Sonrise is a special place. Built by an Anglican Priest to address the orphan crisis after the genocide, Sonrise pulls in the neediest orphans from all over the country.  Parish priests are well established in their individual communities and recognize vulnerable children. They bring the most desperate cases to the orphanage where they can be fed, watered, immunized, educated, protect, loved, raised.  

Interestingly, they call themselves a boarding school rather than an orphanage to help de-stigmatize Rwanda’s orphans. Additionally, to help meet the cost of running the facility (which are fantastically low by our standards), they accept 200 students from “intact” (which can still mean a non traditional nuclear family -- 1994 touched everyone) who can pay for the child’s room, board, and education. In addition to covering a bit of their operating costs, this address the wider social concern of integrating orphans into the society of other children, rather than isolating them.  They equalize all children regardless of their status by having policies of uniformity: the “rich” kids only bring 2 changes of clothes, so they don’t look fancier than the orphans (remember, Rwandais on average live on .80 a day), and Sonrise supplies the bedding to keep it simple (no higher count sheets for the posh ones, so to speak). All the dorms are the same. There are 7 bunk beds with sweet, colorful sheets that would appeal to any child, and in the corners was a small plastic cubby for each child’s changes of clothes and their notebooks.  That’s it.

But the place is far from austere. Classes resume tomorrow, and the large dirt courtyard (someone who reads this, please pay to seed grass for them!!!) was pleasant mayhem. The kids were running, laughing, carousing, exploring, and looking for all the world as if they didn’t have a care in the world, except when it was time to pull wide eyes at the arrival of muzunga, white person!  I could really get used to this greeting. It is truly something to be a constant source of amazement and joyous outbursts.

Tomorrow, the children begin their school year routine, waking up at 5:30 to make their beds, sweep the floors (they line the window sills with their little shoes, and to wash themselves.  At 6 they have a hearty, healthy breakfast of cow’s milk, eggs, and something else, I forgot what!  At 10 and 4 they have a fruit snack (banana and pineapple) and lunches and dinner are meat, potatoes, rice, and beans cooked with other vegs, onion, and fish. 

Sonrise is very, very proud of the healthy, fresh food they provide, and rightfully so. Everything is made in an amazing and beautiful pre Industrial kitchen. Wood was burning under the hand made oven that bakes fresh bread (delicious, I had some) and the store room was a still life, piles of carrots, cabbages, and potatoes leaning in corners on rough canvas mats.

The children wear white shirts (the girls’ have peter pan collars) and blue pinafores or pants.  And what do they do in these charming uniforms? Learn! They rank top 5 in the country each year in academic testing!  They recently have tested as high as No. 1!  Parliamentarians, ministers, business leaders, and the other elite of Rwanda jostle to send their children to be educated at this orphanage.  They are building a secondary school and matriculating their children into it as they grow up.  These are the only kids I have met who can speak some English and French, even the littlest.

Always thinking long term about the integrated education of the whole person, during the academic holidays the orphans go back to their home communities, as it is believed they do need to live to learn in a household and create relationships with their extended families and villages.  I did ask about how the Diocese ensures that those households to which they go for a 2.5 months are safe for children, who by their very nature are needy, vulnerable, and dependent, an orphan being an example in the extreme. The parish priests are responsible for bringing the child to live with him/her if the household is not suitable.

In spite of all they are able to do, this is a poor institution in a very, very poor country. They did not have a single malaria net and I noticed while studying their books that they were paying a lot for malaria care. Also, they buy firewood, which is expensive, and have to use labor to fetch (car, gas, time, etc) it as well as to boil water all day long to prevent diarrheal disease in the 600 kids and staff of 150.

Firewood to create safe water is a huge problem: it adds to deforestation, which creates erosion, which reduces topsoil for farming in an already hungry, subsistence land (it also creates greater catastrophe during natural disasters).  It diminishes habitat and biodiversity.  It is labor intensive and back breaking on people who need to be spending their energy and calories doing other things to catch a break, to get ahead of merely surviving.  It leads to children receiving the chore of fetching wood, and it’s always the girl who gets the task, so the boys can go to school.  It is amazing how nefarious this one thing is, firewood.  

Today we presented each child (all 600!) with a bottle of Sur Eau.  One tiny capful will safely purify 20 liters of water, a bottle will purify a child’s water supply for more than 6 months.  No spending precious financial, labor, and environmental resources on boiling giants vats of water.  We also gave each one a long lasted insecticide treated net, which will drastically reduce incidence of malaria.  One kid I met yesterday had malaria 4 times last year alone; this is so important for all children.

It is such a sweet place, I really enjoyed my time with the director Joy Businge, another gentle woman who held my hand.  We spoke intimately and closely about all they do, and she carefully showed me each feature, each room, each staff member, all the bedrooms, toilets, classrooms (so precious, the long benches with built in desks, lovely dark faces lined up behind them so earnestly ready to learn), the ovens, the giant, beaten tin pots filled with supper, the vegetable store, the cows, everything!  And I was delighted to see each thing.  Rwanda, such a mixed state, land of incredible natural beauty, abject poverty, scars of genocide, and blooms of healing like Sonrise.

