"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. The line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained."
Aleksandr Solzhentisyn - “Gulag Archipelago”
Before most volunteers fly to their host country to begin their Peace Corps service, they meet for a day and a half event called “Staging”. For the Health 9 cohort of volunteers bound for Rwanda, Staging occurred at the Warwick hotel in Philadelphia, beginning on June 4, 2017. Staging serves many purposes - you learn a little bit about what you’re doing and what to expect when you get to the country and you talk about what Peace Corps service stands for - but there is perhaps no more important function of Staging than to get you first acquainted with your fellow volunteers.
There was a giddy anticipation to finally meeting one another - indeed many of us had been spending months explaining to friends, loved ones and acquaintances where we would be going, for how long, and why. To be saved from this island of isolation and get on board the fellow volunteer life raft - to finally be surrounded by those who were just as crazy as you, who would be sharing this experience with you, was both nerve racking and relieving.
To emphasize the relieving aspect of it, part of the itinerary of the first day was simply to share what common reactions we got from people who were newly informed that we would be Peace Corps volunteers in general, and Rwandan volunteers in particular. Our Staging facilitators, with the good humor of those who had heard all of the common reactions before, allowed us the floor, and we began to explain the reactions we received again and again.
“People asked me why I wanted to live in a mud hut for two years”. Nods and laughter. Yup, everyone said the same thing to me, we responded. “They guaranteed to me that I would get malaria, and they had never been to Africa once in their lives!”. More laughter, more nodding. “Everyone seemed convinced that I was going to be living in the middle of the Sahara for some reason”. Or in the plains of the savannah running with the water buffalo, like in the Lion King, others said. We went on and on, accompanied by much fanfare.
When we were asked what people had to say about Rwanda, there were less responses, but of the ones elicited, unanimous consent followed. “Not one person knew exactly where Rwanda exactly was, but they all had heard of it”. “Everyone joked with me about staying at the Hotel Rwanda”. They asked if I would be hanging out with Don Cheadle, I chimed in. People laughed. In the unsolicited game of Word Association, our American friends and family passed with flying colors. Indeed, in 2004, Don Cheadle had starred in a Oscar nominated film called “Hotel Rwanda” which was a retelling of the story of Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of a hotel in Kigali, Rwanda, that sheltered over a thousand Tutsi refugees from government militias during the Genocide Against the Tutsi of April and June of 1994. It was the only way that the citizens of the world’s preeminent nation would ever know about one of Africa’s smallest and poorest countries - by watching an account of one of the worst human disasters in modern history. What a dubious claim to fame.
But while we all scoffed that our friends and family would only know of the country that we were soon to fall in love with through such a superficial medium as a Hollywood produced movie, I suspected that prior to receiving our placement emails, many of us may have only known about our country of service through similar means. I knew that I could be counted among them.
Ignorance Is…
Staging ended, and we boarded our plane to Rwanda. Time passed quickly as we got to know our Rwandan neighbors, and became acclimated to life on the other side of the planet. Over the Christmas break, after a wedding, our friend group was walking around Kigali when we walked into the Mille Collines Hotel - by far the nicest establishment I had seen or been to in the country so far. I remember looking around thinking that this looked like any other American hotel that I had been to - pool, poolside bar, overpriced beers (over 400% markup), and foreigners as far as the eye could see. It didn’t feel much like Rwanda at all, but in that particular circumstance, on vacation, that was exactly the point. We had our overpriced drinks, a couple of us swam in the pool, and when the sun had abandoned us, we moved ourselves along to continue our chase of fun and merriment. Besides the luxury shock, the day passed uneventfully and it quickly slipped from my memory without particular note.
It wasn’t until over four months later, in April of this year, as I sat alone in my house, glued to my kindle, reading “A Thousand Hills” by Stephen Kinzer, that I made the full connection that the day I spent in the Mille Collines Hotel was indeed a day spent in the infamous (to foreigners) Hotel Rwanda. To juxtapose the scene 24 years later, of monied foreigners spending a leisurely day of eating food and drinking beer, with the scene that I was reading about with slack jawed disbelief, of abject horror that swirled within and outside the hotel in April 1994, is so stark as to seem surreal.
