Confronting Ghosts in Rwanda

My mother and I often debate the concept of "evil" as a human condition.

I know this sounds strange but, both of us having been raised and spent our formative years in fairly strict Catholic families, and having later found a general sense of spirituality to replace or augment our concept of religion, we often talk about principles that didn't sit well with us from our childhoods. For me, the whole Catholic/Christian concept that there are "good" people and "evil" people never made much sense. I have just always refused to believe that people come into the world being "evil" and are predestined to do evil things. I do absolutely believe in the notion of karma and that we come back to work out some lessons from previous lifetimes, but I just never bought into the whole idea that one is doomed from the beginning.

My mother disagrees.

I have been contemplating the concept of evil a lot over the past few days since I returned from Rwanda. I went there with two good friends over the weekend because, in my line of work, the genocide that took place there 15 years ago holds so many lessons and questions on the nature of human beings. Plus, Rwanda is right next door to my current home, Uganda, and not visiting seemed wrong. If not to pay respects, then to try to understand how something so awful as almost a million people being systematically slaughtered over the course of 100 days could possibly occur in this day and age. I wanted to understand although I don't think I am any closer to it now than I was before I went there.

My first encounter with that scale of, for lack of a better word, "evil," was in Poland in 1999 when my best friend and my boyfriend visited Auschwitz. Even then, as horrific as the scale of atrocities that were perpetuated against the Jews during WWII seemed, I was somehow detached. It had happened nearly fifty years before...surely we had come farther than that by now?

It came closer to home when I got my first job in DC working for my now current boss helping to compile evidence for the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal that was prosecuting Serbs who had masterminded some of the worst human rights abuses during the war in Bosnia. I would read witness statement after witness statement, reports from NGOs working on the ground, and first-hand accounts of a massacre that had occur ed in the town of Srebrinica where nearly a thousand men and boys were systematically massacred in ways that do not bear repeating here.

The word "torture" doesn't even begin to describe what happened at that place. And I would read, day after day, blow-by-blow accounts of what, in my mother's mind, could only be described as "evil."

It was then that I found out that I had another place inside of me that I could go to when confronted with such things. For the first few months, I was a wreck. I had a hard time sleeping, I drank too much, I was constantly irritable and I took up smoking again. I couldn't talk to anyone about how I felt because doing so would require me to talk about what I was reading and I didn't think burdening anyone else's soul with that information was a good thing. So I just created this space in my mind where I could go when I had to read these things for work that was, in short, a place where emotions were not allowed in.

Years later, and having spent the majority of my time working with marines, soldiers, aid workers, human rights advocates, and a whole host of other folks who LIVE this day-to-day, I realized that so many of us have created those spaces as a means to live and not become numb. I am, by no means, the best or the most honorable among them. I could probably never do what my boyfriend or many of my best friends do on a daily basis. The fact that they are as human and compassionate as they are despite the fact that they have to cope with these things on a regular basis humbles me constantly.

But, still, Rwanda got to me.

It wasn't so much the Genocide Memorial Museum, which is extremely well-done and an honor to the victims, but the fact that my colleague, Nate, and I went exploring further. We both felt compelled to see the rest of it. The parts that were NOT for public consumption and the areas where few tourists venture because they are the sites of horror laid-bare without being dressed up.

We spent that Sunday in a church that saw 5,000 people massacred in one night on 30 March, 1994. We were taken around by one of the three sole survivors of that night who was 5 years old when it happened. It was NOT dressed up.

Again, like recounting my time reading the testimonies of victims from Srebrinica in Bosnia, nothing I can write can ever do justice to what I saw that day. I never knew that one could still smell blood on clothes 15 years later.

I had to walk out of the church at least half a dozen times in our four hours there to get some air.
The most powerful moment, however, was not that Nate and I, as Americans, bore witness to the remnants of that atrocity. The most powerful moment came when my Uganda friend and part-time driver, Eddie, took the tour with us. He kept saying to the Rwandan guide, "I can't believe this really happened to you. How could we not have helped? We were right next door to you...Please, brother, I am so, so sorry. Please forgive me. No one in Uganda really believed it was true, but it was true, I see that now. Please forgive us for not helping you."

He was close to tears by the time he left.

I walked away from the experience and shut down a bit.

Nate and I have not talked about it again. Our friend, Janice, who was traveling with us had begged off of that particular part of the trip and never asked, in detail, what we saw. I think she knew.

Scott had warned me before I went about the after-effects and I was as arrogant as ever. I said I "knew" that I would be able to cope with whatever I saw.

And I can, eventually.

I am going home in June. I think I am going to re-visit some conversations with my mother. I still don't believe in "good" and "evil."

But sometimes it is hard to explain that level of cruelty.

However, like Eddie, I have come to realize that shutting down, while necessary, is not always a good thing.