We closed in a big circle, holding hands in the dirt courtyard, singing “Jesus loves me” and saying the Lord’s Prayer.  Earlier, I talked with them about what I do when I get scared (ask a friend if they can listen, get a hug from a safe person, write a letter to God, make a gratitude list), and after our prayers, I taught them how I do affirmations.  I left Sonrise with a hundred or so kids chorusing in Kinyarwanda, “I am beautiful inside and out! I am precious! I am worthy! I am intelligent! I am creative! I was made on purpose for a purpose!  I can do anything I set my mind to! The world is a better place because I am it!”

To read more about Sonrise, you may google it!  This article has links, too, on how to support them:  http://www.mustardseedproject.org/section.asp?secID=7

There is a new looking compound set incongruously in Goma’s ruins.  In Cambodia, such villas are built by pimps.  I wondered what kind of people could afford such a palace in one of the poorest countries on Earth.  I was grateful to learn it was, in fact, my next destination and was dressed with a Unicef badge.  It is a medical clinic that specializes in genital reconstruction for raped women.  Yeah. You read that right.  Heal Africa, a sad, brave place.

Women squat at the facility hoping for services someday (they are that busy). Some with whom I visited with have lived there for years.  They were squatting in the courtyard, washing their clothes or the children.  They were sitting blankly on beds.  All looked unbelievably traumatized and dark.  Most clutched babies and a few were pregnant by their rapists.  One was disfigured from having been burnt, her otherwise night black skin raw and pink.  How was she burnt? I thought of a friend I made in Cambodia, an HIV+ sex worker, whose rapists had his faces mauled by a dog during the rapes. 

A clutch of women in a doorway, mute and scared, stared at me when I wished them a good afternoon and said good bye, and thanked them for letting me visit.

Their web site is:  http://healafrica.org/cms/   I do not mean to take away from it, but they make it look a lot prettier than it really is. The work is as good as described, it’s just not pretty there at all.  Maybe the photos on the web site are from before the volcano erupted.

http://jha.ac/2007/08/06/hell-on-earth-systematic-rape-in-eastern-congo/

The U.S., through U.S.A.I.D., is spending 2-3 million dollar for rape victim help, mostly trying to help victims connect with services.  It is a drop in the ocean…a good drop, but a tiny drop.  I met the USAID person in charge of this, a great young woman from Kentucky. I am very proud of her.  

Passing back into Rwanda was simple. No mysterious delays.  No attempts at extortion or graft. On the DRC side a menacing figure approached the car, demanding our documents when he knew good and well they were already inside; one simply does not encounter such intimidating acts in Rwanda.  

The breeze off the lake began to blow freshly again and the leaf cover from beautiful old trees provided shade.  On a grassy lawn a wedding was in progress with a magnificent view of the mountains. At the hotel, I sat near hibusicus and plumbago to write this diary; my friend from the gift shop brought me ceremonial ankle bracelets with bells for traditional dancing.  

Rwanda feels hopeful. The DRC is a s***hole.  I dread spending the next week there, cannot imagine why my friend Theresa took the post there (from Cameroon) and thank God I was not born there.  Our programs are fantastic, but they are a tiny help in the face of vast problems. In fact, we are about to run out of long lasting insecticide treated nets. Run out. As in, no more, finished, over, basta, done, forget about it.

Our staff has the will to execute the mission with integrity. My host today is the first girl in her family to go to school and has worked in development her whole adult life. She has 4 children, 3 of school age, and they attend. With the income she earns at PSI, she pays for their school fees plus employs in her household two women.  She said her parents are so proud of her.

We need funding to hire more women like her, which has an awesome series of positive effects on the employee, her family, her society….and we need money for the supplies of birth control, nets, safe water solution, and hiv/aids testing and counseling.

When asked what the Congolese have to be proud of, the director of the maternal health clinic said, “We have so much potential.”

The people here are not just reserved in a cultural way, they are cautious in the way of the stunned, of those who have lived with trauma, brutality, and suffering.  Of the hundred or so people I visited today, a few became soft and warm after a greeting, but most could merely give me superficial smiles that said, “Oh, hi, yeah, okay. Whatever, hi, bye.”  The rest of their countenance and demeanor was occupied with living horror.  They wanted to be nice and friendly – what they offered was all they had to give, and it wasn’t much.

Everywhere the car lurched, children with stunted growth stared.  Once eye contact was made and a wave offered, their faces would joyously erupt into smiles.  They wore tattered western clothes. I saw one little girl in a shaggy tutu.  The sight of her haunts me, the distorted Goma version of the precious little American girl who discovers ballet and won’t take her tutu off for weeks at a time. 