Why did I wait so long to figure this out? How could I have been so callous as to look right through this premier landmark (again, to non-Rwandans who are familiar with the movie) of the Genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda? Why would I assiduously avoid one of my favorite pastimes of taking personal, deep dives into interesting subject matter, when the subject matter was not only staring me in the face but literally towering over me and providing me shade against the African sun?
First and foremost, I was able to delay learning more about it because I have the luxury of being able to do so. Rwandans do not have this luxury. Being an American from a well-to-do background coming in to this country, I am able to walk the streets of Kigali and travel past memorial sites and not have the memories and images of that time come back to me. Secondly, and consciously, I made the decision because I wanted to get to know the country in which I was living in a positive light before I began to learn more about its darkest hour. I thought that any understanding I gained of the genocide before I knew the people and the places would be an opportunity lost. To have legitimate context before reading would deepen and enrich my understanding of what happened here 24 years ago.
Of course, to live in Rwanda is to live among the consequences of those events everyday. While I chose to stave off my personal dive into the genocide, I had several primers to the topic through Peace Corps training and through my own experiences with Rwandans over time. During Pre Service Training, we had a long session where a Rwandan history professor came in to tell us more about the genocide and some of the academic theories concerning how such an awful event could have happened in such a small, isolated country.
Towards the very end of our training period we went as a group to the Kigali Genocide Memorial. We all walked through the commemorative grave sites and the maze of historical panels that wind all through the building, explaining step by step, through prose, personal testimony and pictures how all of it came to pass. I recall feeling that I had never been in a place where the weight of the historical event hung so heavily in the air, like a thick fog that we all moved through with appropriate slowness and caution. Walking along every room, starting from the brief explanation of Rwanda’s pre-colonial history, to the first arrival of European colonizers, you could feel the dreadful anticipation build with every step you took and every word you read. It was common to find people wiping tears away between rooms. I often had to take a seat just to process what I had seen before I moved on. With a deep, edifying breath, I continued forward.
The after affects of the genocide also reveal themselves in subtle ways in the day to day dealings of being a volunteer. In walking around the county of Rwanda, though it is developing rapidly, with happy people dutifully pushing the country forward at a torrid pace, the scars and memories that Rwandans have of that time still manage to rear themselves, even to foreigners. For instance, a short conversation with any Rwandan of adult age will usually reveal that they had lost someone close to them during the genocide. If they are comfortable enough with you, they will impart pieces of harrowing stories, the likes of which a pampered Westerner could literally never imagine.
In these conversations - hearing them firsthand and second hand - an incomprehensible implication about living in Rwanda grimly follows: Almost every single adult you see over the age of around 30 has lost someone to, and has graphic memories of one of the worst human atrocities in the modern era. It’s a heartbreaking and almost unbelievable thing to realize about the country you’ve grown to love. To the mind of someone like me, it begs several questions. How do the Rwandan people manage this psychological burden? How have they managed to move forward? And perhaps the most important question: How is it possible that this country is doing so well today? For answers to these questions, I turned to Stephen Kinzer’s book “A Thousand Hills”.
April, Come She Will
I will preface this section by saying two things. First and foremost, my lengthy American vacation that bit into a significant part of the month of April caused me to miss my communities yearly genocide commemoration event. Many other volunteers attended these events in their communities, which, though somber and emotionally painful, provided insight into what happened in their specific areas. So when I speak of life in the month of April, it must be clarified that I missed its most important event.
Second, reading a single book about the genocide does not a professor or historian make. The book was recommended to me by several other volunteers who have done more extensive reading into the subject. This book was offered to me because it has among the most concise explanations of the history leading up to the period, and it focuses heavily on the rebuilding of the country, and specifically on President Paul Kagame’s actions to facilitate it.
Though I had a solid understanding of the outline of events prior to the genocide, I was still eager to fill some of the gaps in knowledge that I had. I wondered why the Belgian colonizers had been so obsessed with identifying Rwandans based on their arbitrary racial categories. Why they had so quickly and callously switched political affiliation and backing from the Tutsi to the Hutu - thereby installing the government that would promote a ideology of hatred and retribution. I was curious to know more about the international response, or more accurately the absolute lack thereof, and the craven excuses for it. Finally, I was curious to know - how do you come back from all this, and how did Paul Kagame manage to do it?
