Highlighting path from despair to redemption

This year’s photo is of a 28-year-old Rwandan woman called Uwamahoro who is carrying the weight of three generations on her shoulders – supporting her mother Verediana, who lives with a disability, her daughter Ineza and her niece Vanessa.

Compounding her problems is the fact that Rwanda, like so much of the world, is suffering the fall-out from flooding – meaning that people like Uwamahoro cannot farm their little plot of land. And the floods have robbed her of her home.

I’ve been to Rwanda and it is a beautiful country – the Land of a Thousand Hills – verdant, fertile…and carrying the weight of an almost unspeakable horror that blighted this African land forever, 32 years ago.

These days, Rwanda is a tourist destination too, where you can see the gorillas in the mist. Kigali, the capital city, is thriving.

But scratch the surface and the wounds of its 1994 genocide reopen – not that they could ever be heal, given that over 800,000 people butchered to over just 100 days while the world stood and watched.

Perhaps it’s a form of weird progress that Rwanda’s problem these days are the same as ours; climate change causing flooding and affecting its agriculture industry – but the old problems will haunt them, and us, forever.

History reflects a long-running undercurrent of tension between two tribes – the Hutus, larger in number but poorer in wealth, and the Tutsis, fewer but richer.

And – in a genocide triggered by the death in a plane crash of the country’s President Juvénal Habyarimana – the Hutus attacked their neighbours (sometimes their own families) because they believed the Tutsis were ‘cockroaches’ who had to die.

Ten years after the genocide, I travelled to Rwanda with Trocáire to see the aftermath for myself. Then, as now, the country was the focal point of the charity’s Lenten campaign. We met Josiane Umumarashavu, a then-22-year-old woman who was just twelve when her world was thrown off its axis.

Josiane was shy and reluctant to relive her past, but she eventually told a story that would make you doubt humanity. Suffice to say she had seen her own family members raped and murdered; one of them beheaded and dumped in an open sewer beside her home.

Two years ago, Josiane came to Ireland – again it was to create awareness – and now her story was inspirational, both in terms of her own determination and the help given by charities like Trocáire.

Because she is married with two children and living in Kigali. And after graduating in business management and accounting – with the financial support of the people of Ireland – she now works as a finance assistant in Trócaire's Rwanda office.

She still has the 2004 Trócaire box in her home and she look at it every so often ‘to remind myself of how far I have come’.

But she said that the charity had also helped her mother to open a small shop and her family was able to afford a home and a small piece of land.

On that same trip, we visited what was once the Murambi Technical School, now known as the Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre, deep in the countryside of southern Rwanda.

On April 16 1994, 65,000 Tutsis, in fear of their lives, ran to the school for safety. But as they gathered there, water was cut off and no food was available – and after defending themselves for a few days using stones, the Tutsi were overrun five days later.

Rather than a place of refuge, the school was a giant pen that made it easy for the militiamen from the Interhamwe, a paramilitary force that epitomised evil.

Some 45,000 Tutsi were murdered at the school, and almost all of those who managed to escape were killed the next day when they tried to hide in a nearby church.

France – which had previously supported the Hutu-led Government against the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front – later brought in heavy equipment to dig deep pits for thousands of bodies.

And they laid a volleyball court over them to hide what happened.

But in every classroom, there are thousands of calcified bodies – many of them children – sometimes in rows, often just bones piled on top of each other.

You look at the little skulls of the children and you see them cracked like an egg. A man who acts as a guide tells you that was because they caught these children, tied their hands behind their backs…and threw them head-first at the wall.

They repeated this unspeakable evil as many times as it took to kill them….as parents and siblings watched on, waiting their turn to die.

This was just one location – the Hutus descended into villages to murder; they gang-raped the women, they set up roadblocks and, high on drugs, they killed with abandon.

Two years after the genocide the trials began, and ten years later the jails were still wedged with prisoners. As the years went by, many returned to their own villages, next door again to the survivors and relatives of those they killed.

Somehow a version of normality took root – how it could is hard to fathom – but those who killed and the families of those who were murdered again live in close proximity to each other…not talking about the past but never forgetting; just trying to move forward and not back.

With Rwanda again on the front of the Trocáire box this Lent, I can only remember again Josiane Umumarashavu – living proof that, even from the depths of hell, there is a path to redemption.