The Blog.

This afternoon the students and along with a FH regional coordinator visited two genocide memorial sites just south of Kigali. While the first memorial we encountered earlier in the week within the city of Kigali was a big shiny museum complete with manicured French gardens, fountains, a bookstore, glassed exhibits, video screens and audio-guided tours, these were of a different sort.

These were Catholic churches that had served as places of refuge for thousands of Batutsi and moderate Bahutu fleeing the violence that exploded in the spring of 1994. While the precise figures of those murdered within church walls and on the grounds remains unknown–as are many of the details of the genocide–the figure is placed conservatively at well over 10,000 between just these two churches. Of those within the churches, fewer than a handful survived. There were but a few children who managed to appear believably dead among the bodies.

Today, the churches appear much as they did in the spring of 1994. There are no glass exhibits and manicured gardens. Shelves cradle skulls of countless victims bearing the mortal wounds characteristic of blunt force trauma and machete strikes. The weapons, both makeshift and purposeful, remain strewn on the ground. The welded steel doors that had been forced open remain in their ribbonned and melted state. And victims’ clothes remain hanging on rafters, hanging on windowsills, hanging along the inside of every wall, covering every concrete pew, covering the ground of the choir pit, hanging and encroaching every walkway, denying any visitor the benefit of leaving untouched by death; leaving without rubbing shoulders with hate; leaving unsullied by the very dirt in which these lived, feared, died, and were buried.

One is buried among them.