Rwanda Genocide Memorial Museum

Yesterday I went to the Rwanda Genorcide Memorial Museum in Kigali.  It was a surreal experience.  This was my first visit to a non Holocaust genocide museum.  The ground floor takes you through the sequence of events leading up to, during and post the Rwanda genocide.  Upstairs, they have a children's exhibit and tributes to other genocides in the 20th century.  Outside, there are beautiful gardens surounding the mass graves.  I'll try to take you through pieces of each area as best I can.

When learning about the Rewanda genocide, I was shocked by the methods of killing.  They were so personal!  Most frequently they hacked people with machetes until they were dead.  They killed them with their hands.  Other times, some people were burried alive while chained together or a granade may have been sent into a church where people were hiding.  The most difficult method for me to digest was when discussed raping women.  I know that this is not a new technique of trying to erradicate a population.  The shock was that they were raping women with men who were knowingly HIV positive.  This means that they were not killing the women directly, but letting them die a slow and painful death. It not only provided a horrible death for the women (keeping in mind that antivirals are not readily available here in the best of times), but if the women were empregnated, it would likely pass on the same fate to their children who would soon be orphaned.

I was also deeply impacted by the room that had skulls and bones on display.  I began having flash backs of when I saw the hair in Aushwitz.  I don't think I was even able to stay a full 2-3 minutes in that room.  I was alone and felt sick to my stomach.  The skulls belong to real people who were not given a proper burrial.  I just broke down.

When I went upstairs, the children's exhibit was just as difficult to process.  There are huge blown up pictured of the child (or possibly 2 children) with a list below with some of the following information.  

• Favorite food
• Favorite port
• Favorite colour
• Their typical behaviour
• And other cute facts  
• Sometimes at the bottom of the list it included their last words or memories 
• It  always included  how they died.  You see children as your as 8 months old being hacked by a machete.  Who could do such a thing????

I then went to read about the other genocides.  I think it is so important to relate them together.  Jews are just one of many cultures that have been persecuted just for being born a certain way, however, in high school, we never learned about any other genocide. We know the pain and scars that it creates and we should not allow it to happen to others.  We need to teach our children that we are survivors and there are other survivors out there as well.  We all have to work together to prevent this from happening to anyone else!

The final part of the museum is the gardens.  They have several mass graves that are nicely maintained.  There are tributes around the garden, but I didn't take the tour to know what they all are.  It was a great place to walk around and clear my head a little before getting back on the bus.

Rwanda is not really on the map for tourism, but if you happen to be coming to see the gorillas (I'll be doing that tomorrow), you should take 3 hours and see this museum.  I wont be able to post any pictures from this expereience.  I also apologize for not going into details about what happened, but it is apparently illegal to mention the two sides of the struggle by name.  You are only allowed to refer to people in Rwanda and Rwandese.  I am sure that there are ways that they teach about what happened, but I'm not willing to take the risk on my blog.