Weeds, Pineapples and Love Bigger than Big

The midday sun called giant drops of sweat from my brow as I attempted to weed the steep, rocky and neglected slope of our backyard. As I wrenched the weed-trees from the hard, dry dirt I took a birds-eye view on my own bent back. Years of intermittent attention to the yard trains the eye to know which weeds will require a dandelion puller to coax the roots up and which ones, tender and not yet tangled with the soil can be pinched out with ease. Weeds growing in the shade are easily plucked, having grown lazy in the protection of larger things. The ones which have had time to grow under the life-giving, yet cruel, eye of the sun take more work; they have struggled to survive and have sent their roots down deep.

There were lots of those kind.

So, as I struggled against the things I let grow, I thought about weeds and what they teach me about fear and hate.

Those ugly twins also grow in places were nothing else seems able. They put down roots fast, and pop up, unwanted, in the corners of the gardens I neglect. They flower boldly in the sun, and are ever-focused on sewing their own poisonous seed, usually with great success. Sometimes, like the weed-trees that are ubiquitous around our town, they decorate themselves with delicate flowers that color the hillside misleadingly in Spring. Then, the purple and pink petals give way to thorny stocks and wide, green leaves, which sting and scratch my arms in Summer.



Working in the yard today to stem the tide of unwanted thorns and thistles sent my mind to the Rwandese sisters we met at the Pineapple Cooperative. On the day we visited they had just elected a new leader. They told us through an interpreter that they had been having some problems. The interpreter later explained that the root of much of the conflict in the cooperative was deeply social and deeply personal. The farm has been built and is kept up by Hutu and Tutsi women, and the scars of genocide tug and rip in the closeness of community. The seeds of healing, where they can be found, send up fragile, tender shoots. Only some are blessed with fertile soil and an accommodating sun. Others are trampled. Some wither, break and blow away.

Thinking about those women working side by side has me thinking again about community and our profound misunderstanding of it here, at least in my neighborhood. The bedrock individualism that defines us, makes it impossible for us to understand or even imagine the lives of those we do not know or conceive of how our lives, in actuality, are tethered together with unbreakable cords. Thinking again about those women is challenging the basic premise of my “me”-ness. Can I really exist as a soul before God, without responsibility to others? Is there, in the end, any part of me that does not grow out of someone or something else? If I accept that I am a small part of something larger – how big is bigger? That is not a question I really want to ask; or at least not an answer on which I am really willing to wait.

But what these women are teaching me is that the land needs to be farmed. The babies need to be fed. The people need to be healed. And those tasks must be met with linked arms. As Reuben Welch says, we really do need each other. And that need leads us to places of contact that blister. Father Gregory Boyle sees that “finding some spaciousness for the victimizer, as well as the victim, resembles more the expansive compassion of God.” And I am starting to see, to my great horror, shame and joy that I have walked in both of those sets of shoes.

I remember the first time I heard the hymn The Love of God. It warmed my bones and made them hungry for the grandeur of God. Thy hymn was written by Frederick Lehman, with lyrics based on the Jewish poem Haddamut by Ben Isaac Nehorai, from the Aramaic, circa 1050. Lehman says that the lines of the third stanza (my favorite) were found scribbled on a wall of an insane asylum. They paint a picture of God’s love that I could not have imagined:

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.

When I hear that hymn, I cry because it reminds me that the love of God is terrifyingly immense; big enough and strong enough and gentle enough to cover women who farm with the wives of men who killed their brothers, husbands and children. And yet the love of God is close, like a breeze, running over the upturned face of a man locked away for spilling the contents of his tortured mind. The love of God is bigger than my biggest fear and deeper than the roots of the things I hate in secret. It is intimately close, like sweat on my skin. It can grow beautiful things in rocky soil.




“For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” Psalm 103:11-12

Regarding the Pain of Others

We have been back from Rwanda for over a month and that marker is tugging at me to think about what I have been saying or not saying about the trip to those around me. For the most part, I have avoided talking about Rwanda. The depth of what we experienced does not make for quick conversation and I think it is inevitably unfair to expect the people in my circle to stop what they are doing so that I can bumble my way through one or more of the stories I carefully folded and slipped into my heart while we were there.

I am realizing too, that there are some things that we saw or heard about that I will probably never share. To do so could only be sensationalist. There is no real way for any of us to make sense of violence, especially violence unleashed on children. And so it seems there are stones in my heart that are there to stay, little obstacles that fresh blood will have to move around. The few time I have tried to share with others some of the hardest images or stories shared with us, I feel like a peddler of other people's pain - and it feels wrong. And the passers-by on whom I have foisted these sample-sized horrors have been caught off guard. And as I have walked away, unsatisfied and unsettlingly lonely, I have thought back to the many times I have filled the uncomfortable space between myself and another's confession of pain with hallow words that easily sour.

