Genocide Commemoration Day

Today marks the beginning of a national week of mourning in remembrance of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. During this week, flags will fly at half-mast, weddings and other festivities will be banned, conferences and debates will be held throughout the country and the recently-discovered remains of victims will receive proper burial. The official commemoration ceremony will take place this afternoon in Nyamata, a town south of Kigali. Below is a description of Nyamata published by the BBC.

Remembering the victims of Nyamata
by: Mark Doyle (written in June 1994)

The first thing was the smell. We were approaching a church outside Nyamata and the vile smell of rotting flesh was the first signal of what we were about to see.

Outside the church, the grounds were littered with bodies, some mutilated, all in contorted positions. I recall having to step very carefully to avoid treading on one of the corpses of body parts.

I didn't count the dead because what I saw inside made accurate counting impossible. In the thin blue light provided by the remains of a broken stained glass window, I saw the ground was thick with bodies - in places, three or four deep.

There were certainly hundreds of genocide victims in and around the church at Nyamata that day. Some had been killed with machetes, but shrapnel holes on the inside of the brick walls of the church testified to grenades having been thrown into the crowded building before the killers managed to get in to finish their work.

It was clear from the sheer number of corpses in the church that the victims had gathered there because they thought it would provide them with shelter.

In the church grounds, apart from bodies, there were little piles of clothes strewn on the ground. They were the bundled together belongings of people who had fled their homes believing they had a chance of escaping the genocide.

Plane crash

On this date, at almost this very hour, fourteen years ago, a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira was on its way back to Kigali from a regional summit of heads of state in Tanzania. As the plane approached the Kigali airport and prepared to land, it was attacked by two missiles, exploded into flames and crashed into the garden of the presdential palace. Both presidents on board were killed.

Within hours, an interim government led by Hutu extremists took power and the events that would come to be known as the Rwandan genocide began. Over the next hundred days, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandans were killed. Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, reports, "The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

The most efficient mass killing since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Think about that. Only the atomic bombs used in World War II were able to kill more efficiently than the machetes and clubs wielded by common men in Rwanda in 1994.

You know you're a Southerner...

...when you haven't had water in your house consistently for over three weeks, so now that there's no water, there's absolutely no telling how long it will be before there is water; the only water you have left doesn't even fill a small pitcher, a five liter bucket and a large pot; that little bit of water has to suffice for drinking, toilet flushing, tooth brushing, bathing, dish washing and everything else; and you STILL make a pot of sweet tea at the end of the night. (It's a pot of sweet tea because I only have one pitcher and it's currently holding some of the little water that I have left.)

"You can take a girl out of the honky tonk, but you can't take the honky tonk out of a girl." (Sweet Home Alabama)

Garden growth

I'm thrilled to report that this week I had my first spinach salad (I'd actually forgotten what spinach tastes like and how good is) and I pulled three radishes as well. The garden is absolutely thriving. More radishes are almost ready to pull; the carrots are growing well; the squash and zucchini are going nuts; and the spinach and cabbage are continuing to grow. I'm so excited! Even my tomatoes, which I planted much later than everything else, have begun to sprout out of the ground. (They're the two rows of tiny green leaves in the picture.)

Mud

I spent the afternoon today working in my yard - pulling weeds, picking ripe vegetables from the garden, planting new sunflower seeds, moving never-ending piles of rocks and bricks. By the end of the day, I wasn't just dirty and sweaty; I was covered in rich, thick, dark African mud. I don't know what it is, but there's something about this mud that's different from any other mud I've walked through elsewhere in the world. It really takes hold of you. It clings to shoes, clothes, hands, legs, arms and anything else it can. And it refuses to let go. Whenever I come in from the garden, I have to scrub as hard as I can to clean my arms and legs, and, even then, after I've turned my loofah and the water draining from the shower brown, my skin is still stained with a reddish-brown tint. It's not until a couple days later that I ever notice it's completely gone.