It's been so easy to put off finishing this post for the last few weeks. Life has kept me happily busy of late, so I haven't wanted to dwell too much on seeing the horrors of Rwanda's genocide, but I've finally finished my post about the Murambi Genocide Memorial. The blog should be regularly updated from now on.
As we continued the drive to Nyungwe Forest National Park, we stopped to visit the Murambi Genocide Memorial. Walking up the long, eerily quiet path, I couldn't help but think of sickly peaceful Auschwitz had also been when I had visited the famous death camp.
In the 1990s, Murambi was home to a technical college perched at the top of a hill. During the genocide in 1994, Tutsi were told to seek refuge at the college where they would be safe. Tens of thousands flocked here seeking safety. Instead, they were stripped of any food they brought with them and trapped on the campus. Anyone who tried to leave was killed. In the middle of the night, the extremist Hutu Interhamwe attacked the college. In a matter of hours, tens of thousands of Tutsi were massacred.
Today, the college buildings house a museum and horrible reminders of what people are capable of.
The information presented in the museum was a bit disappointing. It wasn't always in chronological order, was extremely one sided (even for a genocide museum), was often unclear or confusing, and raised more questions than it answered.
That said, it was an extremely moving place to visit. Outside of the main building are several smaller buildings, many of which have been left frozen in their mid-construction state. These buildings were meant to be dorms and classrooms for the school. Instead, they now house the remains of those who were murdered here almost two decades ago. The corpses have been preserved in Lyme, giving them an odd, all white appearance. The bodies are laid out in awkward positions on platforms in each room. Some of the corpses have an arm extended, like they were trying to ask for help. Others are tangled up in each other, leading me to imagine people grabbing their loved ones in the final moments before an early death.
As we walked away, Posh and I struggled to make sense of what we had just seen. The only conclusion we could come to was that everyone in the country seemed to have gone mad during the genocide and David, our Rwandan driver who had lived through the terrible events as a boy, readily agreed.