The yawning space between life here and life there feels cavernous and eerie.

Proverbs cautions against throwing pearls before swine. If we allow the context to be personal, this verse offends, but it nonetheless describes the voracious consumerism that typifies mainstream America. If a pretty necklace is so easily devoured, how much more costly and inappropriate the laying of old bones and fresh wounds on a busy sidewalk. Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, posits the idea that "there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it – say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken – or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be."

I think I am beginning to understand what she means. And our friend Theo was clear that we were not to carry away Rwanda’s sorrow, but only her joys. I feel a deep sense of obligation to honor our friend.

But I also know that my friends and I here at home are numbed to what happens on other continents by the distance of miles and the interference of noise that buzzes continuously around our sheltered lives. And what happened in Rwanda, and what continues to happen in places like Rwanda need not happen. Sontag asks another good question: “What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?” And which exactly do I mean to do? What is my small part? Am I only to acknowledge? Does not that acknowledgement carry with it some responsibility to act?



Bearing in mind that none of these stories are really mine to tell, an image that holds for me the richness of a thousand stories is the photo above that I took on our last day. We visited the Rwanda Partners office in Kigali and I got a picture of some of the men who are working for this amazing organization. Theo is on the left. Pascal is third from the left. Gilbert, next to Pascal with the wide smile, as a child used to bring crafts to sell to visitors at the compound where we were staying. He is now a husband and father or two girls. One day, Gilbert traveled with us to the weaver cooperatives, which he oversees. He danced. Answered questions. And at dusk, as we made it back to the city, Gilbert hopped out of the van to attend night school.





Each of these men represent households that are earning professional wages. And all of these men are old enough to have lived through the genocide. I don’t know all of their stories, but as they stood smiling and joking with each other in the bright sun on this particular day, the miracle of their lives, friendship and employment nearly buckled my knees.

I think if you steered away from the memorials, you could visit Rwanda without running into the genocide. You could get lost in the dust and buzz of markets






And commerce




And Moto-taxis



And maybe that is okay. But then again, maybe it isn’t.

Either way, for my part, I find myself a bit paralyzed somewhere between the pitfalls of frenzied and ultimately unhelpful “do-goodiness” and the sin of silence. And for the moment, as our friend Pastor Larry says, I think I will just hold that.

The Royal Blue Future

This is Reverend Canon Japhet Ndoriyobijya. He pastors at Murambi Church and St. Steven Cathedral in Kigail. He is currently working on his doctorate in theology at Fuller Seminary. He is also Director at the CEFORMI Vocational School where we visited him and some of the students who are diligently learning skills in a variety of trades.



When Japhet met Greg and Tracy Stone, founders of Rwanda Partners, he was working for African Evangelical Enterprise running “self help groups”. Currently his students are making some of the cloth bags that Rwanda Partners sells in Costco. The vocational programs he oversees have been highly successful, so Japhet has been asked to help train students at some of the other schools RP is partnering with.



Visiting CEFORMI Vocational School was, in every way, fun. Japhet, who lives with his family on the school grounds, greeted us with enthusiasm and eagerly walked us through some of the classrooms where students and teachers were focused on making things with their hands like stools, window casings, handbags, brick pillars and electrical circuits.








In each room, bright young men and women would smile at us briefly then continue working, eager, I think, to cast small visions for us of the lives to which their hands and minds were leading them – lives of stability and accomplishment, free from hunger and want. And the blue of their jumpsuits sang the same song – like the open sky above us.




God, bless these students by the work of their hands.

School

Sis twirled around me as I did the dishes, a constant river of words passing through her mind and into the air around us. One topic caught my attention and warranted a response.

“Mom, do you know that some people never get to go to school?”

“Yes, Sis. I did know that. And it makes me very, very sad.”

“Ya,” she feigned agreement, but the tone suggested she had already moved past an emotional response to the logical consequences of such a circumstance. And she shared her childish common sense.

“If you don’t go to school you should not get married.”

“Why is that?” I asked, truly wondering.

“Because if you don’t go to school then you can’t help your kids with their spelling, so you shouldn’t get married.”

Although the end point of her thought process was harsh and overly simplistic, her ability to understand the scope of loss when children don’t receive an education was nonetheless profound. A child’s education means more than gainful employment and the ability to meet basic human needs in adulthood. It means, among other things, they can: read signs to avoid danger, understand contracts before signing them, learn from books, follow the news as it is reported in print, apply scientific principles to everyday problems, use math to save or invest or start a profitable business, and (of course) help their children with their schoolwork and feed them nutritious, leafy dreams about where their own education will take them.



