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?