Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust (30 page)

I put my hand on Bazil’s arm. I knew the pain I was about to cause him, so I tried to be as gentle as possible. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Bazil, other than to tell you the truth. Everyone is dead: my family, your family . . . almost every Tutsi and moderate Hutu in our village—they’re all dead.”

He looked at me as if he’d forgotten how to speak, and then he crumpled into a ball at my feet, his chest heaving in spasms as he sobbed onto the butt of his rifle. Poor Bazil . . . he’d lost his parents, four brothers, and three sisters.

I understood now why we’d been treated with such suspicion when we arrived. Many of these soldiers had been fighting their way down from Uganda and had no news from home along the way. They were now returning to find their families slaughtered by neighbors—people they’d trusted all their lives. There was not much happiness in the rebel camp.

I wasn’t feeling much happiness at the moment either. I felt heartsick for giving the news to Bazil, and as the minutes passed, I feared that the worst had befallen Aloise and the group. I prayed hard for their safety, and soon I heard my merry friend’s familiar laughter coming from an approaching RPF truck.

“Whatever prayers you’ve been saying, keep on saying them, Immaculée,” Aloise chuckled. “Those killers were looking at us like they wanted to cut us to pieces, but they couldn’t move. It was as though they were frozen to the spot! We were like Daniel in the lions’ den . . . just like Daniel in the lions’ den!”

Aloise pulled her children to her, hugged them tightly, and laughed and laughed until tears ran down her cheeks. My heart lifted, and I said, “I didn’t know if I’d ever live to say this, but we’ll never have to face the killers again. The genocide is over—God has spared us and given us a new life. Praise the Lord! Thank You, God!
Thank
You, God!
”

Aloise smiled at me and said, “Amen, Immaculée . . . Amen!”

ALOISE’S SUNNY DISPOSITION AND INDEPENDENT SPIRIT charmed the hardened soldiers. She spent the first few hours at camp amusing them with stories about the famous people she’d met, and then she kept them laughing with her bawdy jokes. But they were most impressed with her unbeatable optimism: She never complained about her lot in life, and she made the most of every situation, no matter how difficult.

Aloise and I got along so well that Major Ntwali asked if she were my mother. “No,” I replied, “but she treats me like a daughter. My parents and two of my brothers were actually killed in the genocide—so were most of my other relatives.”

“I’m sorry,” the major said. “Do you blame us?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, confused by the question.

“A lot of my soldiers blame themselves for what happened. They think that we spent too much time fighting to take over Kigali while hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were being killed, including their own families. They think we took too long to get here.”

“They shouldn’t think like that, Major—it’s not your fault. You fought to save us . . . you fought the devil. Now we have to make sure we never face the same battle. We have to stop killing and learn to forgive.”

He shook his head at me, clucking his tongue in disapproval. “Don’t talk to me about God or the devil—I know who did this. You can forgive all you want to, Immaculée, but maybe you haven’t looked into as many mass graves as I have. The people who filled those graves are still out there, and believe me, they don’t deserve your forgiveness. They deserve to be shot, and I intend to give them what they deserve. I’ll forgive them when they’re dead.”

The major pointed to a nearby Baptist church. “You’ll find other survivors in there. Stay put until we figure out what to do with you, and don’t wander off. Remember, you’re still in a war zone. If you run into some Interahamwe, they won’t be as forgiving as you are.”

My little group and I stayed in the church with about 100 other Tutsi survivors. There were no beds or blankets, but we were happy to have a roof over our heads, and it felt good to be in a house of God. Bazil had food to give us, which I volunteered to cook. But as I tried to light a cooking fire outside, I felt nauseated by a sickening stench.

“What in the Lord’s name is that smell?” I asked one of the soldiers posted to stand guard over us. He took me by the hand, and without saying a word, led me behind the church. It was an image from hell: row upon row of corpses, hundreds and hundreds of them stacked up like firewood. A black carpet of flies hovered about them, and crows picked at the top layer of the dead. An old man stood at the edge of the pile shooing away dogs with a stick.

I covered my mouth, my eyes wide in horror. Then the soldier pointed beyond the piles to a deep pit at least 30 yards across and 20 feet deep. It was filled with bodies, maybe tens of thousands of them. I turned my head, vomited, and staggered back to the front of the church. The soldier followed me, still saying nothing.

“Are you from this area?” I asked. He nodded, and I understood then that somewhere in that rotting pit of humanity was his family. His pain was beyond words.

How many years—how many generations—would it take before Rwanda could recover from such horror? How long for our wounded hearts to heal, for our hardened hearts to soften? Too long for me, I decided. Looking into that soldier’s eyes, I realized that I was going to have to leave Rwanda.

I’d have to leave the sorrow and suffering of this country behind, at least for a while. In order to help heal others, as I knew God wanted me to, I needed the perspective that only space and time could provide. I had to first heal myself to be able to assist the others: the orphans at the French camp, the major whose heart harbored vengeance, the killers who still had murder in their eyes, and the soldier before me whose grief was smothering his soul.

I would leave, but not yet. I had much to do first, and besides, I had no job, no money, and no prospects. All I owned were the clothes on my back and my father’s rosary in my pocket.

WE STAYED WITH THE REBEL SOLDIERS FOR A FEW DAYS, spending most of our time trying to figure out how we could get to Kigali without any money. All 12 of us could stay at Aloise’s house once we got there, but we had no way of making the still-dangerous, five-hour journey. I prayed for days about it and asked everyone to do the same. Eventually God answered and sent Major Ntwali to see us with the solution.

