A little levity and a lot of dark thoughts

Apr 17th

Today is the last day of the INSET “Boot Camp” for teachers. And guess what! Round about 2pm we get a series of texts from colleagues that the President has granted teachers and extra week’s Easter Holiday so that they can recover from their studies and prepare lessons for next term. But, hey, you heard a whisper about this right here in this blog two weeks ago when the Boot Camp started. Just goes to show that what you hear as a wild rumour tends to be officially confirmed a fortnight later!

So all our VSO teachers don’t know whether to be pleased that they have an extra week’s holiday, or dismayed that they’ll somehow have to squeeze the same amount of teaching into a week less time when they eventually go back. (Says a lot for our lot’s integrity that they even think about the latter).

For me, it means that the inspection at Shyogwe that I’ve just fixed up will have to be postponed. And that might be a problem because we’re doing it at the same time that a Dutch Aid organisation is considering whether to make a grant of 20 thousand Euros to Shyogwe and its surrounding schools. I’ll have to consult with Geert as soon as I get back to Gitarama.

Today has been another round of Kinya-rwanda lessons (telling the time), followed by some really heavyweight sessions on child abuse and Gender Related Violence in Rwanda, and a session about the whole issue of ethnicity, especially relevant at the present time!

To explain the latter; according to the newspapers (which are not independent but heavily obedient to Government will), there have been five grisly murders around the country recently. Most of the victims have been genocide survivors, or closely related to them, and have previously been subject to heavy intimidation and threats before they were murdered. It looks as if people who have been punished for their crimes in 1994, or who have relatives imprisoned for their roles, are taking it out on witnesses who gave evidence against them. It goes a long way to explaining why the Government is so fanatical about the anti-genocide boot camp for teachers, and also why the powers that be try to keep such a tight control on what people say and even think. This isn’t a free society in any way an English person would recognise, but we are constantly reminded that fourteen years is a very short time to expunge the awful things that happened in 1994. It’s a huge issue here. Films like “Hotel Rwanda” (see yesterday’s blog) almost sanitise what went on. The reality is so indescribably awful in every respect – the methodical planning that went on before it; the vicious and deliberate savagery of what people did to each other; the lying and cover ups by officials from Government, church, foreign NGOs, the UN – that it is unfilmable. It’s all but unbelievable. If you don’t believe me, just read about what some of the various churchmen did in 1994. For every brave pastor who hid people or gave his life to try to save them, there is another who aided and abetted the slaughter. Can you believe that there was a priest who actually bulldozed his own church onto the packed mass of refugees inside it, then allowed the army and militias to move in with hand grenades, automatic rifles and machetes? No, of course you can’t. We associate priests with tolerance and love. But it did actually happen. The more we lift the lid on what took place in 1994, be it from books, or from personal accounts, the more we volunteers feel the ground slipping away from under our feet. You wonder how any society could possible hold together given the amount of sorrow and anger only just held in by all the police and army and security guards around the place. It makes us as Volunteers feel very uncertain about our roles; we are trying to model education here in our “western” image when people’s priorities are a combination of day to day survival in one of the world’s poorest countries, and trying to comes to terms with trauma so deep that even now a visit to the National Genocide Memorial leaves them screaming in terror in public, and unable to sleep for days. I kid you not; anything that you’ve seen or read about the Nazi Holocaust can be matched much of what went on here. On Saturday night there’s a special film showing at the Gisozi Memorial Centre. We’re wondering if we can stomach it.

The present-day stuff on Gender Related Violence is frightening. We were specially briefed by the head of the Rwandan Police’s gender desk, and by a woman from Action Aid, a specialist in gender issues. They’d prepared their power points completely independently of each other, but it was a frightening session because their two viewpoints were saying exactly the same thing. We saw slides of battered, tortured and abused children, of infanticides and aborted babies, and bare statistics which reduced us to total silence. In Rwanda there is a culture of women suffering in silence; they simply do not report most of the violence meted out to them, whether it be sexual or physical or psychological. Rape is common, and forced sex an everyday occurrence for young girls. You can easily see why – houses are overcrowded; when your uncle of nephew comes to stay he is often put into the same room or even the same bed as the young daughter because there simply isn’t anywhere else for him to sleep. The daughter isn’t really aware of what’s being done to her, and there’s simply no concept of “Telling someone” if you don’t like what’s happening to you. Way to go, by British standards, but at least it’s a step up from chopping one another with machetes.

To this you need to add forced marriage when the girl is about fifteen (her parents need her space for the numerous younger siblings); there is polygamy in a few places (a hangover from pre-Christian days) and daughters of the less dominant wife are habitually abused. There is forced prostitution, neglect, and over the last three years an average of 60 cases of infanticide. But how can we point the finger at a mother who is too young, who probably never went to school, who is illiterate, who has never been beyond her hill or valley, and who is so desperately poor that the murder of her child makes the difference between the other children living or dying of malnutrition? Tiga says there have been cases in the South of children dying of malnutrition while attending state boarding schools. At Hester’s school in Rusomo there were riots by the students earlier this year because of the lack of food for them. Once again, you suddenly find all the moral framework you take for granted cannot be relied on here.

On a lighter note, myself, Tiga, Épi and Florence (a Kinyarwanda-speaking Ugandan volunteer who has just joined us) have agreed to serve on the Volunteer Committee. This is the official vehicle for communication between volunteers and “the management”, but it only involves four Saturdays each year, and we get travel expenses paid and a free lunch at a Kigali restaurant.

Everyone is getting tired and feeling flat; we need to bet away from here. A week’s course is very tiring, and I know that by Saturday we’re going to be just as exhausted as we were on the first course back in January. So it’s a night in with my book tonight – tomorrow is Els’ birthday and we’ll hit the town. There’s talk of going to an Ethiopian restaurant. (OK, so what do Ethiopians eat?) We’ll see.

Best thing about today – the food at Amani. We’re so stuffed we can hardly move! Worst thing – having to confront the issues described above, and feeling so powerless to act – we can’t speak the language; as guests we have precarious authority, and yet we’ll all see the effects of violence in our schools. We were actually told that any amount of physical punishment is, in effect, OK as long as it doesn’t leave marks.