“Today our group in Rwanda shared a challenging day. I will share what I have written about the morning and I hope Sharon will write about the afternoon. The day, taken as a whole was a study in contrasts, It raised questions for me about the either/or of need, balancing the need to address current states of despair with the need for promise and opportunity.
“This morning we started our exploration of Rwanda with a walk through one of the Millennium villages in Africa, which I will explain later. What caught my eye as we walked up the clay road to what looked like a community center complex of buildings, was a nondescript red brick building with lavendar and white ribbon woven throughout the wrought iron fence and lavendar “used car triangle banners” across the front. I assumed it was the local school about to have a field day or open house. I could not have been more wrong. I was about to enter the grounds of the Nyamata Catholic church, the sight where 10,000 people were hacked to death with machetes as they prayed and sought refuge in and around the church. Twenty thousand more died in the surrounding small community after the April, 2004 massacre.
“You walk in, glimpsing at something surreal enough to look like an abstract art exhibit, but in fact is the bloody, dirty, torn clothes of 10,000 people who were massacred, piled onto the low wooden benches that were the church pews. There are still blood stains on the walls and the ceiling looks almost like a planetarium. The metal roof is punctured with tiny patterns of holes from the guns and grenade blast and looking up the effect of the sun streaming through the metal roof into the darkened church is like starlight. The walls of the entrance are piled with children’s clothes because it was there that they were thrown and bashed against the walls rather than waste the effort of a machete chop.
“The altar is topped with traditional white cloth, but not with a chalice or a cross. Instead, overlooking the piles of stacked clothes of people who sought refuge in a place of God, is a collection of rosary beads found under the bodies, a rusted, blunt machete, a knife and an identity card of one of the victims. A few pieces of stained glass remain in a single window, affording what little light enters the room.
“You descend into the crypt, an eerie well lit space completely tiled in white, almost like an old operating room and below you, behind a glass ceiling is a single coffin covered in white lace with purple. The coffin contains the body of a pregnant woman who was found with a metal pole run through her body and up through her head and another run through her chest and out her back through the baby that was bundled on her back. Their impaled skeletons had been displayed against this clinical white setting for years until they were placed in the solitary coffin.
“Walking out behind the church you descend into the first of two crypts. It’s a steep and dark descent to find yourself in a narrow corridor, bumping into shelves piled with hundreds of coffins covered in purple or white satin and lace decorated cloths. The drapes are a stark contrast to the dusty shelves and wooden coffins. Each coffin holds 20 to 30 bodies, individually unidentifiable as the bodies decomposed into piles until the outside world entered the site. The second crypt holds dusty skulls, arranged like eggs in a carton on wooden shelves. The shelves above and below, hold bones stacked according to their place on the bodies – thigh bones piled high next to a pile of arm bones. These are the bodies still being uncovered, which are brought to the church in large white feed bags every April on the anniversary of the massacre.
“This is what I saw.
“Nyamata is located in the Bugesera district of Rwanda, about 35 km from the capital of Kigali, one of the regions that was most devastated by the 1994 genocide. From the beginning of the 1960s, Tutsi people from different areas of Rwanda were forced to leave their homes to live in this dry, barren region made even more unhealthy by an epidemic of tse tse fly. Bugesera became a region whose population was predominantly Tutsis.
“In April 1994, many people from Nyamata used the Catholic church and nearby houses belonging to the priests and sisters as havens, hoping to escape death at the hands of the “Interahamwe”, the Hutu militia, and the RwandeseGovernment Forces. The Tutsis used the church as a refuge, padlocking the iron door from the inside as protection from the marauding killers. Both survivors and killers confirm that on April 10th, 1994 this band of armed men managed to break down the door and entered the church with their rifles, grenades and machetes. All who were in the church were killed as well as tens of thousands of people in the surrounding area.
“In memory of the people who lost their lives in Nyamata Church and its surrounding community , the currentRwandese government, in collaboration with the genocide survivors remaining in the area, decided that the church would no longer be used for worship and, instead, serve as a memorial.
“This is what I know.
“Today I bore witness and I am sharing that with you.”
