Nyamata Memorial

Yesterday, we had a very trying afternoon. We drove to the south to visit the Nyamata Genocide Memorial. It’s a church where 10,000 Tutsis were trapped and slaughtered. Only seven individuals survived.

Normally, I wouldn’t share something this personal or depressing with my online community of followers, but since most of you may never come to Rwanda, I think it’s important to share with you what I saw and felt in hopes that by learning from humanity’s horrific past, we may work to change humanity’s future.

The following is what I wrote in my journal upon returning from Nyamata:

They’ve collected the clothes of the victims and placed them on the wooden pews and around the alter. Piles and piles and piles of clothes collecting cobwebs in this space that was once considered holy. I lean against a brick pillar for support. Our tour guide tells us they tied the most educated Tutsis to this pillar before murdering them in front of the crowd. There are steps that lead to a small white room under the church. In the room, there is a glass case filled with the skulls and bones of countless victims. I had thought that would have been the worst of it…

Out back behind the church, there are stairs to another cellar. I walk down into cool air and am staring at a row of coffins covered in purple and white ribbon. I follow our Rwandan guide to my right (he himself is one of the survivors of this massacre) and find myself in between two long rows of towering shelves filled with human bones. All the skulls are lined up in perfect order and stare straight at me with those gaping eye sockets. It’s the teeth that get to me though… A skull might just be a skull; a symbol of death, or of human evolution. After all, I’ve been in their presence before in the catacombs of Paris. But these skulls are different – they are not blocked by glass or rope. And they did not die of natural causes. The one I look at now is maybe a foot from my face with almost a full set of teeth. These teeth look just like mine. These are the teeth the victim may have bared in a smile or perhaps in pain at the moment of his death.

I have to leave and promptly walk up the stairs and back into daylight. I sit for awhile – not knowing how or what is the appropriate thing to feel. Sadness? Anger? Despair at the utter failure of humanity? Then a Rwandan friend comes out of the hole in the ground and he is crying. These are his people – this is his country. He was a soldier in RPF when they came to liberate Rwanda. But RPF was too late to save these 10,000 victims that were killed on April 7, 1994. And so were we.

Being here is starting to wear on my mental health. I will be sad to say goodbye to the friends I have made, but am looking forward to a change of pace. I will be able to walk away from this experience a changed person, with a better idea of why we must fight for human rights and put a meaning to the term “Never Again.”