A balanced approach to provide complete solutions for poor people:

While PSI is working with its partners (USAID, UNICEF, Doctors without Borders, the CDC,  WHO, Gobal Fund, UN, etc.) to protect and empower poor people’s health through medical services, education, and products, Women for Women International provides literacy, hygiene, nutritional, educational, access to capital, and job skills. An NGO [non-government organization] with programs in 8 war torn countries, they pair, for $324 a year, a woman who can afford it with a woman who cannot. It sounds like a lot of money for a sponsorship, but my oh my, the money does so much!

In the midst of this ragged and doomed place is a walled courtyard filled with grass that is actually green, a garden that is actually tended, a building that is clean and proud. There were enough chairs for 20 (!) people to sit, and some tidy furniture.  I always wonder how these weird pieces of furniture of indeterminate style end up in place like this. 

I was greeted with joyous clapping, singing, and ululating, the great African vocalization.  I ran to the throng and threw myself at them, dancing and exclaiming my hello in the way of their culture.  After some time discovering each other in this way, I was introduced as someone who sponsors in W4W and who was there to hear their stories and to take those stories  them to America. (In fact, Women for Women’s biannual report, Critical Half, is about the transformative power of compassionate listening, and is the most inspiring, precise account of why I listen, why I write these diaries, why I reach out to others.)

We sat for hours, each woman taking her turn to stand before her sisters and me, sharing her life story.  They were each so incredibly beautiful!  The eyes, the cheekbones, the lips!  They wore traditional, colorful dress and I so want to learn to wrap a turban like that! They were all reached by a Woman for Women recruiter about the same time and have been in the program one year.

This is what those 4 ½ hours sounded like to me:

I am an orphan My husband was killed My 3 sons were killed I could not read I could not write I could not count I lived like an animal I have 13 children I have 10 children I am a widow I am a refugee I am an internally displaced person I fled with nothing, not even a cup I did not know how to feed myself I was half mad I was crazy I was a cadaver I was a corpse People in the street were afraid of me I begged  I scavenged in the dump I treated my children like animals My husband went to other women My husband’s people pushed me from our home when he died I was run off the land I was cheated because I did not know how to sign my name My children died I have taken in orphans I knew nothing I was filthy I smelled bad I came  to this area to escape violence I carried loads with my body to earn money for food I walked everywhere with my hoe to see if people needed my services if they did not I starved I had no where to go I was dead I had no idea how not to have more children I was in a constant panic I lived in terror I could not cope with stress I abused everyone around I was in a rage The psychological trauma was so great  I was abandoned I neglected myself

And then, the transfiguration:

I am the happiest woman in the world - I am so blessed - I know my rights - Women have rights -  I learned to read -  I learned to write -  I can asses the value of my small goods to ask a fair price for them - I received a small loan to buy fabric -  I sew now to earn a decent living - I can calculate my profit so I can manage my finances -  I save a bit and I use my capital to expand my business - I learned about nutrition - I know how to eat  -Vegetables are important -  I know where to get them -  Look at me I am clean! -  I use soap -  I use lotion-  My children eat 3 meals a day -  My husband and I are partners now  I have rights in the household – I have a voice - I keep my pamphlet which describes my rights in my pocket, it is with me at all times -   I was able to save enough to buy a small plot of land – I have my own home – I built my home- I am saving for my home – I was able to get back two plots of my dead husband’s land and I sold them for a profit - My soul opened up - A new woman was born inside of me - I use the money W4W gave me to pay the fees for my daughter to go to school -  In my culture no girl ever went to school but mine do now  - The woman who recruited me would not recognize me today – I thank God -  I space my births by at least 3 years – I am at peace – I am empowered – I live a respectable life – I have dignity – I have worth – I harassed all the governors so much, they were sick of seeing me, they would not give me back my land, but eventually they did – I joined another women’s rights group and they elected me their leader 

Their stories are unbelievable, each woman a Congolese Lazarus, nothing short of an absolute and total miracle. As we listened, the group made clucking and groaning noises of recognition, and would burst into applause at a particularly heightened expression of empowerment.  When the entire group finished, we talked in more detail about sexual exploitation, rape, HIV, malaria, and unsafe water.  Each woman had personally had malaria, yet strangely, not a single one slept under a net last night. Half had babies die from it. Most “knew” (perhaps they spoke of themselves) someone who had been raped. A few knew her HIV status, and again, strangely, only one was using modern birth control.

I was able during this round table dialogue to complement W4W’s extraordinary work by giving a reproductive health, safe water, and malaria lessons.  For example, I explained that one can become pregnant 31 days of the month!  Most said the only used b.c. during the “dangerous” times….we talked about injectable bc as long lasting and safe, but how they needed to use a condom each time to protect from HIV (all did have good perception of  their HIV risk).   We discussed the female condom as discreet option, though most said they could negotiate a condom with their husbands, as fine a tribute as possible to W4W. I told them about my recovery buddy, and asked if they would be willing to make a commitment with a friend to buy long lasting insecticide treated mosquito nets; they gave their word to one another and committed to following up….today!!!!!  All raised their hands and said she would begin sleeping under a net immediately.  “Imagine how you would feel,” I said, “If you had to write your sponsor that you had missed your W4W graduation with a case of malaria!  You came here to learn how never to neglect yourself….so step up and protect yourself from malaria! (Congo’s children account for 1 in 20 malaria deaths world wide; these great women lose their productivity if they are sick with preventable diseases….)

