Living life: The New Dawn

It is not an easy proposition for your entire existence to be the target of a murderous rage as the Tutsi were during the build up and the culmination of the 1994 Genocide against them (the Tutsi). To be reduced to the equivalent of a vermin insect for no fault of your own or ancestors other than to feed the fear of other humans of your own existence is unfathomable. Yet this is the dark reality that many Rwandans lived with prior to the genocide. The genocide was an evil demonstration of how humans can sink so low, much lower than the bestiality of beasts. Yet with every narration it continues to shock. My friend Emmanuel, who was then a ten year old does not want to talk about his experience. But because he thinks that it is important for people to remember what happened in order to keep it in mind never to allow it to happen again, he uncharacteristically opens up. He recalls how in a few instances the adults aware that the children were too weary to run, dumped them in trenches of dead bodies, where they lay pretending to be dead, while the killers threw stones in the ditches to finish off any who showed a sign of life. If you think that it is shocking he goes on to say how on many occasions one would smear oneself the blood of a freshly murdered person in order to appear “dead” to the murderers. “For such things to happen to a child who probably never knew that there was a problem before it all happened, is something that I have failed to believe, even though I saw these things, even though they happened to me,” he narrates. Behind his cheerful demeanour is perhaps a heavy load of trauma. A trauma that instead of dragging the country down into the depths of wallowing in self pity has instead galvanised the nation into a reconciliatory spirit and a fresh sense of real progress and growth. In fact fifteen years after the genocide, the Rwanda story is less about ethnic hatred and more about the dramatic achievements that a country can make in the right direction. The Rwanda story is now an inspiring story of difficult trials of the human will overcome by a sheer sense of hope that everybody in the world would like to own. In Rwanda’s new dawn, my Rotaract friends in Uganda and I have found it fulfilling as we went around to different clubs in Kampala last week and also collaborated with clubs in Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia, talking about Rwanda and the progress that it has achieved in the last fifteen years. For me, that is the least I can do for Rwanda. I can never understand the pain and the cost that the victims of survivors bore, but from it, many others and I draw lessons of inspiration, of optimism, of life. This is the new Rwanda, with a new dawn. kelviod@yahoo.com