Braver Than You Think

by Maggie Downs

  I didn’t exchange any money at the border—the exchange rate was incredibly poor—so I arrived in the country with a pocket full of now-useless Ugandan shillings and some emergency American bills. The hostel clerk says he will accept the U.S. money, but only if I pay for a three-night stay at a higher-than-usual exchange rate. Tired and desperate, I fork over the money. I don’t even ask to see the room.

  I unlock my room and see that I’m paying thirty-five dollars a night for what feels like a tall jail cell. Though Rwanda is known as “the land of one thousand hills,” I won’t be able to see any of them from here, even when it is light outside—the cinder-block walls loom cold and hard, about fifteen feet high, with just one small window near the ceiling. The room is not much more than a square of gray with a bed and one chair.

  A low stone wall partitions off a private bathroom that consists of a shower head, a clogged drain, and a toilet that doesn’t flush. The water in the pipes runs cold and colder. For an extra ten dollars a night, I could have received an “upgrade”—that is, the owner would turn on the hot water. I can’t afford that kind of luxury on my budget. Or food, for that matter.

  I scrounge around in a red nylon bag that I keep packed with assorted foodstuffs. My dinner choices include a box of pasta, a packet of powdered pumpkin soup, two packets of maple syrup–flavored instant oatmeal, a bag of peppermint tea, and a three-month-old smashed granola bar from Bolivia.

  Since most of those items require hot water, I go with the Bolivian granola. It is not good, unless you enjoy sawdust with raisins, but it quiets my growling stomach.

  Mosquitoes swarm the room, and I huddle under the net that hangs over my bed. It is dusty pink, and it looks like it has been belched out from the ceiling, chunky, saggy, and full of knots. It has big rips that I try to fix with duct tape. Some of the bugs still manage to find a way in. I hear them buzzing around my head, echoing in my ears.

  I’m not even sure what I’m doing in Rwanda, except seeking a new place to volunteer. The country seemed manageable, since the whole nation is just slightly smaller than the state of Maryland. It helped that it was an incredibly easy border jump from Kampala to Kigali. The bus journey took just eight hours, which is lightning speed in African bus time, and cost the equivalent of ten dollars.

  Only now that I’m here, I’m not sure what to do. This night seems darker than most, and I hunker down on the bed with a book. I long for my husband’s voice, but I have no cell service or internet access, and he has no way of knowing where in the world I am.

  The room’s one light dangles from the ceiling with exposed wires. I’m not even surprised when it extinguishes itself, as if it has committed suicide. I’m with you, light. I give up too.

  So I cry. I cry as the room remains frustratingly dark. I cry as mosquitoes zoom into my ears. I cry as the toilet spontaneously hiccups fetid water onto the floor of the bathroom. And then I cry deeper, a heavy sob of guilt, knowing that I’m in a land that has faced genocide and unspeakable horror. I cry for the people I’ve never known and the people I never will know and the ache of things I cannot possibly understand. I cry for a mom who is dying while I am unable to stop it and for all the incomplete families that surround me.

  That night I dream of malaria and detached body parts. Though I sleep, it feels more like a pause than rest.

  When morning arrives, I am thankful to open up the door and see that the sun has come up. Prosthetic legs still litter the ground, but now I won’t trip over them.

  BY THE END OF MY FIRST FULL DAY IN KIGALI, I HAVE Rwandan francs in my pocket and a belly full of sweet potatoes, beans, and cassava from a local mélange, or buffet. Still I feel aimless and lonely.

  I settle into an internet café and spend a couple of hours searching for a place to volunteer. My one lead—I had traded emails about teaching at a women’s shelter with one of the organization’s administrators—ends when what they need is clarified: “Can you teach aerobics? In French?” I thought they wanted a writing instructor.

  Before heading back to the dreaded hostel, I take a walk through downtown Kigali. It’s more residential than I’d imagined. The houses are big and stately, made of solid brick, the windows lined with flower boxes. The streets are leafy and clean, the lawns trim and decisively green. It’s as hard to imagine a genocide taking place here as it would be on my street of palm trees and bougainvillea in Palm Springs. I continue walking, knowing that people died on the ground where my feet are now.