That last paragraph is not meant in any way to suggest that W4W’s work is partial or incomplete. In fact, their work is extraordinary in the maximum. I was visiting with only 20 out of thousands of Congolese women they have reached, and this group is not finished yet with their “topics.”  It just means that it takes all of us NGO’s working in partnership to provide a complete solution to an exceedingly complex and varied series of life challenging problems that confront the poor. We specialize in health: prevention, creating recognition of problems and treatment seeking behaviors, treatment, products, and services, and we’re d***good at it. W4W teaches traumatized, victimized, poor women to bathe, to learn to feed themselves, to read, count, write, parenting skills, social skills, money skills, a trade. Together we empower and protect the whole woman.

Back on that lush, soft grass, we danced, caroused, undulated, clapped, bumped, hugged, and smiled.  At the very end, I lead a passionate salute to Zainib Salbi, founder of W4W: her name rang through the air in a series of joyful waves, sung by beautiful, clean, fresh smelling, literate, skilled, empowered standing tall Congolese women!!

And at PSI we’re already brainstorming about how to cooperate more, to hire their graduates as Peer Educators, to present reproductive health activities as new women come in, etc.

For more on how W4W works, and to become a sponsor, see womenforwomen.org

Today I also saw an overview of our point of use water purification outreach.  60% of rural and 40% of urban Rwandais do not have access to safe water. Even the 2.5% with piped water cannot know if that water is safe.  

Unsafe water makes millions sick, which additionally adds to loss of productivity, inability to procure food, care for children, the children miss school, maternal mortality issues arise, adding to orphan crises, and ultimately it is a killer of all.  Death by diaharea, can you imagine?  

In the last 2 weeks, 14% of all children under 5 have had diarrheal disease, regardless of source of water or when they are in the country. (In some of the 65 countries where we have programs, we are doing de-worming.  Icky to talk about it, but worse to die of, no?)

Sur Eau comes in a small plastic bottle and one capful makes 20 liters (over 5 gallopns) of water safe. A bottle provides safe water for a family of 6 for one month for a total cost of  55 cents!

The UN clearly states that disinfection of water at the point of use is consistently the most cost effective intervention.  Sur Eau helps poor people obtain safe water, even if their infrastructure is improving; my local church is financing the digging of a well in the Sudan, and Sur Eau purifies water as some communities wait for such improvements.  Additionally, Sur Eau makes sure the stored water remains safe.

The BCC and education that accompanies this campaign is 3 parts:  hygiene, sanitation, and water.  Hand washing behaviors.  Correct latrine behaviors.  And point of use purification, whether water is obtained from lakes, rivers, dams, rainwater, creeks, wells, or taps.  It’s a big deal.  Again, we have packaged this product with pictures and local dialect instructions.  They clearly show the links between daily life activities, contamination, and sickness.  

It is a lightly chlorinated product, and this neatly sidesteps an array of issues.  When water is filled in a jug or jerry can, which is time intensive/labor intensive/often obtained from far away/if bought something only affordable periodically, storage of the precious water ultimately leads to it being contaminated, even if it happened to be safe to begin with.  A dirty hand…a dirty utensil….insects…..whatever.   Sur Eau is perhaps the most cost effective life saving product on the planet.  The prevention of morbidity and mortality is almost incalculable -- oh, but we’ll try, as we measure lives saved as the private sector measures profits, which is why our donors love us! We can show you our results in black and white.  It is produced by a private sector partner locally and per bottle revenues recover the cost of production. In a word, sustainable.

We make Sur Eau available via an integrated distribution network: health facilities, mutuelles (health insurance) community health workers (you’ll meet them on world malaria day), private sector pharmacies.  We also distribute it for free as an emergency response.  Cholera breaks out often here due to erosion into water ways, which leads us back to where we began: overpopulation and stress on the environment.  Poverty reduction must be a balanced approached, we all have something to contribute, the environmentalists, the human rights activities,  aid groups, public health agencies.

One last note for now about Sur Eau is the government of Rwanda has banned plastic bags.  How fabulous is that?  If you have them upon arrival, you are politely asked to give them up and they’ll sell you a replacement for cheap. Rwanda and San Francisco, what fantastically unlikely company!!!  We need to figure something out with Sur Eau bottles and how Tazanet is packaged, even though school kids use the net’s bag as their tote for school books, and that generally, everyone is so poor a little plastic bottle, even empty, is a treasure.(Whenever I think of poor people and plastic, I think of what happened in Appalachia when plastic jugs of milk came out, our creeks were full of them.) Staci says we are striving to create re fill “centers” where folks can easily bring their bottles to a nearby village for a re fill.  “Progress, not perfection.”