When I arrived back in country after my vacation, April in Rwanda was in full effect. Speaking to some of my fellow volunteers, I had heard about the commemoration events that were sorrowful and powerful. Official banners honoring the memory of the genocide 24 years ago began to appear all around my community and in the city I live outside of. Many of them simply say “Kwibuka” meaning “remember”. Others in English say, “Remember - Unite - Renew”. More flowers than usual adorned the large memorial site that I pass on my way home from town. Members of my health center carried themselves more solemnly than normal. Many of them, (though I won’t share their specific stories for privacy reasons) had lost loved ones either in the community I live in or very close by. Remembrance events were held at the University in town where many students tragically lost their lives. Many of us volunteers who were holding a meeting to discuss volunteer business pitched in to buy flowers for the event. It was clear that though we had been living in Rwanda for almost an entire year, carrying on as if there was nothing wrong with this beautiful adoptive country of ours, the scars of the past were here, and they were very real.
And so, while the mood seemed appropriate, I resolved to read. And with page turning (or should I say Kindle-flipping) rapacity, I read the book in a matter of about a week and a half. Sitting on my chair, staring out my front door, I would often have to put down the book and stare out at the hills, contemplating what I had just read. As I pieced together a mental image of what I was reading - racial vitriol, escalating political tempers, and finally a mind boggling paroxysm of violence - against my friendly, hardworking waving neighbors passing by my front door, I was struck again with that surreal feeling.
To anyone who is curious about Rwandan history, I highly recommend Stephen Kinzer’s book, “A Thousand Hills”. I offer you a recommendation rather than a amateur recap. It more than adequately explains the lead up to the Genocide Against the Tutsi, and is written in a concise and straightforward manner. Any account of the 100 or so days that constituted the genocide will be undoubtedly troubling to read, but the author does not relish the violence with his language. The writing remains steady and never veers into gratuitousness. Most importantly, I believe, it moves on from the events of the genocide to explain how Rwanda has rebuilt itself under the tutelage of its president, Paul Kagame.
This section of the book is the most remarkable and important to read, considering that Rwanda is developing at a faster pace than all of its neighbors, and is enjoying political and physical security that many countries in the region do not. The fact that all of this has happened after the country quite literally descended into a hell on earth is nothing short of astounding. That I can sit here comfortably, enjoying my time with the Rwandan people, so shortly after such a chaotic and painful time, is a testament to the strength of the people, the collective vision they share of a better future, and more importantly, their dedication to work every day to move towards it.
Living in this country, with its history, can at times be difficult. It deeply saddens me to know that so many of the people I have grown to care about are carrying around such terrible memories with them everyday. As such, “A Thousand Hills” is hard to read. If I were sitting where you sit right now, there is not a chance on earth I would undertake it as a pass-time read. And there are many blameless reasons to think this way. It puts you face to face with a human atrocity. While our liberal-democratic ethos predisposes us to believe that international institutions like the United Nations are good and true, it painstakingly recounts its most egregious moral failure - the deliberate abandonment of the Rwandan people in their greatest moment of need. With every colonial fiat, with every political extremism, with every vitriolic testimony, it lurches you forward, as inevitable as the ticking of the clock, to the fateful events of 1994. Indeed, the book affected me deeply; while living in the county for nearly a year deepened my context and understanding, it also pulled harder on my emotions. Putting memories to places and names drew heavily on my empathy.
But I believe beyond the difficulties, “A Thousand Hills” presents the Rwandan story in a redemptive light. And most importantly, I think it depicts a story that is deeply and inescapably human. It is an accounting of all the extremes of what we are capable of, from the capacity for abject violence to incomprehensible forgiveness and reconciliation. It is a story of hatred, love, and belief. It shows that people are capable, in their darkest hours and with their most heavy burdens, to soldier forth and make a better future for themselves and those around them. That is the reality that I live in as a volunteer in this country, 24 years later. It is the story of the vibrant and truly indomitable spirit of Rwanda. It is a story that I think we would all be better off for knowing. I can say with no hesitation that I benefit from it every day, and I am fortunate to have been placed in such a extraordinary place.