Murambi Technical School

The past few days have been fairly packed. On Saturday, I took a trip to Gikongoro with the other interns. We visited Murambi Technical School, which is now a genocide memorial. During the genocide, people fleeing the Interahamwe were told that schools and churches would be safe and that the clergy and others would protect them. Instead, they were used as mass gathering spots so that the Interhamwe could kill them more efficiently. About 45,000 Tutsis were murdered at this school in April of ’94.
Honestly, I hadn’t planned to go and see many of the memorials. I felt – I am here in 2007 and I should focus on the problems that are killing people and disenfranchising people now. I also felt (and partially still feel) that there is no benefit to anyone for me to see things like that. But, because I didn’t want to miss the chance to get out of the city for a day, I went with the 4 other girls to see the memorial – and I don’t think I prepared myself adequately. The memorials that I am used to seeing have pamphlets and gift-shops and guides. This one was left almost without explanation. There were rooms filled with skeletons. At first I thought they were models because there was a strong scent of plaster in the air and everything was covered in white. Then I thought to myself, this is Rwanda – no one has the time or the money to make thousands of model skeletons. And then I saw the tufts of hair on a few of the skulls – the positions of the children, a few infants. I stopped looking then – and the tour went on and all of the rooms were the same. After the first two I stopped going in. We didn’t even open all of the doors or go to all of the buildings. A few of the bodies had flowers laid by them. There was a separate hall where all of the clothes were hung and folded in stacks.

Then, as we walked back around to the front of the school, there was a huge pit in the ground – it had been a mass grave. During the later months of the genocide, the French soldiers occupied these school grounds. Apparently they built a volleyball court over the grave, and also were complicit in notifying the Interahamwe and gathering the Tutsis. As a result of these types of actions, there is no longer a French Embassy in Rwanda, and I don’t believe that relations between the two nations are very friendly.