My friend E

E

My new friend E does communications for an organization that is helping Rwanda improve its health system. They educate members of the community about the various services available, and help train health professionals, among many other tasks.

When I first met him, he was in action – training a group of local mayors, police and city council members on how to help their constituents learn about the services available to them. Engage the local electeds, they reason, and you have a much better chance of actually getting your messages to the community. E led a role play exercise, getting his audience up on their feet, and acting out various scenarios that his audience might encounter back in their villages. He was a wonderful emcee – engaging the room with humor and switching effortlessly between the native Rwandan language Kinyarwanda, French, and for the benefit of his monolingual guests (well, me, since all of my colleagues understand French very well), English. He had the group standing up and sitting down, laughing and engaging, working the room with the panache of a man very much at ease with the world. Later, as we sat in the lobby of our hotel, there was a steady stream of friends or colleagues that came up to him, greeting him warmly. Apparently, there was some kind of event in the building, but he got the same treatment in the parliament building and at the various ministries we visited. “You know everybody!” I observed. “Well, they know ME,” he said, almost surprised.

E is 59. His hairline has almost completed its march to the back of his head, he wear glasses, has a forward-set jaw, a prominent lower lip, and an easy smile that uses the whole face and reveals an expanse of gums. But without a doubt it’s the eyes that I paid most attention to. They are the eyes of a man at peace. I’m not sure how to explain it any better than that. He’ll take in the room, or look you in the eye, pause a moment, and let fly with his disarming smile. He seems happy, and I liked him immediately. And he’s a communications guy, and we tend to stick together.
Someone had told me that in addition to his duties at the NGO, E was a reconciliation court judge. The reconciliation courts are traditional village gatherings, called gacaca (pronounced “ga-cha-cha”) in which a perpetrator of genocide explains his crimes and asks for forgiveness from his victims, if they are still alive, or the survivors of the people he has killed. Once the verdict is given and the sentence, if any, is served, the “genocidier” may return to his village and attempt to resume a semblance of a normal life. This process is said to be painful and highly imperfect, but preferable to every alternative. We were sitting together in a meeting of just the two of us to discuss some other business, and when it appeared we had concluded our work, I mentioned that someone said that he was a reconciliation judge. “Who told you that?” he replied, looking a little surprised, and he changed the subject. I let it go. It was all I could do to bring it up in the first place – I didn’t want to press. We then returned our conversation to some un-decided upon matter, and made a bit of easy small talk. As I said, E is a fellow who’s very easy to like, and I felt very comfortable just chatting. Maybe I passed the test. After a pause, he said, “Let me tell you my story.”

E was born in exile, in Burundi. His family was forced to flee Rwanda in 1949, after what is known in Rwanda as the “first war” – a period of attempted ethnic cleansing that forced many members of the Tutsi tribe to escape to neighboring countries, including the neighbor to the south, Burundi. His father had a seventh grade education, (“It would be like coming from University,” he said) was considered an elite, and he became chief of their village not long after they arrived. E was born in Burundi in 1951, the 14th of 16 children, of whom ten survived. With the exception of one sister, who was made to stay home to help their mother, all of his surviving siblings were educated and went on to professional careers. E eventually went to work at the Burundi Ministry of Health, specializing in child and maternal health, despite the fact that he was not a citizen of the country. In fact, he wasn’t a citizen of any country – the militant Hutu government of Rwanda wouldn’t allow him to return to his ancestral home, which he longed to do, and Burundi refused to grant him citizenship. “I was, what’s the word?” “Stateless,” I said. “Yes, I was stateless.” He was given a card by the government that classified him as a “native refugee.”

Things in Rwanda were extremely tense in the 1980s and early 90s – there were periodic explosions of violence, primarily targeting the Tutsi minority, and the tensions exploded in April of 1994 in the famous genocide, in which one out of every seven people in the country was murdered. When the genocide ended and the militant Hutu government was deposed, E took it as an opportunity to return to Rwanda to try to find his relatives and to rebuild his country. It was still a very violent and unhealthy place then, with revenge killings commonplace, and services nonexistent. He arrived in July of 1994, finally stepping foot on his country’s soil at the age of 44. He returned to his village to seek out the relatives he had never met, but not a single relative survived. All his aunts, uncles and cousins had all been killed.

E took a job at the Ministry of Health, working in his field of maternal and child health. Rwanda in the summer of 1994 was barely a state, and E struggled in the ministry to provide some help to people with almost no resources. The international aid community was well meaning, but ineffectual. “After the war, they would send things to us that made no sense,” he told me. “These big shipments of blood would arrive, but it was too late for blood.” “There was an outbreak of cholera, and they’d send water. There’s water everywhere in Rwanda – we needed medicine.”
They did the best they could, and as I’ve noted before, the country seems remarkably functional for a place that just fifteen years ago was no less lawless than the Congo is today. There are no shortage of problems – malnutrition, illiteracy, and myriad health problems among them. Yet the government’s goal is for Rwanda to be a middle class country in ten or so years.

E responded to my interest in his life, and to my curiosity about his country’s history. There was a movie on his laptop about the genocide that he wanted me to see, and after repeated failures to transfer the files from his laptop to mine, he called his son and dispatched him to town to buy me a copy. “Are you okay with the bad pictures?” he asked. I told him that I thought I could handle it. “Good,” he said. “It’s the whole story.”

In many ways, E is the face of the reconciliation, and if Rwanda succeeds, it will be thanks to him and many, many others like him. He’s a judge, and a community organizer, and he’s working his way through his own pain. He’s willing to try to put that aside for the good of the country, something which is a theme that emerges wherever you go. “It’s crazy,” E said. “You can’t tell a Hutu from a Tutsi by looking at him. We all speak Kinyarwanda. We eat the same food. We’re the same.” Indeed, bumper stickers and billboards everywhere proclaim “It’s our Rwanda,” imploring its citizens to try to move beyond the past.

“One million people died, and I think that there were three million people who were responsible. But we can’t put three million people in jail.” I asked him how he can be so positive when he’s been through so much. Has he found a way to try to forget the past? He took a moment and said, “The simple decision is not to forget but to take another strategy to live together.”