By Marcia DeSanctis
“Are those….” I pointed to the white sacks.
“Bones,” the Andrew said. “They still dig them up. So many were tossed into the rivers and farms. This area was all Tutsi.”
I picked up a child’s writing tablet. “They came here to do their homework,” he said. “They thought they’d be safe but the Hutu threw grenades into the church.”
There was a notebook with math exercises, a French workbook, a pad of what looked like writing samples and stacks of motheaten bibles. A woman came to usher us around.
“Shouldn’t these be under glass?” I asked her. “Preserved?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Inside the church were clothes, glasses, identity cards, sandals, pens. Skulls were lined up on shelves, showing the three primary ways of murder: machete, blunt force, and gunshot. She and Andrew showed me around the exhibit, wordlessly, and occasionally, when I had the stomach, I interjected a question.
We drove to Nyamata, the church where ten thousand Tutsi were murdered in the place they had gone to seek protection. The below-ground crypts were stacked top to bottom, end to end with bones. Upstairs, the clothes the victims were wearing were stacked limply on the pews. On the side of the church was a statue of Mary, looking helplessly down from her perch.
Every breath I drew that morning had been tainted with sorrow. Purple petals from the jacaranda tree fluttered onto our car as we left Nyamata.
“Even the trees are in mourning,” I said.
“No, the opposite,” Andrew said. “The trees are very much alive.”