In 1994 when the machetes stopped hacking bodies it was women and children who began to pick up corpses and body parts.  Remains were everywhere.  In an already poor country bearing one of the world’s most crippling disease burdens, cholera, typhoid, and other killers took additional lives. Women, often rape victims, attempted to burry bodies and build simple shelter and find safe drinking water and a little food. The trauma was sky high.  

Rwanda now also had a massive orphan crisis and most survivors took in at least 1 orphan. However, in many cases, children became the heads of households.

 As we drive through the now clean and orderly capital, as we drink in the lovely countryside, my mind from time to time does an automatic slide show, and imposes the detritus of genocide on what I see.  It really is unimaginable, that such protracted filthy evil transpired ever, anywhere, but especially here, some place so pretty.

 President since 2003, Kagame has worked his heart out since he led the Rwanda Patriotic Front in 1994 in what is widely credited as stopping the genocide.  His parliament and minister posts are stacked with capable women, the highest female participation anywhere in the entire world (this has been codified in their constitution and government articles) and women have enormous government participation in the welfare of “la base,” the people.  Looking at the extreme nature of what transpired, the government has reckoned extreme solutions are necessary, and the result is one of the most progressive and dynamic governments in the entire world.(I like to say San Francisco and Rwanda are equally progressive, although opposite ends of the economic spectrum.)  They stopped the genocide with no help from anyone, and they have a can-do attitude about re building their country themselves.  PSI employs 150 people here, only 4 are non-Rwandais and the ex pats are monitored closely; I even heard one refer to herself as a “transactional cost,” meaning the government tolerates her as the price of getting on with the business of improving public health.

Rwanda society is highly decentralized. It is described in units, if you will, beginning with the individual household. The next unit up is the cell  (still trying to get this right!  It’s fascinating!!---), the sectuer  (--------), the deparment (-----), the province (like our states), and the national government.  This is to ensure individuals have a voice, that there is a way for their needs to be recognized and heard, to create a harmonized society where there is a profound sense of belonging and community.  The expectation is that such closeness will also eliminate the possibility of the types of divisions that created the genocide.  

It is remarkable how nice things are here, in spite of abject poverty. This is country is ranked 159^th our of 177 countries….so close to the very bottom. The hotel is terrific, with an azure blue pool and pretty gardens. I have a little suite and each morning I stand at my window drinking tea, watching a woman with a hand made broom sweep the street below (the city employs street sweepers). All the lavs are clean, modern flush toilets, some with 2 modes (little flush, big flush, for conservation), and there is TP available in public places everywhere. There is usually even a nail with a small, clean cloth for drying hands after washing with the bit of soap provided.  The streets and fields are free of litter; there is less litter here than there is on the road between Franklin and Leipers Fork that I drive every day.  They are proud, these Rwandais.

And the flowers!  My Lord, how beautiful!  Vegetables are cultivated literally everywhere, even in urban spaces.  Houses often do not have a path to the front door, rather, folks walk to their homes between rows of corn or runners of beans trained up bamboo sticks. It is a hungry country.  So many are food insecure, the stunted growth and orange tinted hair tells me that.

For these reasons, I think Rwanda absolutely should be promoted as a tourist destination in Africa.  It is safe. There is no corruption (the government is very  serious about this!!!), there is no intimidation or crazy making and contradictory beaurocracies to navigate.    There are at least 2 very good hotels (phones and internet work fine, big lovely bathtub, robe, slippers, rather amazing, don’t you think??) and the overall landscape is not only clean looking, it is stunningly beautiful, these mille collines.  I have finally found somewhere I could bring Dario.

I managed my grueling experience at the genocide memorial by dividing it into two parts: intellectual and emotional.  Intellectually, the site is incredibly well done.  It shows how the Germans, then the Belge, followed by the unconscionable inaction of the rest of the world, set Rwandans up for the genocide; the historical background of the clans, of which distinctions like Hutu and Tutsi were occupational and not tribal/ethnic at all, yet how the white people’s obnoxious, flagrant, unrepentant racism distorted and perverted everything about this beautiful, ancient people into “us versus ourselves” mentalities.  Of the most enraging images was a priest, for God’s sake, a priest measuring Rwandais’ heads and categorizing them ethnically for the registration cards of 1932 as deemed necessary by the Church and King Leopold, one of the great nutters of all time.  These registration cards were doomed to become one of the worst props in the history of the humankind. As these ethnic differences were spurious to begin with, the church had trouble distinguishing Hutu from Tutsi, so they would ask random questions like “how many cows do you have” and decide for the people ‘what they were.’ Once the massacres began in 1994, these cards were the delivery system of death for over one million people.