Each day we were in Rwanda, we saw groups of children in uniform coming and going from school. Sometimes they were holding hands. The little ones carried backpacks on their backs that obscured all but their ankles. I loved to stare out the window of our minibus and watch. The groups of older girls always sent warm surges of blood through my heart. And the groups of older boys, with fresh white shirts and confident shoulders, caught my breath. They seemed to reflect the full strength of the sun. Radiant with promise.






There is no substitute for education.

Ntarama

The Ntarama Genocide Memorial caught up to me at church yesterday. While everyone around me sang upbeat praise songs, I cried silent tears with my hand over my mouth. Ntarama was the third and last memorial we visited. Like many of the sites where Tutsis were killed by the thousands, it had been a church. Our experience at the Ntarama Memorial was different in that a guide walked us around, laying over the hallowed grounds a steady stream of calculated words. He said things like systematic, indoctrination, polarization, oppression, and racism. He patiently relayed the colonial history and its aftermath - the story of the blood-soaked earth beneath our feet in the tiny sanctuary.



The church was the site of over 5,000 murders. Our guide explained that in the “practice genocide” of 1992, the Interahamwe militia had purposefully avoided church grounds, hoping that Tutsis would flock there when the time was right for their extermination. The plan succeeded and in 1994 many of those who died did so inside the walls of God’s houses.




We entered the memorial through an iron gate that opened into the back of the sanctuary, passing a sampling of human bones which had been cleaned and stacked on gorilla shelves. Some of the skulls were partially crushed or had machete hacks through them. They came in all sizes. The clothes of the victims had been stacked on pews or hung from the rafters, so that we had to pass underneath the rust-colored dresses, coats and trousers on our way to the front of the room.



Our guide spent a long time talking to us once we had squeezed ourselves into earshot around the linen-draped coffins. He pointed out how grenades had come through the windows. He showed us the collection of water cans, baby-bathing tubs, purses and shoes that had been stacked from floor to ceiling to the right of where a preacher had once stood addressing the crowd. He also showed us one of the government ID cards, which had meant life or death during the genocide. Each person had one so that race could be confirmed, since there was no way to accurately separate Hutu from Tutsi based on physical appearance, language or culture. The yellowed paper of the card, peppered with holes and smeared with dirt, was silent but the eyes of the woman pictured stared back, burning my heart.



Our guide added his own story of survival as a child; running from his home after watching his father murdered and traversing the marshland runs through Rwanda, cut here and there by a meandering river where bodies were dumped by the thousands, sent back to Ethiopia, from where the Tutsi clans were said to have originated.




He talked to us with his back to a wall of names. There was not that many names listed. The genocide was been so effective in this region that there was hardly anyone left to properly name the dead. Sometimes there would be only a first name, or a last name – a partial identity gleaned from the evidence that had fallen near the body. “Look at those hillsides there,” our guide said. “They used to be covered with farms. Now there is only grass. There are no people left.” I looked. It was a day’s hike across the space he was describing and the lush hillsides were indeed void of any evidence of human hands.



The Ntarama Memorial caught up to me yesterday morning in church. I pictured the entire permanent population of the college town where I live squeezed into the sanctuary. I looked at the clothes that people around me were wearing and suddenly the heaps of clothing, rusted with blood in the Ntarama church, took the forms of the men, women and children who had been wearing them, waiting in darkness for their eminent death. I pictured our own sanctuary littered with skulls and I wept.

That place had been a church. And it was full of bones. Full. Of bones.

Earlier, when we had visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial, I had scribbled down a quote from Yolande Mukagasana. I wrote it down because the beauty and pace of the words grated against the circular and empty logic:
“There will be no humanity without forgiveness.
There will be no forgiveness without justice.
But justice will be impossible without humanity.”

Pascal had told us that humanity does not have in itself what is needed for forgiveness. Forgiveness, or the grace to forgive, is a gift from God. Without it, as Mukagasana seemed to know, there is no hope and no point hoping.

But asking God for the gift of forgiveness by which to begin healing is complicated or stunted by one deep and craterous question: Can he be trusted? The reconciliation director who had met with us early in the week had talked about the importance of beginning the reconciliation process by letting people say out loud what they think about God. He told us what many victims say:

“God is Interahamwe.”

It had been God himself who had come for them and killed their families and stalked them in marsh and darkness. Even if he had not been the one with the machete, he had closed his eyes and listened with arms folded.

The reconciliation director told us that these things need to be said aloud. And heard. And wept over. Then, gently, people can begin to go back to God. “When people begin to realize that God is not hunting them down, they can begin healing.”

