Icyunamo

We stand together in the grass amidst a copse of pines. Men hold their hats as we observe a minute of silence. Our seats overlook the tea factory, and a stiff wind blows towards us carrying its smell, too sweet to be fresh grass clippings. Every part of the factory smells that way, I remember from a tour during my first week at site. The smell even permeates the director’s office, where there’s a big wooden board showing the factory’s monthly tea production every year since it opened in the 1980’s.
From April 1994 until the end of 1995, there are no numbers on that board.
For the most part, my first Icyunamo, the week of commemoration for the 1994 genocide, has seemed like that board. Every day, dialogues are held in each town and village across the country. But the dialogues that I witnessed were interesting in their omissions. By-in-large, they did not treat specific details of the genocide in Kitabi sector.
“Dialogues” is really a bit of a misnomer, because these meetings really consisted of speeches drawn from talking points distributed by the Rwandan government. Time was given for questions, but few were asked. The focus of this year’s speeches was “Remembering our past to build our future,” and the talks I heard reflected that. Among the topics discussed were: What is genocide? How is genocide different from war? How was the Rwandan genocide different from other genocides? What were the historical and political factors that lead up to the violence in 1994? What are the methods used to prepare and bring about genocide? The speeches I heard were all very well prepared and easy to understand (which I can attest to- if I understood 50% of the content after 7 months in Rwanda, they couldn’t have been too high-brow.) Their focus was on unity, emphasizing that all Rwandans have shared the same language and culture for hundreds of years. The supposed ethnic divide between Hutus and Tutsis was really a result of a fossilization of social classes forced by European colonists, and was not really ethnic at all.
That’s all well and good. The point of these talks should be to bring people together, and to prevent any sort of reemergence of the hateful speech and actions that lead to genocide. I can’t imagine reliving the details of the genocide in great detail for a week every year being very healthy. But from what I heard from other volunteers, I was ready for an emotionally trying week, to hear what happened here in ’94. What I have is a blank board where numbers should be.
Even though I still have as many questions as I did before Icyunamo, I think it was a good week. Some of my colleagues took the opportunity to travel, both in and outside of Rwanda, but I feel that having spent the week with my community was a good bonding experience. In 1994, the foreign aid workers stationed in Rwanda fled, but this April I could be here with my community, and I think that was appreciated.
The evening of the last day of Icyunamo, I went down to our school canteen and stumbled upon an informal meeting of some important people from my community. The Executive (like the mayor of our cluster of villages), the head of the Nyungwe National Park, the director of the health center, administrators of various local projects, and some other staff members of the school were gathered around a table sharing beers. They were evaluating how the events of the week had gone, and by their measure the week had gone very well. Speakers came to the dialogues every day, village residents attended regularly, and most importantly there was no violence or unrest. The executive asked me how I thought they went, and I agreed with their assessment, adding that while it wasn’t what I expected, I thought the week had gone very smoothly.
Discussion turned to the speeches of the last day. We had a guest speaker that day from another part of Rwanda. He told the story of how his family (two parents and eleven sisters) had been killed. He had been kept captive near a road and tortured. He was given HIV. He was 9 years old. But he has continued to live, has completed medical school and is now a doctor, and now is a role-model, giving hope to people living with HIV/AIDS. But recently, he had been in a car accident, and his fiancee (also HIV positive) was killed. Now his survivor’s guilt has resurfaced, and he wonders why God won’t just let him die and be done with it.
The conversation around the table clarified details I hadn’t quite understood during the ceremonies, but it was hard to listen to. It is hard to imagine the people I see every day were all one side or the other of this conflict, that the old men sitting around me in the dialogue may have taken part in the events of ’94, but also might have been hiding in the forest or across the border. During the retelling of the story, I noticed a coworker lost in thought. He was staring into space, past the bottles on the table to another place and time. Will I ever know what he was reliving, or any of the stories of this place? Do I really even want to know?

You don’t really know where those presents go

“Ntwari,” she says, “what is this?” My neighbor hands me a small cardboard package. Inside is a little-kid paint set, colors in their own little tubs, connected by flimsy plastic.

“We tried to eat it. We thought it might be chocolate.”

Oh shit. I quickly check the package to see if it is labeled “non-toxic.” All I can find is “Made in China.” After those “lead-in-kids-toys” scandals a few years back, that did not make me feel any better. But no one seemed sick. No reason to scare the neighbors; they were bright enough to realize that it wasn’t food already.

“It’s paint,” I say, pointing at their recently-painted house for emphasis, “for children. They can draw with it.” I demonstrated, painting a sloppy yellow sun on the inside of the package.

Next they brought a small metal box with a picture of some Disney princesses on the front. My neighbors were stumped by its contents. Inside was a fifty-piece puzzle, which I showed them how to put together, explaining that it was also a children’s toy.

“But Ntwari, why did the abazungu send these things? Our children don’t know what they are.” Ntwari is my Rwandan name, by the way.

Let’s rewind for a minute. Last week, while I was walking to town to buy groceries, I ran into my neighbors walking back from the town center. They were carrying a number of shoebox-sized packages marked with Christmas colors and the logo of an American organization that sends presents to children in developing countries.

Mind you this was last week. It is April.

They showed me a letter that was inside one of the boxes. It was from a little girl in Puerto Rico, the little girl who sent the presents. I translated the note, which said something along the lines of, “My name is Liliana, I live in Puerto Rico and I have four brothers. My favorite drink is Coca-Cola, my favorite food is pizza, and my favorite thing to play with is the computer.”

As I’m translating the lines about food and computers, I can’t help but crack a rueful smile. Sending a present like this seems like such a nice gesture, but so much gets lost in translation. I’m glad I was around to interpret the letter, at least, or even that human touch would have been lost. Even so, the letter is not easy to explain. My neighbors seldom, if ever, can afford soda and have never seen cheese. Most likely, their children have never seen a computer, let alone played with one. And here they have a letter from a little girl, to whom which all these things are common-place.

I explain to my neighbors that many American children like to drink Coke. They know what a candy-cane is, and they name their teddy bears. They don’t know that there are kids in countries like Rwanda that have no idea what to do with a puzzle, that have never seen a paint set before, that have never even heard of pizza. This little girl, Liliana, just wanted to give some children she has never met some Christmas cheer. She wanted them to be happy, to have toys like she has. She probably imagined that her presents would be received sometime in December, and that when they were opened on Christmas, children would be overjoyed with their new toy, instead of curious and a little confused. It is easy to forget that miles aren’t the only thing separating Rwanda from America. One of the hardest things about Peace Corps is realizing that the world can be so big and so small, all at the same time. At their core, I still maintain that people are more or less the same everywhere. But that doesn’t make it any less difficult to understand the differences between us. I guess maybe that is what I am here for, after all.  

Kitchen Week- March (not really a week, I know)

Unfortunately I haven’t had time to keep up with Kitchen Week as a weekly feature, but I’m going to try harder to be regular about that. Here’s the highlights of my kitchen during March:

Pickled green peppers (these were really good! I need to find some more jars so I can make a bigger batch next time)

Refried beans + guacamole + tortillas

Stalingrad Special (potatoes, cabbage and carrot stew)

Biscuits

Cornbread and Chili (again)