The memorial, in a balancing act of the highest order, does not stoop to blaming the outside world, but rather in a straightforward way simply tells the story of how over decades the west’s racism, abuses, extraordinary sins of commission and commission let 500,000 women be raped, a million people be butchered, and for hundreds of thousands of secondary deaths to occur; for there to be complete civic destruction and a cascade of ancillary tragedies and upheavals (refugees, for example).  There are photographs of Hutus preparing to kill with French soldiers supervising the proceedings, examples of major media (NY Times, Times of London) newspaper stories reporting killing sprees that were well orchestrated rehearsals for mass murder, and the pleas of the  UN peacekeeper leader in Rwanda begging for assistance, predicting what was coming, and saying how very little he needed to avert it.  And  finally there is the stone walling silence of Kofi Anan, heads of state around the world, and us, normal citizens who should have stopped our everyday lives to prevent this doom.

The grief is debilitating. I would walk and feel my legs becoming heavier, almost immobilized, as I slowly moved through the mass graves.  At times I was close to passing out and I’d have to sharpen up mentally and re connect with my breath. At other times I felt hyper alert to the point of panic and had to slow my breath down, it would be coming in heaves.  I would feel pain so deep the rest of the world ceased to exist and I would be swallowed entirely in it.  If I had been able to think in those moments I would have thought my life was over, nothing else was possible, except maybe to crawl silently to somewhere quiet to sit, to hide, to huddle. Three women with a faded color photograph gripped in their hands staggered through the graves. One fell to her knees and her sisters stood alongside her as pillars. When she recovered slightly it was the other two women’s turn to keen.  I wanted to run to their group and throw myself on them, like we were a pyre, sobbing, howling, “I am so sorry, I am so sorry.” Perhaps they would have appreciated such a validating outburst of communal sorrow, perhaps culturally that would have been wildly out of order.  I barely restrained myself as I passed by them, brushing one lightly on the back. She said, “thank you.”

I am mazunga, a white person. I wish I had gone with my instinct and reached out more to the women.  Part of the pain about the genocide is the lack of validation from us.

Prayer did help as I was sucked inexorably further into the memorial. When I would start to lose my mind I would start to pray for the souls of the dead. (I haven’t started to pray yet for the perpetrators, the way Archbishop Tutu’s daughter has taught me to, but I will. I will.)  May you rest in peace. May you rest in peace. May you rest in peace. One million and more times, may you rest in peace.

One of the round rooms of the exhibit had victim’s clothing suspended in mid air by filament. The arrangement of the clothes uncannily suggests the posture of the body that had occupied them; the empty garments expressed surprise, violence, pitiful and useless self defense. The clothes were all sizes, and I stood, weeping and haunted, in front a child’s colorful sweater, filthy from where the body had lain in the muck. At that little child’s age, that would have been my favorite sweater, it was so cheerful. It reminded me of the rainbow painted on the entrance to the tunnel from Marin County to the Golden Gate Bridge, so optimistic!  Next to it was a tattered superman sheet.  God have mercy on us all.  Was the person sleeping and hacked to death in her bed? Had a family tried to flee their mud hut, the sheet grabbed in a mindless fit of modesty?  Had a wildly panicked mother grabbed the sheet to tie her youngster to her back so she could run from her rapists?

Another room had horizontal rows of filament, to which survivors pin photographs of their loved ones. Rows, rows, and rows, images from family parties, official documents,  snap shots of reluctant looking elderly which perhaps an amateur family historian took to have for future generations.  The room is devastating in the absolute.  It is almost unbearable.  Murder, murder, murder, it silently screams.

I paused at the memorial guest book. I couldn’t see the page for my tears blearing my sight. What do I say?  How do I tell the survivors of such horror anything consoling?  How does one apologize to the dead? Feeling useless and incompetent I wrote, “I am sorry, I am so sorry.”

This genocide was unique in history in that a small government incited millions of regular people, including the educated classes, to slaughter their family members and neighbors with their bare hands in their homes and in places of sanctuary.  It was intensely personal murder. The swing of a machete once wasn’t enough; hacking and hacking, with 400 different acknowledged forms of toture, burying people alive amongst them. it is unfathomable yet it must be fathomed.

Afterwards I was asked to say a few words to our local staff and the media. In the morning, I had thought to talk about the Rwandais government’s extraordinary action in re building itself, a veritable Phoenix rising from ashes, and to salute NGO’s and initiative’s like President Clinton’s, which have accomplished so much. It was not, however, the right time; this needed to be about genocide, regret, accountability.  In this moment I found the division between the intellect and the emotional in order to be able to speak in public and not simply wail.  I took responsibility certainly for my government’s indefensible inaction, pledged to do my part as a citizen to ensure no genocide happens again, and to serve Rwanda’s people as living amends.  I also mentioned this Chinese ship full of arms that was trying to dock in Zimbabwe earlier this week. Are people out of their minds? Nothing, absolutely nothing good can possibly come of such arms coming to Africa.  Are we forgetting, even as this memorial exists, that the genocide was committed with .50 machetes from China?  I vowed to call my legislators and you bet your a***I did.  That ship needs to go back from whence it came, thank you very much.

These writings will not be entirely about the genocide, but today’s is.  It inescapably informs everything in this country, and most certainly Population Service International’s public health mission here.  It is the background, acknowledged if unspoken, it has set Rwanda’s stage.