  The genocide began after years of tension between Hutus and Tutsis. The fire ignited on April 6, 1994, when the plane carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali.

  Violence moved swiftly throughout the tiny country. The quickness and efficiency of it was astonishing—one person killed every seven seconds. Print and radio media added more fuel to the fire with violent propaganda, encouraging war rape and urging the Hutu people to exterminate their “cockroach” Tutsi neighbors.

  Roads were closed, trapping people inside their towns and villages. Those who sought refuge in churches were betrayed and slaughtered there instead. Family members turned on their loved ones with machetes. There are stories that those who attempted to flee had their Achilles tendons sliced, so they were forced to witness the bloodbath that surrounded them before they were bludgeoned to death.

  By the time the massacre ended in mid-July 1994, just one hundred days later, every tenth person was dead—a significant chunk of a country with a population equivalent to that of Chicago. More than 500,000 others were mutilated. Many had been raped and infected with HIV.

  There is nothing I can do but let the sadness burrow inside me. What else can be done when surrounded by so many ghosts?

  DAYS PASS. I MOVE OUT OF THE PROSTHETIC-LIMB FACTORY and into a youth hostel that is closer to downtown. The building is spacious and crayon yellow, full of long-term backpackers, graduate students who are living in Rwanda to study the genocide, and expatriates who work for nongovernment organizations. At night we sit on the patio and drink big, cold bottles of Primus beer and rarely discuss the tragedy that happened in this place.

  My new neighborhood is where the president lives, a posh section of the city filled with wide streets, flower beds, and embassies. Snipers line the nearby rooftops. It becomes such a commonplace sight that I don’t even notice them after my first day at the hostel.

  In addition to a place to live, I also find a reason to be in Rwanda, as a volunteer in a trade school for adult women. All of them either lost their families or encountered other troubles after the genocide, which then led them to prostitution. Now they come to this school to learn skills like jewelry making, weaving, and sewing. My job is to teach them practical English, just enough phrases to help them tell their stories and sell their homemade goods to tourists.

  To get to the school, I take a moto taxi (what Ugandans called a boda-boda), showing up the same time every weekday afternoon. About 75 percent of the time, Andre the guard opens the metal gate to let me inside. The other 25 percent of the time, Andre is huddled in his room with Francois the cook, watching soap operas on a tiny black-and-white TV. On those days I shout until a student hears me and unlocks the maroon metal door.

  My class consists of twenty-five students, give or take. Mostly take. They are not required to be there, so I usually end up with about twelve people. Even the students who say they are excited to learn English slouch in their metal chairs and roll their eyes.

  I start by teaching general phrases and introductions: “Hello” and “good morning.” “How are you?” and “What is your name?”

  Evoking classroom participation is practically impossible—I beg the students to answer my questions or repeat after me. I have never been a teacher before, and filling up an hour of instruction every afternoon is excruciating.

  When I remind myself that I’m not certified for this, it makes me feel more selfish than kindhearted. I have no background in education—I’m just tryi
ng to pass along some of my knowledge about the English language. I wonder how much good I’m doing. Why should I ask these students to call me “teacher” when I am not one? What if my volunteer work harms these women? What if I’m taking a position away from someone more qualified to help?

  After the first few days, I bring my concerns to Tom, the administrator who initially interviewed me, and I ask him if I should abandon the volunteer post. He is a British man who has been helping to run this school and nonprofit for more than a dozen years. During that time, he has seen many volunteers come and go, and he has seen how the school prepares the women for practical jobs in modern Rwanda.

  “Listen, you are important,” he says. “If they didn’t care about your lessons, they wouldn’t come to your class.”

