"I sleep"

Today is Sunday and it is the day we all knew from the moment we left the US was ahead of us. We visited three genocide memorials. The first in Kigali, was the national memorial and the site of 7 mass graves. The museum took the visitor on a tour of Rwanda pre genocide and then looked at other attrocities of the 20th century. Armenia...Bosnia, WWII. There were stories of survivors.

Honore, our guide, was a generous spirit as we have found all Rwandans to be. I asked him how he came to work day after day. He asked back, " how could I not?" I asked him how at the end of the day he took care of himself. "I sleep." was the response.

This visit was a prelude to the memorial at Nyamata, a church that became the burial ground for at least 15,000. The safe sanctuary of a religious home was anything but. The church itself was filled with the fading African fabric that the victims were wearing the day they became a historical statistic. We walked to the rear of the church where underground bunkers served as grave sites. The stairwell of the fist grave led us to wooden coffins stacked one on top of the other draped in purple and white, some with flowers and others with no one left to put flowers on them as a remembrance. The second stairwell was far more painful. A descent into hell. To the left were the purple covered boxes, to the right skulls and bones stacked on shelf after shelf.

We still had one more memorial to atend and I turned to Hal and mumbled, "I don't need to see another memorial to know that humanity can lose sight of its inhumanity. " Given how life held such little value at this moment of human history and in so many other moments, my feelings were of little consequence. Ian our driver pushed on.

Arriving at the third memorial, a Catholic mission, more fading fabric, more bones, and cahiers (school notebooks) crumbled and blood splattered. Each filled with the precise penmanship of African school children. Another driver told me this was too much for him and he walked out. I found him playing soccer with a group of school boys on the grounds outside the memorial, the same grounds where the notebook owners had played 14 years before. There was nothing else to do but show them that an old muzungu (white) lady could play soccer. We all did what we could do. Honore slept, boys played soccer and our cab driver cranked out Cat Stevens' Morning has Broken on his tape deck as we drove back to Kigali.