The major offered us a truck and driver to take us right to Aloise’s front door. Not only that, but when the truck picked us up, the major had his soldiers load it with sacks of rice, flour, sugar, beans, coffee, tins of milk, and cans of oil. It was more food than I’d seen in months, more than enough to last us for months. We thanked the major repeatedly for his generosity as we waved good-bye and headed off for Kigali.

We arrived in the capital in the middle of what would have been a busy working day a few months earlier. As it was, we drove into a ghost town. The streets were deserted except for the occasional United Nations truck or RPF Jeep darting along the empty roads, swerving to avoid the corpses in the street . . . or the carcasses of the hundreds of dogs the soldiers had shot to stop them from scavenging on human remains. The air reeked of death, and I could hear the wind shrieking through abandoned homes like evicted spirits. So many buildings lay in ruins, burned out and pockmarked by machine-gun fire and mortar rounds. Shop doors were ripped from their hinges, the stores were looted, and every once in a while we’d hear an explosion in the distance. I couldn’t recognize the beautiful city whose bright lights and busy boulevards had thrilled me so much as a teenager.

“Watch where you step,” our driver warned. “There are land mines everywhere . . . we can’t remember where we put them all. You could go for a walk around here and end up without your legs.”

We drove straight to the United Nations headquarters to see if we could find Aloise’s husband, Fari. As she said, “It’s only a 15-minute walk from our house to the UN. If he survived hiding in our ceiling, this is where he would have come. It’s the safest place in Kigali.”

We parked in front of the big metal gate and lifted Aloise out of the truck. She was shaking—it was the first time since meeting her that I’d seen her spirit falter. “I don’t know how I’ll go on if Fari was killed,” she admitted. “He is my heart and soul, and he gives me my strength. I’ve prayed so hard for him to be alive . . . I hope God listens to my prayers the way He listens to you, Immaculée.”

God did listen to Aloise’s prayers. No sooner had she finished speaking than she spotted a familiar figure walking across the compound. “Oh, my God . . . that’s him! I’m sure that’s him—I’d recognize his walk anywhere. Call him, somebody call to him!”

We pleaded with one of the UN guards to run and get the man Aloise pointed out. The man walked toward us cautiously until he saw Aloise . . . and then he began running as fast as he could. He pushed through the gate, dropped to his knees, and began kissing her. “My darling, my darling,” he said. Little Kenza and Sami jumped into his arms, smothering him with hugs and kisses. It was one of the happiest family reunions I’d ever seen, until Fari asked, “Where is the baby?”

Aloise’s eyes filled with tears. “God took her,” she croaked. “She had a fever and didn’t make it.”

Fari put his head into Aloise’s lap and they cried for 15 or 20 minutes, while the rest of us stood around awkwardly, looking at each other. None of us knew that Aloise had lost a child before reaching the French camp. We marveled at her strength.

Eventually, Fari looked up and asked her who we were. “Orphans I adopted at the refugee camp,” Aloise told him. “They’ll be staying with us.”

“You’re all welcome,” Fari said.

“The tall one there is the daughter of Rose and Leonard . . . both of our old friends are dead.”

“Oh my,” Fari said, getting up and taking my hand. “I see your parents in you, young lady. Be strong—your mom and dad were beautiful, kind people. God has spared you for a reason . . . you can stay with us until you find out what that reason is.”

I didn’t know what to say except “Thank you.”

WE CLIMBED BACK INTO THE TRUCK AND DROVE to Aloise’s house. On the way, Fari told us that he’d abandoned their home and had been living at the UN for the past four months. “If Aloise hadn’t returned to me with the children,” he said, “I would never have come back here. A home is a prison without love.”

The place was a mess: The windows had been blown out, the walls were riddled with bullet holes, and part of the roof had caved in. Yet we all pitched in, spending the next week repairing and cleaning the house. With hard work, and construction materials we scrounged from several destroyed buildings, the place soon looked like a home again. Jean Paul and the other boys had their own rooms, while Florence and I became roommates. For the first time since I’d left my parents’ house, I was able to sleep in a real bed. We were all in heaven!

While we had the food that Major Ntwali had supplied us with, we had no money—and after months of constant wear, our clothes were practically worn to threads. So we went to abandoned homes looking for shoes and newer things to wear. In one house I found a pair of gold earrings. I convinced myself that I deserved something pretty to make me feel good after all I’d been through, and I put them in my pocket. But when I tried them on in front of a mirror at Aloise’s, I couldn’t bear my own reflection. All I could see was the face of the woman who had owned them. The earrings didn’t belong to me and held none of my memories; someone else had worked hard for them or had received them as a loving gift. I felt like a trespasser in another person’s life. I didn’t want possessions I hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve, so the next day I took the earrings back to where I’d found them.

Meanwhile, a little voice was whispering in my head, and I nodded in agreement with what I heard:
It is time for me to move on. It is
time to get a job.

CHAPTER 22

The Lord’s Work

G
od only knew where I would find a job in a city where people were afraid to walk the streets. Leftover land mines littered the streets of Kigali, but if I wanted to work, I had to pound the pavement. The buses weren’t running, and I had no money for taxis.

I asked Fari if he knew of any businesses within walking distance that had any job openings. “Your options are pretty limited because nobody is hiring now,” he replied. “The only possibility is the United Nations . . . but the people they hire usually have to speak English.”

My mind snapped to attention. Of course! After all, the United Nations was the reason God had led me to study English in the bathroom in the first place. I’d even had a vision of working in a UN office.

I washed my clothes especially thoroughly that night and prayed hard for God to help me find a job at the United Nations. I was so excited about finally putting my English to use that I stayed up most of the night looking in the mirror, practicing the phrases I’d taught myself:

“Good morning to you.”

“How do you do?”

“I am looking for a job.”