  But the next day, toward the end of my fifth class, I wonder again. Liberé, the slouchiest one of them all, swipes chalk dust off the board and pats my back, leaving stark white handprints on my black T-shirt. The other students hoot and cackle at me while they applaud Liberé. It’s just a silly joke, probably made with no malicious intent, but it makes me feel disliked, unwanted, marked. I see who has the power here in this room, and it’s not the woman standing at the front of the class. My face grows hot and red, and I leave quickly, before I break down in front of everybody.

  Back at the hostel, my roommates are already pumping music and getting ready for the weekend. But they won’t see me at the clubs; I’m going to find a way to win over my classroom.

  I spend hours researching how to teach English as a second language, how to capture a classroom’s attention, and how to create a useful and practical learning experience for them. Selfishly, what I want is for my class to like me. I want them to accept me. This is high school all over again.

  The next Monday, I try out a trick I remember from my own teachers: I bribe the class with candy. One wrapped caramel for each answer. Suddenly I can barely keep up with their enthusiasm.

  By the time I ask “Which direction am I pointing?” a dozen hands shoot up in the air. I shuffle the tables and chairs around the room until I have created a labyrinth that leads to the front of the room. Then I blindfold myself. I ask the students to guide me through the complicated maze by using their new direction words. When someone says “left” instead of “right,” I let myself walk into walls or stumble into a desk—I already feel stupid enough in front of my class that I might as well look like it too. In response, the students laugh and scream with delight. A few of them yell “No!” and try to stop me from tumbling over a chair.

  That day, everybody gets candy. And I get my first invitation to hang out with a couple of students outside of the classroom: Rose and Claudine ask me to go for a walk in their neighborhood. I am elated as they steer me down the brown path to their homes.

  TWO WEEKS INTO TEACHING, AND I’VE LEARNED THAT EVERYTHING in Rwanda requires a follow-up question. I discover this during my lesson about families, as I teach vocabulary words like “sister,” “father,” “husband.”

  When I pose the question “Do you have brothers and sisters?” to my students, I am met with stares until I follow that with “Did you have brothers and sisters?” That’s when I begin to hear their stories. Time is separated into pre- and post-genocide, and so are the tenses in which my students ask me to speak.

  I can’t even fathom this pain. I spend each day surrounded by women my age who have fought to survive. They outlasted a genocide while I was selecting dyed-to-match shoes for prom. They saw hatred and destruction firsthand. Me, I watched danger on TV. They watched loved ones die from machete blows. I’m grieving a mother who rests in a clean nursing home bed.

  The genocide is like a man lurking in the shadows, a faceless stranger who feels present even when he is not. This affects every conversation, every interaction. It changes how people look at each other, how they appraise strangers, how guarded they remain.

  Claudine and I walk the neighborhood after class one day, and she tells me her story. When her Hutu neighbors came for her Tutsi family, she hid underneath her bed while they beat her father until he was unable to move. A neighbor dragged Claudine into the room and handed her the machete. Only sixteen years old, she was forced to make the final blow.

  When Claudine tried to run, the same machete was used to slice her legs, and some of the men beat her with sticks. They laughed as she crawled for help. That’s when she blacked out. She doesn’t remember what happened next or how she survived. But she does know that when the genocide began, she was an HIV-free teenager with a family. By the time it ended, she was an HIV-positive woman, alone.

  I struggle to understand an event that breaks the brittle bones of what I once believed to be true: people are inherently good, and sometimes the world just makes them do bad things. The reality in Rwanda is that evil exists, and my students have borne witness.

  Beyond that, I wonder if this is even my tragedy to understand. The struggle of my own mortality feels selfish in the face of those trying to reconcile their humanity, and I have no right to stake a claim in their personal suffering. I can’t escape the fact that I am a foreigner here, and I always will be. I can grieve here, but what right do I have to feel so sad?

  I remember what Jason said about how the brain tries to compartmentalize anything it doesn’t already understand, how our minds try to find patterns in clouds. I think about the genocide, but it dissipates in front of me. My brain tries to make sense of the senseless, and I see nothing familiar there at all.

