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| (Historical) Traditional Rwandan House |
Yesterday we left early in the morning to make the two hour drive down to Butare where we visited the national museum on culture. It was a beautiful museum that somehow remained untouched during the genocide. Out behind the beautiful gardens of the museum, there is a school that teaches street women how to earn money by making handicrafts. There are many choices of “track” – postcard making (from banana leaves, basket weaving, jewelry making…We visited the basket weavers and they showed us their most recent creations. It was nice to have the opportunity to directly hand the money for baskets to the weavers. Usually, we these cooperatives, there’s a business person that acts as a conduit between buyer and weaver. In this case, we were encouraged by the museum director to directly pay them so they could experience the gratification of receiving money for their work. He said it’s very motivating for them to exchange directly with the customer; he hopes one day they’ll feel secure enough to venture on and make their own businesses. Economic self-sufficiency is a powerful gender equalizer.
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| Basket Weaver |
This next section talks about my personal experience at the genocide memorial in Murambi, and may not be of interest to everyone…
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| Hillside at Murambi |
Murami is the largest genocide memorial in Rwanda. Here, surrounded by 360 degrees of beautiful lush hillsides where smoke drifts innocently from distant fire pits, rest 55,000 bodies, many in mass graves, of those who sought refugee at this unfinished school during the genocide in 1994. Though the guide’s explanation in English were indecipherable, the smell of lyme-preserved bodies explained well enough what we were about to encounter before we peaked around that first classroom door. As I looked at the ashy gray bodies displayed on racks by the hundreds, the lime smell enveloped me- I had to step back for a minute. Flies buzzed around and thunder boomed ominously in the distance as if to echo some past anger that nothing was done to stop this so long ago. 840 full bodies have been preserved here, preserved in their last moments of agony; many more skulls and piles of bones are separately preserved. The guide explained all of this as she callously shifted two babies’ bodies displayed on a desk in the middle of the room. We looked, but did not enter, despite the guide’s encouragement, the rooms housing the sorted bodies. A room full of skulls, a room full of abandoned, confiscated clothing. The schoolhouse buildings where the French stayed after arriving too late to save anyone stand empty behind the others. The guide lead us out to the field where the French played volleyball on the freshly covered mass graves of the victims. We ended the tour by a large, muddy, open pit- formerly a mass grave, now exhumed. The silence of the tragic past began to fade, and sounds of animals and children playing echoed off the mountains in the distance. In the shadow of this great tragedy, life moves on- close enough to hear, but not quite close enough to see. An armed guard wanders the yard now, rifle slung across his chest. The storm finally rolls in- angry raindrops to reflect the guilt I feel that our foreign policy so badly failed humanity here…
Thanks, Caitlyn. And it's nice to finally meet you (even if virtually and all the way from Africa)! And thanks so much for your kind words. I don't feel like an inspiration in comparison to all the amazing people– Dan included– that I meet along the way. Hope you enjoy the rest of my blog. You really went back in the archives :)