We also visited an infamous site, Ntarama church,  where on  April 7, 1994 10,000 children, women, and elderly were slaughtered. In the mayhem of the bloody free for all, a group had fled to the church, naturally expecting some protection.  Instead, they were tortured.  The Hutu madmen began by throwing grenades into the packed throng (the church is not big, just one open room, 10,000 people in it inconceivable).  The shrapnel damage is still in the church’s tin roof, letting small bits of sun come through.  Over a short period of time, the 10,000 were hacked to death, one brutal, agonizing death at a time.

Rwandais society held a special place of honor for its elderly, but in the genocide they were treated with a particular cruelty.  Everyone was, really….the Hutu just found different twists on the same fundamental insult: the elderly had breed cockroach Tutsis, women gave birth to cockroach Tutsi, men married cockroach Tutsi, and so on and so forth. But I feel a singular grief at what was done to the elderly.  No more so than children, but….it’s a different aspect of the pain. Maybe because I spend a little time each day honoring my grandparents, thanking them for my life, coming to peace once more with the fact they are with me in spirit but not in the flesh.  That someone would set out to ruin an old person’s life, when I long each for more old people in my life, hurts.

I haven’t said much of rape, but it happened (and continues to happen, especially in the so called Democratic Republic of Congo, en masse).  A typical example of rape as a tool of genocide happened in this church. A woman was strung up, crucifixion style, and raped over a period of days by hundreds of genocidaires, until she expired. Her bones hung on the tortured scaffolding until recently. What remains of her family asked for them to be interned just recently, They had had enough of her bones as a historical teaching point.

The church is breathtaking for all the wrong reasons. Upon entering the grounds, “We will never forget” is spelled out in a lovely and restrained planting of small shrubs.  Then, upon entering the church, I was thunderstruck by the flabbergasting site of the clothing of 10,000 people piled onto low, backless benches, which once served as pews, and by the rotting stench of the defiled bodies that have been removed, piece by piece, from the clothing.  I cannot even begin to describe the shock of this.

I moved in transfixed horror between the benches, studying the piles and piles of t shirts, pants, jeans, dresses, baby clothes, sweaters.  Everything is dirty, and it’s easy to discern blood stains from life’s wear and tear.  I kept stopping every few steps to turn slightly; it was relentless from every angle, 10,000 people, 10,000 people, 10,000 people, butchered in this small room, maybe 20 by 40. 

Within the church is an opening in the floor, a set of stairs that leads down to a basement. Oh my God.  The basement is very simple, going from right to left with only a very narrow footpath path. Its walls are lined with shelves that go from the floor the ceiling.  Oh my God. These shelves are stacked with bones. Human bones. Skulls, femurs, fibulas.  Stacks upon stacks upon stacks of bones.

I didn’t know if I should enter. I didn’t know if I could. I didn’t know if I would later have trauma if I did.  I thought about my own bones, and how these women, elderly, and children were innocent.  I decided they in and of themselves were not spooky; what was done to them was.  I pressed on.  From time to time I thought I was suffocating.  I would stop, struggle to breath, look at the shaft of light from the church above, and re gather my determination to see, feel, and know the truth.

As far up as I could see were orderly, stacked rows of human remains.  Some of the skulls are missing chunks were a machete had connected.  Many were missing teeth.

Many were very small.

One skull was sticking out a bit from its shelf. The path is so narrow, I was already turning sideways not to bump into leg bones.  I had a quick obsession flare up that someone would knock this skull off its shelf, and I really wanted to pick it up and set it somewhere more secure.  I equivocated, a real life version of some childhood dare.  I thought, oh, it’s just bone, I know what bones are made of, the soul has flown away, it’s not like there are maggots, it’s okay, do the right things by this skull….pick it up…..but right before I touched it, Papa Jack said, “Maybe in life he was a sticking out there kind of guy.”  I laughed in an improbable celebration of this skull’s personality and left it as it was.

There are also caskets.  They are filled with 20-25 bodies each.

The woman who was raped over a period of days is in a casket in a place of respect for the uniqueness of suffering, the additional brutality meted to women for being women.

Outside, with the stench from the clothes funnelled through the church door and canceled out any freshness from the rain, I visited with the woman who guides tours. She lives nearby and does this as much as she can, taking days off when it really starts to get to her.  We talked about her crops (cassava and sweet potatoes right now), how I live somewhere that has 4 seasons instead of 2, and best agricultural practices.  She was a tragic figure, and I took pleasure in helping her find a few smiles.  We exchanged addresses and I look forward to writing her. Oh, she is a grandmother, and she lit up in the special way that grandmothers do when asked about their grandbabies.  I was glad for her that she has them, even as I know lack of family planning is a serious crisis in Rwanda.

Believe it or not, when we got to talking about flowers, she went to the side of the church and picked me a bouquet and sent me home with it.

