Agahozo = "to dry your tears"

Part of my new job is doing field visits to women's income generating groups throughout Rwanda. The groups are facilitated through our partner organization, a widows organization called AVEGA Agahozo (agahozo means “to dry your tears”). I wasn’t told much, other than when we would be leaving and that I should compile some questions to ask the women how they feel about the project. So on my third day of work I was thrown into a rickety old car and driven deep into the hills of Northern Rwanda.

I was really nervous about whether I might say the wrong thing or ask the wrong questions, bring up old wounds or rub salt in new ones. I wasn’t sure how I would relate or what the tone would be. Turns out you don’t relate, you just listen. And the tone isn’t always solemn – every group laughs for about 20 minutes straight every time I try to speak Kinyarwanda.

Luckily, my colleague was sent with me to act as translator. When we arrived, we were led into a hall where the IGA (income generating activity) class took place. The class had about 50 women. We started out by discussing the purpose of the project; that this was the opportunity for them to transform their lives through utilizing the training of how to find a market, work a budget sheet, keep customers, and lastly apply for a loan. They would receive this loan with remarkably low interest because our organization had arranged it with the bank. Then they would open new businesses; businesses that would give them independence and stability. After the project was explained, we opened up the floor to them for their testimonies, thoughts, or disagreements. They all spoke about how grateful they were for the opportunity and the specific skills, but it became obvious that they’d gained more than just entrepreneurship training. I had become distracted trying to hastily write everything that the translator was telling me, so much so that I wasn’t really processing what they were saying. Until one woman stood up and caught my attention.

Beforehand, most of the women had been looking at the translator, but this woman looked at me. She said, “After the genocide, we thought that life was impossible. But now that we see people are here and they are helping us, and they care, we see that life is possible.” As she was speaking she motioned to me. And just like that, I had been woven into the story. My being there had somehow validated their pain and their hope simultaneously. This recognition was entirely undeserving, as I hadn’t actually done anything yet in Rwanda. I’m just a lowly American intern. 

This perspective turned out to not be unique among the groups. Many women spoke of a regained sense of hope. One talked about how she had always been angry before; that she had watched her children and family being murdered and could never find herself smiling. She said that now on Fridays she smiles because she gets to see her friends. Another woman from the same group stood and spoke quite candidly about how she had been raped and been given aids during the genocide. “I always used to be lonely and sick” she continued, “but now, even when I am in the hospital the women come to visit me. I know now that I am not alone.”

It doesn’t seem to matter that the genocide was 18 years ago. The memory is still just as fresh today as it was then. The trauma, although distant, is still just as debilitating.

And these stories are everywhere. When traveling on a bus one of my happy, silly friends told me that his mother had been killed. I asked how, and he told me that he had watched her being dragged into a bush and hacked with a machete. He ran so fast and so long that he ended up in the Congo, where a Rwandan family found him walking down the street and adopted him. He was six.

Sometimes I find myself looking at the deep open sewers on the side of the road and imagining how many dead bodies must have been piled inside, spilling out onto the road. And why is the dirt so red? This deep, maroon, almost purple-red clay dirt that’s darker than any other that I’ve seen. The Shona in South Africa have a theory that the dirt is so red there from all the blood that’s been spilled over the land. But I’m really just getting carried away.

I wonder if anyone in this country was not affected by the genocide and its collective madness. The case of Rwanda is particularly odd in that ordinary citizens became genocidaires, with neighbors literally killing neighbors. I asked my Rwandan friend if after witnessing such a thing he believed that people were inherently good or inherently bad. He said neither. “All people in the world are capable of being good or bad. It’s not something you’re born with, it’s something you become.” That’s the dark reality of this place: is everyone really capable of being brainwashed into killing someone simply because they were born a different ethnicity? And even for those that aren’t, are those of us that remain silent as these acts occur really any less guilty? 

But despite the world’s convenient blindness during the genocide and the scars it left, there is a strange, incredible thing about Rwanda…After the genocide it rebuilt, grew, and healed. It would’ve been really easy for the country to keep spiraling into an ethnically divided, traumatized and lawless place, but instead it did the opposite. Rwanda offers a fascinating perspective in that you have the most brutal possibilities of humankind in its history juxtaposed next to the most optimistic, determined and resilient people of the present. After the genocide, the new government abolished the idea of ethnic division and made unification a law. And people take care of one another. Perhaps the widespread devastation of it all helped demonstrate everyone’s common humanity. For example, if you’re standing on the side of the road at night a bus will stop and drive you where you need to go for free, just to help you out. Every last Saturday of the month the entire country shuts down to clean the streets and do community service. There is free universal primary education. The government even has a program called “One Cow Per Family” where they give a poor family a free cow. Once that free cow has a calf or produces milk the family must give the calf and milk to their neighbors. There are innovative, widespread, effective development programs in the works. Every year Rwanda’s economy is growing, and less and less people live under the poverty line. It’s also incredibly safe. Really really safe. While I still get the whole “Muzungu” (white person) thing every now and then, for the most part I am left alone. Petty crime and muggings almost don’t exist here.