  There Is No Hierarchy of Pain

  I DON’T KNOW WHY I DECIDE TO VISIT SEVERAL GENOCIDE memorials. Maybe it’s that I want to understand my students’ stories better. Maybe I need to mourn for a mother other than my own.

  I make the trip to Murambi alone and by bus. Once there, it is an easy walk to the school.

  I’m close to the school complex when my step slows. My walk has started to sound like an autumn hike through the forest, with sticks popping and cracking on the path beneath my feet. But when I look around, I notice there aren’t many trees nearby. The landscape is flat and grassy. There shouldn’t be sticks underfoot.

  When I squat down, the dirt is embedded with tiny bones. I hold some of them in my hands; they are small and light, almost like bird skeletons. A volunteer, who had been standing on the school porch, walks toward me, crossing the grass until she is close enough that her shadow stretches over mine.

  “Kids,” she says.

  I let the bones fall from my hands, returning them to their exposed grave. I don’t know what else to do with them.

  Most of the school buildings before me are plain and low-slung like barracks. It’s here that thousands of Tutsis were instructed by government officials to seek sanctuary. The whole idea of a sanctuary was a ruse—the officials deliberately gathered the Tutsis in one place, denied them water and food, then slaughtered everyone when they were too weak to escape. An estimated 45,000 live here now, in this earth.

  The volunteer, a genocide survivor, opens the door of the school and ushers me inside. I’ve seen a few dead bodies in my life. While working the nighttime crime beat at the Cincinnati Enquirer, I saw glimpses of death—limbs askew under white sheets, puddles of blood, the silhouette of a body as it is rolled away—but now I am in a room with hundreds of dead at once.

  There are wooden tables in every classroom, each covered with children and adults, who were initially buried in mass graves then exhumed, now calcified white from powdered lime. Their shapes are contorted, twisted, and frozen in the moment of death. Some of the bodies look more like papier-mâché than people. Others looks like crumpled sheets.

  Each rigid limb tells a story. Even though the skin of each person has long since shriveled, on a few, the machete slashes are plainly visible. Some fingers still bear wedding rings. Mothers cradle the void. Hands grip the air. Mouths are forever wide in silent screams.

  The lime is supposed to absorb odors, but it is not strong enough to mask what has happened here. With e
very inhale, my nose fills with the scent of decay, and my stomach lurches in revulsion. I am angry and sorrowful, underscored by guilt.

  Until my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I lived with the assumption of a future. Even now, I am resentful of the genetics I might carry and how this holds the rest of my life captive, because I believe I am entitled to one. The bodies that surround me didn’t have that luxury. They were promised a future, and it was a lie.

  I know it’s better to show the bones of victims instead of hiding them, but that doesn’t make it easier to see. I rush through the remaining twenty-three rooms, all filled with bodies, until the final hall, a place of meditation and prayer. I sit on a bench for a long time—long enough for the guide to peek her head into the room and make certain I’m all right. I want to be alone, so I wave her away, but she stays with me anyway.

  ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER BUS, THIS TIME HEADED AN HOUR south of Kigali to Nyamata, site of another memorial. Our bus slips along the hilly highway, tires tearing across the washboard shoulders, sliding toward drop-off cliffs, then back on the asphalt again. Luckily, the road is nearly empty.

  The man sitting next to me drops his head between his knees and groans. In his right hand he clutches a lime, digging his fingernails into the puckered skin. Every few minutes he holds the lime to his nose and inhales, the punchy scent smoothing over his motion sickness.

  “My stomach tumbles,” he says, moaning with discomfort.

  Mine does too, but not from the bus ride. Death is everywhere, and no amount of citrus zest will fix the way I feel.

  On my regular calls home, my dad hasn’t said much about my mom’s health, even when I ask. It makes me wonder what he’s keeping from me. I know she has spent the past few months in the “moderately severe” stage of Alzheimer’s. She has little awareness of her surroundings; she rarely responds to her own name; she needs help eating, dressing, and going to the toilet; and she no longer walks. I also know that once my mom reaches the final stage—when she becomes completely unresponsive—it won’t be long until her body shuts down entirely.