A letter from Kay Day in Rwanda
April 2013
Dear Family and Friends,
Greetings from Rwanda. On Sunday I stood amongst 58 students and lecturers from PIASS (the Protestant Institute of Arts and Social Sciences) as we listened in eerie silence to the guide to the Murambi Genocide Memorial describe for us the slaughter of more than 48,000 people in one day on the very ground on which we stood. The memorial is less than an hour’s drive from where I am teaching in Butare. Our trip was part of the school’s planned activities for the “Time of Remembrance,” a week set aside each year by the government of Rwanda for remembering the victims of the 1994 genocide and exploring what the country can learn from this horrific event. This was not a tourist outing, but a pilgrimage. We walked through the museum part of the memorial, viewing pictorial panels of the history and of the events leading up to and following the genocide, as the guide interpreted it for us. Then we were led outside to the marble mass graves that hold the remains of many of the victims. There we laid flowers and a wreath in memory. This is all on the site of a former school where the victims, all Tutsi citizens, had fled for protection but were met with guns and machetes. The hardest part of visiting the memorial was going into the old classrooms that now hold the calcified skeletal remains of men, women and children dug up from mass graves on the site that had been hastily covered over with dirt, then where the soldiers who secretly trained on the grounds played volleyball. Room after room held pallets of white bones, surreal-looking. They were once the bodies of men, women and children, full of life, who had been slain for no other reason than they were born into the minority Tutsi tribe. They were killed by their Hutu neighbors and fellow countrymen. Over 1 million people died in just 100 days. Several of the students were overcome with emotion as they remembered lost family members.
I wondered what benefit opening old wounds might have, 19 years after the event. As I watched and listened I realized that wounds unaddressed become ugly scars that can only mar and deface, but when the wounds are addressed, opened to healing and cleansing, they will still leave scars, but not debilitating ones. This annual remembering is a way of cleansing the wounds of the country and bringing healing. But more than that, it is a means to discuss the way forward into a future where this may not be repeated. We spent an hour in such a discussion when we returned to the school.
Walking the grounds with my new students and colleagues, I had the sense that we were walking on holy ground. No, the acts committed were unholy, were atrocious. But the remembering and the attempts to learn lessons from these unthinkable actions made that place holy. God’s hope of redemption was present.
I have so much to learn in this beautiful, healing country. Please pray with me that I will continue to see God’s sustaining grace, and that I might share it as I teach Practical Theology in this environment. Please pray as I get settled into my new home and make new friends that I will be open to God’s lessons for me.
Yours in Christ’s love,
Kay (Cathie to family)
The 2013 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, Rwanda, p. 102
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