My friend Emmanuel is by and large a happy chap. He smiles generously and chats away like any normal man in his mid twenties. If you peer hard into his eyes you will not find there a deep sense of melancholy. So is Marcella, a fun-loving go-getter, a little bit shy than the average Rwandan girl in her late twenties. All Marcella and Emmanuel want is a decent life with a decent job, a decent salary and a decent family. And they both think that they have a decent chance at life. It might all have been different Fifteen years ago, Marcella experienced the most defining moment of her life. She saw both her parents and her only brother killed, her mother getting the worst of the “treatment”, dissected into two, head to toe, by marauding machete wielding Interahamwe. Marcella and her two sisters then had to reconstruct their life in an orphanage and lost contact with each other for a long time. It took time for them to pull themselves together away from the horrific memories of their childhood but like many Rwandan orphans, they only had one choice. To forgive, forget and forge ahead Emmanuel’s story is much different. The then ten year old did not understand why the peace of his Gitarama village was shattered in a few days in a manner that he never understood. But sooner or later with his friends, he was relegated to running around in the bushes desperate for food that was not there. He never got used to finding able-bodied men, their limbs severed at the knees and the elbows, not dying but not living, but waiting for their fate whatever that would be. Like many Rwandans, Marcella and Emmanuel wonder why it had to happen to them, this sudden denigration of humanness, this sudden change in the way life was meant to be, respect for others, love for neighbours, commitment to blood relations, and grace for strangers. They cannot understand how such things could happen. They do not even believe that it really happened even though they saw it happening with their own eyes. It defeated the whole purpose of living, of life, this merciless disrespect for humanity. You might be surprised that the Marcella’s and Emmanuel’s of any Rwandan village do not spend their days crying over those they lost and the things that they saw. They do not spend sleepless nights hatching plans of revenge for the well-known perpetrators of their suffering, now humbled and silent, amidst the general crowd nor do they continuously live their lives in reverse, questioning why it happened to them and them only. After all it happened to everyone. In the story of many young Rwandans, there are a few common undercurrents. Among those are trauma, pain, forgiveness, and hope in the future. Most of them are hard to find, but hope is hard to miss. It is painted on the faces of the school children, in the loving smiles of their young mothers and the silent confidence of their young fathers. It inspires the orphans to strive for better life for themselves and their dependant siblings, everyday. If there is country that runs exclusively on its bountiful reserves of hope it is this country, Rwanda. People are not found trying to blame everyone else for their conditions because everybody would have someone to blame. Like the traffic policeman who refuses to be considerate to a young reckless driver because his foreign friends say he is an orphan with siblings to look after, because everyone in Rwanda is an orphan, is a sign of how people can turn bad into good. Instead of wallowing in self pity, the orphans take it like the opportunity to advance. While others blame everything including the absence of food on the table on that big amorphous fellow we like to call government, in Rwanda people are taking advantage of the path that the government is beating for them. Be it making is easy to do business, to get loans, to assist orphans to live a decent life or giving people a simple affordable means of health insurance. People are grateful for those simple intangible things that government offered for free – freedom, peace and security – plus their own abundant reserves of hope, to mix a powerful dose of a new positive and progressive attitude towards life, the best capital one can have for a better future. Like Emmanuel and Marcella, they are thinking of how good the future can turn out, not how bad the past has been. kelviod@yahoo.com