And so I add a small prayer of my own: Lord, be waiting. Be warm. Make them brave enough to say what they feel. And strong enough to tip their chins toward heaven.

“The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Psalm 34:18

Forgiveness

The evening of our first day in Rwanda the team met with a man who oversees reconciliation projects around the country and the continent. His PowerPoint presentation moved at a pace slow enough to accommodate some vulnerable and raw details of his experiences growing up Hutu, fleeing the country and living through the inhumane conditions of a refugee camp and eventually coming to see the absurdity of hate through the eyes of Jesus. But because he was Hutu and because his family is from the northern hotbed of Hutu hate frenzy, he told us that he often begins his work facilitating reconciliation by apologizing on behalf of Hutus for the genocide, even though he was not himself a perpetrator.

As I chewed curiously on this idea of blanket apology, he pulled the rug out. “You know, you should think about doing the same thing,” he said. “You will go to these villages and people will be polite to you, but they hold mzungus (white people) responsible in many ways for what happened here.” I looked at my shoes but I knew in my heart that I had just been given a word from God.





Leading up to the trip, lots of people naturally asked me what we would be doing in Rwanda. “I really don’t know,” I answered. I anticipated that there was something important about just being there, listening and learning – offering a witness and trying to take some of that home in our suitcases along with the red clay dust of the roads we traveled, stained into our clothes. But I did not imagine taking responsibility for my part in a genocide.

By the time we met this man we had been to the Kigali memorial and looked at the mass grave with the glass door by which they feed the bodies (continually unearthed by construction) onto their rest. At the point of conversation, the 1994 genocide was very real to me, and I would never of had the courage on my own to say anything meaningful about it to the survivors we were visiting.

The Germans colonized in 1884. The Belgians invaded in 1916 (during World War I) and are generally credited with taking a convoluted quasi-social classification and turning it into an arbitrary race war, which burst into the bloody flames of genocide in 1994. And the genocide itself is when the rest of the West solidified its position of purposeful and disdainful disinterest in the dismemberment of innocent women and children by machete. The UN had soldiers in the country. The U.S. received daily faxes from Paul Rusesabagina at the Hotel des Mille Collines (made famous by the movie Hotel Rwanda). But the lives of one million Tutsis and Hutu sympathizers were met with total silence from the West. Although I was not a diplomat or a lobbyist or even a High School graduate in 1994, I know that the UN stood down, paralyzed by their orders and only raised their rifles to kill the dogs that were feeding on the bodies in the street.



On day two of the trip we met with a large group of widows who use a Rwanda Partners building for weekly meetings where they offer each other emotional support. Many of the women were clearly fragile. One had a deep machete scar across her left cheekbone. They talked about Jesus and friendship and finding the strength to bathe themselves and dress themselves, despite their crushing grief. When it was my turn to speak, my lip trembled violently and my heart kept pace. I told them I was very sorry for their sorrows and asked for their forgiveness on behalf of my family, my church and my nation. Right away a few women stood and offered me an embrace. I was folded into strong arms that held me close for a few long, breathless and healing seconds. The small words were accepted over shared tears.



Later in the week we met with a large group of reconciliation ambassadors, many traveling long distances by bus to make the meeting. These are men and women who have made forgiveness the business of their life, investing themselves in the physical, emotional and spiritual healing of their communities. We took our place around the circle of patio chairs.



We exchanged polite greeting and kisses on the cheeks, but I could feel the vague chill that we had been warned about, like the cold of a concrete floor coming through wool socks. My husband felt it too and stood to take his turn with the small words. His eyes began swimming and his voice faltered but he spoke from his heart about the shame and silence of our family, church and nation. When he was done speaking, a few men rose to hug him. One man, with both his arms around my husband’s neck sobbed quietly while the rest of us studied our folded hands.

Then one of the men who had stood to forgive my husband spoke. He spoke quietly, saying through an interpreter that he appreciated the sincerity and accepted my husband’s small words. He then bravely added that all his life he had dreamed of one day getting a gun and killing all mzungus. The hyperbole of his statement did not dilute its raw honesty and truth. Even someone who has made forgiveness his life deserves the chance to extend that forgiveness and continue the process of healing. Pascal, who works for Rwanda Partners and whose story is featured in Wounded Healers, had told us days before (while sitting next to Narcisse, who killed his wife and unborn child during the genocide) that man is not capable of forgiveness. It is a gift from God, accepted in an instant. But healing, on the other hand, is a process. And it can take a lifetime. And sometimes it demands extraordinary distances over which to carry small words.



(forgiver and forgiven after the meeting)


(Narcisse, Pascal and us)