100,000 people were murdered every day for 100 days.  500,000 women were raped, with men who knew they were HIV+  taking the lead. Children were made to murder (and in the case of boys, rape their mothers and sisters) their parents, parents to murder their children, before they themselves were killed.  Torture was sometimes lengthy before death.  A refugee crisis was created as panicked Rwandans fled to the DRC and other neighboring countries.  There were hundreds of thousands of additional deaths due to starvation, disease, and civil collapse, deaths due to things like cholera and typhoid, on top of malaria, etc.  And in a strange twist that human rights groups and ngo’s have not yet discussed, when the Hutu fled to the DRC sensing their bloody glory was over, they were taken into refuge camps by human rights workers, and there were fed, watered, and tended to, while their victims were left in piles unattended and the living were abandoned.  The Interwahme who still live on the DRC border would start this all up again in a minute if they could, in spite of the peace and reconciliation that Hutus and Tutsi have miraculously found at home.

There is no part of the Rwanda that was not under the rampage of genocidaires.  The killing was not localized; it was spread over an entire country the size of Maryland.  Human remains are still being found everywhere; in the church there was a blue tarp with a family of 19 that had just been discovered.  It was sitting in a pile near a bench of dead people’s clothes.  I guess someone will take care of them and gently place them on the already heaving shelf when they have a free minute.

Williamson County, Tennessee has a population of 125,000.  If anything came through and hurt a portion, much less all of us, in the span of a day (or a year!), the state and federal government would urgently declare a state of emergency and descend with interventions and help. We had a tornado blow us around a bit this spring, and my gosh, we were untouched yet we received concerned telephone calls from all over the country, with people saying they were at the ready to get on a plane if we needed help.

Yet this genocide happened day after day for 100 days, with deaths and suffering and collapse of the highest order, and in spite of knowing exactly what was happening, we did nothing.  A quote chosen for the memorial said:

“Quand il disait de L’Holocuste, encore jamais, parlait-il du tous le monde, or juste certaines personnes?

When they said of the Holocust, “never again,” were they talking about everyone? Or just certain people?”

They were talking about everyone but Africans.  Just ask the Sudanese.

Today’s travel has gone off as planned, and as I write, I am watching the African sun begin to set, casting shades of oranges so associated with this continent.

Africa! How is this possible? How did I get here?  Where does this life come from?  My 40^th in the Scottish Highlands with dear friends, roaring with laughter and running a` sack race on the front lawn of a castle, to my first appointment in Rwanda this evening with a woman Senator and Zainib Salbi, the founder of Women for Women International, whose amazing book “Between Two Worlds” I finished last night?  I called someone back from the Rodham-Clinton campaign last night and when the President heard it was me on the line, he grabbed the phone for a wee chat. That is sort of nerve wracking, to have him spontaneously get on the phone like that…I have to laugh at my life,  give thanks, laugh, give thanks. 

The African sun is setting with its patented hues of orange and red. The sun looks like this from nowhere else on earth. I can see the thousand hills of Rwanda undulate before me, terraced and graced with lakes.  I am grateful to be emotionally sober. My last time to this continent, the original home of us all, I was so overwhelmed with emotion as to be nearly distraught. Everything, but everything, made me cry!  My first African tree! My first African bird!  My first African friend!  I was returning to my cradle and had the heightened emotionality of a seeker’s first pilgrimage.  I am far from casual about this journey, far from it, I am simply….simpler.  My gratitude, awe, respect, and even my enthusiasm are more subtle.

There is tough work to be done. I begin tomorrow the Genocide Memorial and a talk afterwards about the progress Rwanda has made since that insanity.  I will meet our local staff (Psi.org) and begin to learn more about the burden of poor health that continues to unnecessarily cost Rwandans their children, their own lives, and stifle their economy and progress..  Rwanda is the most densely populated African country, and malaria, lack of safe water (only 2.5% of Rwandans have piped water), the great need for  family planning, STI’s, HIV, and other preventable diseases and issues keep the entire population subsisting on less than  a dollar a day..  I will see our programs in action, celebrate what works, and help carry the message of prevention and effective grassroots programs to those who can fund them and help change attitudes and policies for the better.

Gender based violence will be a core theme of this trip. I have already abdicated my day to see the Silver Back Gorillas in order to go to Goma, a portion of the Democratic Republic of Congo accessible more safely from Rwanda.  There are refugee camps filled with masses of women victim of rape.  The gorillas, much as I love them, can wait.

I am glad to be here, glad to learn, glad to serve, and am more than a little perplexed as to why me.

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From PSI.ORG, an unflinchingly unemotional description of us.  It reads dry, but it is anything but on the ground.  A further note is that we fill a critical gap between what poor governments can do for their populations and where the private sector is lacking, too.  Governments often have little if any infrastructure, yet magically those fizzy soda pop drinks are ubiquitous, as are mobile phones. Hence, we use private sector techniques to deliver family planning, safe water, child survival and maternal health, malaria prevention and treatment, and hiv/aids prevention health programs, which include products, services, and education.