Arrival, St Familie, Faith Victory, Nyomata

Dear Peoples.

Hello. I am in Rwanda. We are staying in a Jesuit Retreat Center next to St. Familie – a large church and genocide site in Kigali. The priest offered people haven, locked them in the church, regularly took women to the back room and raped them, then served mass. After two weeks, he called in the army to slaughter everyone. I was struck by the quietness of the church – a tall quiet brick building – and the people praying inside. Rwanda is attempting with great will and vision, to carve a country where victims, perpetrators, returnees are creating an identity of “one Rwanda” and the cost of that is – for example, a survivor not only having to return to site where they lost many of their family, but maybe praying in this church side by side with a man (or woman) involved in killing them.

And then, we visited an association called Faith and Victory Association. The train facilitators who then go into communities and hold facilitate community conflicts for perpetrators, survivors and domestic violence cases unrelated to genocide. We visited an association about a half hour out of the capital in a village by Nyamata – more on Nyamata in a moment. We got a quick introduction from perpetrators and survivors who have been involved in discussions together - to learn how to “speak freely” with each other, to develop trust. The self-defined perpetrator smiled as he put his arm around the man who lost his entire family – mother, father, wife, four children- to the genocide. The survivor did not smile. The perpetrator, a fairly outgoing man in an orange shirt, held his hand, but the survivor did not hold it back. The perpetrator was basically holding the guy’s thumb in a tentative awkward embrace. And it made me think – also, what does reconciliation look like? A slogan they kept saying at the association was “a step ahead”. Yes, it is much work. Yes, there is a possibility to become hopeless in the face of so much loss and inequity. But also, how to celebrate a step in a direction toward peace? And how to learn to recognize it? The Association’s hospitality was remarkable – a thing we encounter again and again in Rwanda – a group with very little picked and roasted ground nuts for everyone our group.

Same day: We visited Nyomata. A church that has been preserved as a genocide memorial .Many, many genocide sites were churches or schools because they were solid buildings and the Hutus would encourage Tutsi to gather here – often implying they could be a safe haven – and then when they had people rounded up would weaken them with starvation and then come in and kill them – or lock them in and set the place on fire, in the case of Sovu, for example. About 6,000 people were killed in the church at Nyamata and 4,000 interned there who were bodies discovered in the neighboring areas. 10,000 in all.

The church is a little raw- Clothes of the dead line the floor. The ax mark in the door remains where the lock was hacked off to get into the side rooms. The altar cloth is spotted with blood. Those blood stains have particular stories – here is where a baby was ripped from a woman’s womb. We were there at the same time as a memorial service held by survivors who had lost family in the church. And so we stood looking at this museum while women wailed and someone had to be carried outside. The light came in through the windows and across the brick and the piles of clothes radiated gold light. What is to be learned here beyond the beauty and terror of death?