Jean de Dieu’s, one of a teacher in the Shyira primary school, and one of a guide I had in the national park last summer.
I don’t have the right to share these stories in detail, but I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. Just two days ago I was at lunch with a Rwandan man, enjoying tea in a suburb of Kigali, sitting at a table next to a semi-rural dirt street. A worker walked by with a bundled swath of long grass balanced on his head – feed for cows. One of his hands helped balance the grass. The other hung by his side, holding a machete. My Rwandan friend did a double-take and kind of shuddered. His face flashed something that I might describe as a pained grimace – I noticed it – and then he caught himself, came back to his senses, and gave a weird, over-compensating laugh. “Sometimes, still,” he laughed, “when I see a machete…”
And there was The Ellipsis. He didn’t finish his thought, but obviously I knew exactly what he meant. And I wasn’t laughing.
Once your catalogue of shocking personal stories begins to grow, you realize something even more disturbing: these stories aren’t uncommon at all. They’re very, very common, maybe the most common thing of all. In some ways they are the only common thing that matters – these shared memories of trauma just might be the fragile thread that holds this whole darn place together. And they are as mundane to them as they are powerful to us. To a Rwandan, they are the banal fabric of everyday life.
But I’m not a Rwandan, so they take some getting used to. And here’s another thing: I’ve hung out with enough travelers and ex-pats here to notice patterns in the accepted vocabulary of in-the-know outsiders – the parlance of our times, if you catch my drift. Just like in any place, there’s an in crowd here, and it’s in among the outsider in crowd to comment on the broken soul of Rwanda. This is going to be really cynical of me, again, but you’ll have to excuse me. I have to be honest. I’ve too many times been out at a restaurant with other outsiders when some white guy – probably a really nice guy, a traveler, let’s say – ends his rumination by sighing, looking off into the distance, and saying something like “… but in Rwanda…” Or some well-meaning white girl – a really nice girl, a missionary, maybe – furrows her brow, shakes her head, and says in a tone of genuine concern – and I have no reason to think it’s anything but genuine – “yes…especially in Rwanda.”
In some ways I much prefer the jaded aid worker to these sometimes self-important Lonely Planet types. I know, I know – I’ve certainly been that person before. Or I still am. And maybe this blog is just as guilty as their sighs and ellipses, and maybe we are all just a bunch of people who have been earnestly impacted by a shared experience in the emotional weight of Rwanda, and we’re all expressing it in different ways, so who am I to judge? I know, I know. In some ways Rwanda now belongs to all of us – it is a story for all of humanity – but I can’t help but be embarrassed on behalf of these outsiders who pretend that they really get the emotional plight of Rwanda. What would my Rwandan friends say if they saw us talking, musing about genocide, sighing into the distance, unphased by the sight of machetes?
We should learn the history, we should listen to the stories, we should take from them the lessons we can learn – but we must also know when to tread lightly on other people’s sacred ground. Sometimes during these ex-pat dinners I end up being the quiet one in the room just because I’m afraid if I say anything it’s going to be along the lines of Go back to America.
And I apologize, but I had to get that out. My judgmental flights of cynicism are very much the exception in my time in Rwanda, not the rule. But I’ve realized that I could easily go through a whole summer of blogging by highlighting only the wonderful experiences of picturesque travel in Mother Africa. And there will be many of those. Sunsets over banana trees, passion fruit (!), playing guitar in a Pentecostal church, the unexpected kindness of strangers… but what would real, adventurous travel be without, say, persistent diarrhea? Traveling gives you plenty of these less picturesque moments, and any amount of time spent in a place as fascinating and deeply conflicted as Rwanda is going to give you conflicted thoughts and feelings, too – guilt and shame, curiosity and awe.
I’ve described traveling as the art of rolling with the punches. I’ll stand by that, and I’ll try to keep this blog an honest account of all the best punches.
No comments:
Post a Comment