Outsiders, great book, good movie, not a great feeling

June 3, 2008

I’m not going to go into a whole thing about our house but it is very quaint. I plan on posting some pictures/videos of where we are staying so you can get a feel for where we are.

Arriving here last night with none of our luggage was not that fun. After eating some cold goat cheese pizza that Mireille brought us (not as good as cold New York pizza) and speaking with her about our plans for today we went to get ready for bed. Without a toothbrush, or other toiletries, pajamas, pillows etc. there really wasn’t much to do but go to sleep. Needless to say, not the best nights sleep I have had.

I woke up in the morning before Steph and really couldn’t get back to bed. She kept waking up here and there but I was so bored, didn’t know what to do with myself. Eventually I took out my laptop played around for a bit and then started reading our guide book. Eventually Steph got up and we started to plan out, in our heads, what we should do once we get settled in.

After a number of hours and debating back and forth we decided to venture out past our womb-like surroundings. We walk out the back door and see a young girl doing some work in the shed. She immediately gets up and greets us hello. We shake hands and Steph starts to explain who we are. The girl seems bewildered and confused. We can only assume that she does not understand a word of what we are saying. So we wave goodbye and proceed toward the gate. She follows us to the gate and lets us out. Here we are…in Rwanda.

The first thing we notice is how the dirt/clay road leading to the compound is not so much a road but a very rocky, very uneven, riddled with holes path that people and cars can travel on, but if the car is too low it bottoms out sometimes and you have to take it slow.

To our left there are two little boys playing with a tire. One of them, as soon as he sees us, stops what he is doing and is frozen for a brief moment before he runs over as fast as he can, arms flailing and gives me a big hug around my legs. I hug him back and he quickly lets go and hugs Steph. It was so sweet. Then we begin our walk down the long, winding, hilly road our house is situated on towards the neighborhood and main roads. The whole time people are staring at us. Not sure if it is because we are new faces in a neighborhood which seems to be pretty tight nit or if it is because we are THE ONLY white faces, or a combination of the two. Let me stress this point, we were THE ONLY white people that were there the whole time we were walking around.

The sheer shock of us realizing that, “ha, we are um…a little out of place here”, was a little overwhelming. I have felt like an outsider before, but never like this. We walked to the end of the block, kind of scoping out the place; getting a feel for our surroundings, the people, the shops, the crazy drivers, the motos (scooter/motorcycles that are like taxis for one person).

All of a sudden images of 1994 Rwanda flash into my head. Clips from movies, excerpts from books and my imagination all join together to transform what I am seeing in front of me, to how it would have looked in 1994. Every truck that drives by, I see images of it being filled with bodies, or men wielding machetes traveling to their next destination of slaughter. Men listening to radios, for the music, are transformed into men listening for their orders and direction to where they should go to “work”. A man walks by carrying an axe; all I can think of are the numerous men and women who walked the streets wielding “tools” like these which they used for “work” aka slaughtering innocent people.

Soon after a pickup truck drives by with about 10 men in the back, all wearing pink jumpsuits (not really jumpsuits, they look more like pink scrubs). I say aloud “wow”. Steph asks what? I respond, “Those men are prisoners, the pink outfit is their prison uniform”. Now I start to think to myself, I wonder if any of these men are genocidaire? Did they confess at Gacaca?

Gacaca courts are traditional court system set up to try individuals who committed crimes during the genocide. Since there were so many individuals guilty of various crimes, there was no way that the modern court system could handle that kind of volume. So for lesser offenses, aka the individuals who did not organize but took part in the killings, beatings, rapes, they are brought before these Gacaca courts and tried in public. This community justice system or justice on the grass as it is sometimes referred to, is a much more efficient way of hearing testimony of the accused, witness testimony and then making a deliberation. The majority of the guilty do not serve normal sentences for the crimes they committed but usually a form of community service in conjunction with shorter jail sentence or no jail time at all. Again due to the sheer volume of perpetrators, it is not feasible to lock up all guilty parties.

You can search for more information about this court system, in my opinion one of the most interesting pieces of the post-genocide Rwanda puzzle.

I’ll write again soon,

-- Mike