It’s all arranged. The organization that runs peace education programs for children in Rwanda couldn’t house me during my stay, but it’s school vacation and the Catholic boarding school downhill is empty and willing to take me in.
My French mentor in all things Rwandan, Jacques, takes me to the two-story, hundred-room building surrounding a courtyard and parking lot.
“You’re lucky,” says the nun, who lives downstairs, as she unlocks the door to a narrow corridor leading to my bedroom. “You’ll have the whole floor to yourself!”
“Oh my!” I exclaim. “Could you show me how to set up my mosquito net? I’ve never used one before.”
As the days go by, I form a routine. As soon as the sun rises, I pass a guard squatting outside his hut by the dormitory gate, and walk up the road through Kigali’s patchwork of dwellings and red earth plots. People have already begun working their pocket-sized parcels with hoes and machetes.
The omnipresence of these tools terrifies me, since they are symbols of the Rwandan genocide. My own mental myopia has not yet accepted the fact that, of course, the people have hoes and machetes: They need them to work their land, make an income, raise a family.
Once I get to the organization’s modest headquarters, I have breakfast with the staff. Jacques, a die-hard French leftist in his 70s, has given up on France and wants to contribute to Rwanda’s future. Laurent is a lithe Rwandan schoolteacher who is both a merry prankster with the kids and serious scholar, and who never ceases to surprise me with his insights about Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Madeleine is Rwandan, too, and as the mover shaker and president of the organization, is forever hurrying to fund-raising meetings, outfitted in a Western suit or native dress.
After each day’s work and a sparse but leisurely dinner, with or without electricity, Jacques walks me down the hill through the night back to my lodgings.
Then one night — boom! — in the muddle of the mosquito net, alone on the second floor of the dormitory, I’m shocked awake by a violent crash. Electrified, I hear a man’s voice chanting in furious Kinyarwanda. An angry chorus of men shouts a refrain after every rant.
I can’t understand anything, but try to think. The shock felt and sounded like an earthquake, so I should dash out of the building into the courtyard. But it also felt like an explosion, and I know the 1994 genocide began with one, when the president’s plane was shot down and all hell broke loose only moments later. If it’s the beginning of another massacre, I should hide in the closet.
I get out of bed with my flashlight and enter the dark trap of a corridor, where I flip a switch, but the electricity is out. I’m paralyzed with indecision: Should I run in or out? Then I think a horrendous and shameful thought: “If it is a genocide, they’re not after me. They don’t care about my ethnic group.”
I stand in the narrow corridor, listening, almost praying that the nun will rescue me. Nothing. I’m trembling and crying and asking myself: “Why? Why did I put myself in such a situation? I have a safe home, a family that loves me. It’s not my fault that I was born into peace and security and plenty. If I ever live through this night, I’m going directly to the airport and taking the first plane out of here. I’ll go anywhere.”
Finally, fear and inertia lead to exhaustion, and I go back to bed, back to sleep.
The sun rises and I hastily, but fearfully, make my way up the hill.
“Did you feel the earthquake?” my co-workers ask, concerned that I might have had an anxious night.
“Yes,” I say, “but what was all that chanting?”
“Just some evangelical group, they often do that. You probably slept through it the other nights.”
I look at Jacques who has spent six months a year here for the last 10 years, and at Laurent, who has a scar from his left ear to his forehead (which, I’ve come to realize, is not rare among genocide survivors). I glance at Madeleine, who lives with rumors that her imprisoned brother may be a murderer.
And I want desperately to go home, to get out, to fly away, to be honest enough to admit that my contribution is not even a drop in the bucket.
But I don’t have the courage to tell them how cowardly I feel, so I stay on and we continue with our work.
By Nancy Leenson Caldwell, who has taught intercultural dialogue and conflict resolution at institutions around the world.