On Monday, we visit the Gisozi Memorial Museum. We are each given a purple scarf to wear as purple is the color of mourning here. Our guide directs us to a mass grave that houses the remains of thousands of victims and we have a quiet moment of silence as we each lay a single rose on the grave. Our guide explains that even late last year, thirteen years after the genocide, victims’ remains were still being found, identified, and given a proper burial. This evokes a different form of cleaning up, one that is not about making sure the streets are free of litter.
Every guide who works in the museum experienced the genocide and now shares his or her story many times a day. We learn that racial divide in Rwanda is attributed to the European colonists’ separation of the Rwandan people into Tutsis and Hutus based on their physical features and assumed levels of intelligence and refinement. This separation was made concrete with identity cards which labeled the population as either or—either Tutsi or Hutu, either preferred or cast aside, and later, mostly either dead or alive. I hold it together through descriptions and pictures, through films of children screaming and attempting to flee, through statistics that boggle the mind: 800,000 people killed in one hundred days. Can I comprehend an average of eleven people being killed every two minutes? Or 500,000 women raped and more than that number orphaned? We reach the room where in beautiful glass display cases, cases that might house jewelry from Barneys, or treasures from ancient lore, lie the bones of the dead—the skulls, the femur bones, the bones of the arms, and other parts of the skeleton. The bones are alive and their pain is palpable and present. My heart takes over and I start to cry.
As we prepare to depart, we are privileged to hear a story, through an interpreter, of a survivor of the genocide. This survivor has come to the museum to beg for money today and the museum director decided that she should share her story with our group. Her name is Mukagihana Wifreda and she is forty-eight years old. On April 15, 1994, less than a week after then-President of Rwanda Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down and the Hutu power militia began their highly efficient plan to kill all the Tutsis in Rwanda, she watched as five of her six children were killed.
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