Memorializing

Halfway into the 3-minute Introduction video, I already had tears rolling down my cheek. “Great,” I thought, “Why am I doing this?!” The screen went black, and before I could bolt, the lady from the front desk was opening the sliding door to the gardens, pointing me to a big #1 sign, and showing me how to start the Audio Guide hanging limply around my neck. A somber voice came on, “Welcome to the Kigali Genocide Memorial.”

In 1994, when the 100-day Rwandan genocide took place, I was 13 - old enough grasp that something significant was occurring, but young enough to not really comprehend the scale of this global atrocity. With my barely adolescent mind, the person I remember identifying with the most was a fellow MK who, I overheard, had been sitting in the front seat of the car when her parents high-tailed it for the border, and she saw everything. I didn’t know what that word meant when it was said in such hushed tones, but it sounded bad.

The Audio Guide directed me into the museum portion of the Memorial where I learned precisely what the everything was. I willed myself to go slowly, to read the posters about Hutus, Tutsis, and colonizers, to listen to the recordings on politics and propaganda, to watch the interviews of survivors asking “why” over and over, to absorb the reality that the bodies in the pictures had been real humans. And I grieved for what my fellow TCK had witnessed. I walked past remnants of clothes and toys that are still being retrieved from muddy fields. The humor of the flamboyant 90’s style was overshadowed by the memory that, unlike the Holocaust in my own beloved land, this genocide had happened in my lifetime. Truly it could happen again.

When I reached the Children’s Room, the unraveling began more fully. Through blinking tears, I read about the personalities of 2- and 5-year-olds as well as how they died until I felt an overwhelming need for fresh air. I practically ran out and straight into the gardens where I sat and sobbed for a moment. I spotted a number and somewhat mechanically typed it into the Audio Guide, and the heaviness on my chest began to lift slightly as I listened to the beautiful intentionality behind some of the garden designs. The rose garden with the jagged paths, the forest where baby trees were planted in the hopes that they will still be around for multiple generations, the garden that is the resting place of more than 250,000 victims. My favorites were the three layered ones on the hillside that allowed a river to flow through the Garden of Unity to the Garden of Disunity to the Garden of Reconciliation.

Later that night as my gracious hosts and I ate dinner on their rooftop, watching the sky fade from yellow to dark blue, they listened to me debrief and make comparisons to my visit of a Holocaust concentration camp back home. It would be so much easier to remain in ignorant innocence, but I’m grateful for the times when harsh reality crashes into my fairly easy life, calling me to empathize and to memorialize. Reminding me of the frailty of the gift we call life and the eternity of the gift we call the gospel.

Garden of Disunity

Before and after sunset