With a population of about 9.7 million people and the size of Maryland, Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa. It’s also considered one of the 20 most impoverished countries in the world. During the genocide that occurred here in 1994, nearly 1 million people (some scholars debate even more) were brutally killed over the course of just 100 days. Every single individual living in Rwanda today was in some way affected by the atrocities of the genocide. The Rwandan people are now faced with the enormous - and seemingly impossible - task of rebuilding their country and continuing to live together peacefully, often perpetrators and victims in the same neighborhoods.
16 years is, in some ways, a long time, but if you think about it for just a couple more seconds, it’s really not that long in light of what kinds of things happened. Rwanda still thinks about it. And, this earthquake of brutality that hit the entirety of the country in 1994 is not without aftershocks in neighboring countries, particularly in Burundi and the Congo. The issues are still complicated. The past can still be haunting.
While there’s undeniable scarring, it’s impressive how far Rwanda has come. This progress is evident in the literature, in the press, in the people, in a new way of life. Rwanda is often seen as a diamond in the rough, a model of post-conflict peacekeeping and reconstruction.
I’m finding, just in the few days I’ve been here, that there’s a lot to eradicating genocide ideology – a lot more than we might read or guess. Recovery must be both practical and psychological in scope. Recovery lies not just in the system – in the politics and in the economy, in solutions to poverty, in access to opportunity – but it has to lie in people’s minds. Fighting genocide ideology means changing the way people think.
I found out about Prison Fellowship International when I was thumbing through a Vanderbilt publication one day during senior year, half-asleep. I read a blurb about what PFI’s last Kolbe Fellow, a Vanderbilt alum, was doing in Rwanda. I woke up. Day after day, I kept remembering what I’d read. In fact, it kept nagging me. There were lots of things on my mind at the time, but this one was as persistent as those mosquitos in your ear at night. I did something about it. After some discussions with the staff over at the D.C.-based headquarters and a few Skype conversations later, I applied.
That was the day before I headed overseas for 10 days in March with a grou
p of six college students. I had been planning on going for some time since talking about a year prior with the group’s leader, my friend and fellow student. He’d gone a few times before. I had a half-idea of what I was getting myself into –visiting prisons and juvenile detention centers, meeting ex-criminals. Our group partnered up with an organization that reaches out to guys (and some girls) who’ve been swept up into the pervasive gang systems in that region of the world. Without going into intense detail, I’ll say that there is nothing that compares to the sights I saw and the things I heard while I was there. I told a good friend a few days before the trip that the organized gang system in that region and in certain parts of the U.S. is one of the very worst things I know about in the world. I haven’t parted with that idea since.
The boys we worked with, anywhere from 13 to 23 years old, had been caught in the cycle of poverty – often abandoned, orphaned, and jailed countless times. They had turned to gang membership as a sort of family, purpose, and identity. The gang promises a certain stability, too - food, shelter, and clothes. Tattoos were everywhere – signifying the boys’ loyalties to their gangs, their hatred for those who didn’t submit, their bragging rights to the number of people they had killed, their anger, their losses.
The guys in our group stayed in a house with 15 of these boys. All of them had left the gangs, convinced that living for something far greater than themselves and these criminal networks was the only way to live. We were at the house every day, talking with these guys, going places with them, playing basketball and soccer in a graffiti-plagued park with them. They often lived in fear – anywhere they went, they might be identified. Many of them wore long shirts and pants in the heat of the day to keep the tattoos concealed. Despite intense fear, they continued to persevere.
As many names as I’ve been called in my time overseas and in the U.S. (including, but not limited to: “gazelle,” “Giselle,” “Gao” – “tall” in Chinese and the first ever word in my Chinese vocabulary, “Stretch” by my middle school P.E. coach, “Legs,” “Daddy Long Legs,” “Mosquito Legs” by the boy I had a crush on in 5th grade – I’m still scarred), I came to love the name they called me: “Amiga” or “Hermana” (sister). That was the most important thing we could be for them in the time we were there: friends, brothers and sisters, a part of their better lives. We let them tell their stories.
Shooting hoops (my skills are really rough, but they kind of gasped when I scored a 3-pointer and then wouldn’t let me put the ball down) and shooting the breeze with these guys was like – I don’t even know what. Having them – the roughest and toughest, most calloused and hard-hearted of society, the witnesses and perpetrators of some of the most terrible acts humans are capable of – hang on me, hug me, smile at me, laugh with me –was nothing short of mind-blowing. Something beyond all human understanding had happened in their hearts and minds.
Coming back to the U.S., I knew
that serving the Rwandan people, in prisons, in their homes, on the streets, in the wake of some of the darkest criminal acts, was exactly what I needed to do. Those 10 days overseas in March, along with a few other things, played an undeniable role in that decision. I look at young boys around the world, like the boy in the first image – taken amidst the ruthless and perpetual warring in the Congo – who know of no other route than crime. They are actively recruited, and they respond out of desperation. Desperate for their lives, they kill.
Rwanda is not the only place. Crime can be an easy way out, but at the same time, it’s a trap. And it has a cyclical relationship with poverty. Crime perpetuates poverty; poverty perpetuates crime. This pattern penetrates nearly every region of the world. So what can we do about it? That's the question that dictates what I’m doing in Rwanda.
Last summer – the summer before my last year in college – a few things happened that changed the way I look at things. Curiosity, amazement, and reflection made me dig deep. I devoted pretty much the whole summer to thinking hard, reading, asking questions, and talking to a lot of people about the existence of God and about what that means for me, for others, and for the world we live in. I decided to finally address all of my doubts, which I had pushed aside for far too long, about religion, spirituality, and meaning. That was time well-spent. The realizations of that summer inevitably contributed to the decision to live in Rwanda for awhile, and you might sense this in different ways in the writing that follows.
That’s probably enough on background. (And never fear, posts won’t usually be the length of novels.)
Here’s what you can expect to read about in the coming months:
- Prison reform as a social and economic good
- Crime as a major component of poverty
- What other countries can learn from Rwanda
- Approaches to post-conflict peacekeeping and reconciliation
- How and what kind of education can help change the nation
- The psychology of Genocide and the effectiveness of counseling
- How world-view plays a role in all of the above
Feel free to comment, challenge, question, and suggest. Remember, this is about making us think.
Photo Credits: FALLING WHISTLES, an organization dedicated to freeing young soldiers in the Congo from a life of war crime by working to create productive, sustainable outlets for them.
http://www.fallingwhistles.com
No comments:
Post a Comment