Over and over again, you find happy, hopeful people just going about their business and moving on with their lives. So while it’s important to recognize the history of this place and seek justice for survivors, it’s also important to recognize how far everyone has come since 1994. 

The Land of a Thousand Hills

[Written October 16]

Sometimes I wake up and forget where I am. My eyes are half open and I panic, stumble around a room looking for a sign of something familiar, all the while trying to remind myself where it is I’ve ended up. Cape Town, Ghana, Santa Barbara? I could just as easily be in my tiny twin bed in South Africa, or in a tent somewhere in Botswana, or on the floor of the Happy Kids girls dormitory - a cockroach laying beside me on its back, legs flailing in the air. I listen to the whizzing ceiling fan and the chickens outside until little girl eyes open and smile at me from inside their mosquito nets. Or maybe I’m in Santa Barbara, back in America, back in the developed world. On a couch at one of my best friend’s houses, last night’s wine glasses still on the table. As many times as this happens, I still have a hard time knowing. This is the somewhat hilarious frustration that comes with moving around so much. My mind has a hard time catching up with my eyes.

This is how I woke up my first day in Rwanda. Only in the midst of my confusion my ankle got caught in my mosquito net and I fell, face first, onto the concrete floor. Ah, that’s right. I moved to Rwanda. So what now?

When I landed it was night and because Rwanda is made of hills, you are almost always looking down or across, never up, so that all you can see is the darkness pierced by the scattered white lights of people’s homes across from you. In this way, it seems as if the sky has fallen to the earth. It's beautiful.

In the morning, I decided to wander into the city to find internet and a sim card for my phone. Motorcycle taxis (“moto’s”) are the most common form of transportation here, so I walked up to a driver, negotiated the price and hopped on. All of the motos have an extra helmet for you to use, but they are most often useless; oversized, cracked, and taped with duct tape…not too reassuring as you weave through traffic, pinching between a crowded minibus and a rusty truck at the last second. They are an incredibly fun and interesting way to see the city – but they are dangerous as hell. I’ve had some cringe worthy rides; some very close calls that tempt me to close my eyes, until I remember the story of my friend that had to jump off of one in a split second, right before his moto and another crashed into one another. Danger aside, motos are convenient, good if you need to get somewhere fast, and they're cheap. 

After I got my introduction to motos I moved into my new house, which I’d arranged prior to my arrival. My house is in a vibrant neighborhood called “Nyamirambo.” It’s the only part of the sleepy Kigali city that is always moving. It’s also the cheapest part of the city to live in, and is hilariously nicknamed Gangster’s Paradise. It’s packed with tiny, colorful shops. Only the main street is paved and the rest are either cobble stone roads or dirt. It has character and feels more alive, more authentic. The rest of Kigali is rather quiet and calm. My house is also great. There’s 6 of us that live there; all expats from various parts of the world…America, Holland, Denmark, and Britain. Everyone is smart, motivated, and most are working in development. I have my own room with a bed and a desk, and we even have a water heater! Granted, the water pressure is so bad that most of the time I have to boil water beforehand and then shower with a small lemonade pitcher (which I fill twice). It’s not fancy, but it’s home, and I love it.

For those that don’t know how I ended up in this dusty city, I’ve come to work for a UK based organization called Survivors Fund (SURF). SURF supports genocide survivors through a wide variety of projects, but I’ll be working mainly on their Widowed Survivors Empowerment Project. The project provides capacity building, counseling, legal and health support to older, widowed survivors of the 1994 genocide. While I’m not 100% sure what my day-to-day job duties will be, I can’t wait to dive in and get started on what I’ve always wanted to do: post-conflict development. My contract with SURF is only an initial 3 months, but I’m hoping it will either be extended or I’m able to find work somewhere else. I love getting to know a country, its language and its people, and I know that can’t be done in 3 months.

But I didn’t just come here because I needed a job. There is a fascinating curiosity that I, and I’m sure others, have always had with Rwanda. I will borrow the words from Phillip Gourevitch’s book “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families”, as I’m sure mine would be woefully inadequate:

“I presume you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flick of self-knowledge—a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it.”