The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (28 page)

With Habyarimana as a beacon of hope, thousands of Tutsis made their way to his city. Honorata and her family were among the throngs who miraculously survived the nighttime drive through the forests, arriving in Butare on the morning of April 17. On the same day, the president of Rwanda arrived with an official delegation that included our old colleague Agnes, one of the three parliamentarians who had helped start Duterimbere. Agnes's actions and Honorata's fate would be forever linked. The president summarily dismissed the prefect and commanded that he leave office immediately. I would learn only later that Habyarimana was the godson of Agnes's husband.

The exhausted ex-official walked out of the auditorium alone, speaking later to a crowd in the streets: Habyarimana never ceased pleading to stop the violence until he was drowned in a sea of rage and blood.

The government's grand plan was to ensure the collective guilt of every Rwandan, while exterminating every single Tutsi and moderate Hutu. Like a dark cloud inching across the sky, the government co-opted the weaker officials and murdered the ones who resisted. Habyarimana's replacement, Sylvain Nsabimana, an agronomist by training with a reputation as a lightweight and a dandy, claimed not to have wanted the position of prefect. Nevertheless, he managed to buy himself a new suit for his installation ceremony.

Habyarimana's dismissal unleashed the killing machine. On April 18, more than 10,000 people who had been hiding in the convent of the Bernadine Sisters were murdered. Honorata, her sister, and their families remained huddled in Anunziata's home for another 4 days, trapped, knowing that terror lurked everywhere.

The orange sun was descending in a foreboding sky on the evening of April 22 as Honorata's and Anunziata's families sat down to a meal of rice and beans. The scene was tense, filled with an unbearable masquerade of normalcy. Suddenly, a shot-then shouting and more gunshots.

Soldiers barged through the door. Young boys with banana leaves around their necks dragged adults and children alike outside until they counted nearly 40 people. Men were instructed to stand on one side of the street, and women and children on the other.

"I knew the time had come," Honorata whispered. "We recited the Act of Contrition right in front of the soldiers, and I said a prayer to the Virgin Mary, begging her to help us. Then I said the Act of Contrition again, with the children joining me."

I thought of the first words of this prayer that is part of the Last Rites, "Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee," and imagined her reciting it in the face of killers.

One of the soldiers snarled, "Your good Lord, where is he now?"

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee."

A boy commander ordered the others to kill, and they shot each man once in the middle of his head, 6 feet in front of their wives and children. Theodore slumped to the ground, his slender frame folding into the muddy road. No one tried to run. Not a single man screamed. Not a single man survived.

The women and children cried and begged, pleading not to be massacred.

The head soldier turned and ordered the rest of his makeshift squad to kill the women and children.

"I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit then," Honorata said, her eyes turned downward. "I yelled to everyone to drop to the ground. The soldiers kept shooting, shooting, until they thought we were dead. Then they left, not checking to see who was alive. They didn't take our possessions. Maybe they knew we had nothing to take."

The rain pounded, drenching bodies and bloodying the street. Lying under a pile of corpses, Honorata thought she was dead. For what seemed like hours, no one moved.

Out of nowhere she heard a young, high-pitched voice asking if anyone was still alive. Honorata laid in shock, unable to utter a word in response. Another child shrieked, "Those who are still alive, try to save us."

Her daughter shook her and pulled her hair, crying, "Mother, Mother!"

She could do nothing but stare at her sister, Anunziata, lying next to her, hit by two bullets and barely alive.

Every other adult was dead.

Seventeen children were still breathing. Two were critically wounded: Honorata's 13-year-old daughter had been shot in the breast, another son of a close friend, in the thigh. But before she could think of helping the children, she had to somehow accompany her sister in her final moments. That was all that mattered.

Together the sisters prayed: "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do." Honorata asked the children to join them. Together, they recited the prayer three times.

Honorata told me, "Of all the adults, I was the least maternal and the least courageous-I was the wrong person for God to have left alive. But there I was with 17 children in my care. So I told God that our fates were entirely in His hands."

As she turned her focus to the children, the prayer of forgiveness and surrender gave Honorata a strength she had never known before.

Where to run? The churches were no longer secure. Thousands had sought refuge at chapels and cathedrals previously considered safe havens. Priests and nuns had turned over their congregations to die. With the children in tow, Honorata stumbled back to Anunziata's house, now littered with papers, food, chairs, and mattresses. By the time she returned to her sister, Anunziata was dead.

At dawn, workers from Doctors without Borders found Honorata holding her twin, keening and sobbing at the site of the massacre. She accompanied the two wounded children to Butare's hospital, where a MASH unit had been set up. Throughout the day, terrified, Honorata shuttled between the hospital and Anunziata's home, where the children were still hiding.

By the end of the first day, after community members learned what had happened, an old acquaintance found Honorata at the hospital and gave her $20, now all the money she had in the world. Other friends offered to take her children into hiding with them. Even strangers shared whatever they could to help her buy food for her children. When I think of how aid agencies characterize Africans as desperate for handouts, I think of Honorata and her support system, still functioning and generous in a brutish world gone mad.

For the better part of 6 weeks, Honorata remained at the hospital, comforted that the other children were safer outside town. "The soldiers would come into the hospital, see my children, and say, `These children are offspring of Inyenzi [cockroaches]."' Other Rwandans came to the hospital to give her and other survivors whatever they could spare for medicines and food. In turn, Honorata did what she could for other patients, comforting them and praying with them.

By June, Honorata felt safe enough to brave another journey, this time to the refugee camps in the French-controlled Turquoise Zone near Cyangugu. My own memory of Cyangugu was one of beauty and magic: It is near a lush forest, one of the most extraordinary on earth due to its astonishing biodiversity. Home to 14 species of Africa's primates, 280 avian species alone, and thick with vegetation, the Nyungwe Forest is another world in peacetime. When camping there with a friend, I fell asleep looking at the stars from beneath the canopies of the high trees and awakened at dawn to loud chattering, surrounded by scores of colobus monkeys, their masked faces staring at us inquisitively. Now, that seemed like ancient history.

FIRST I N ONE CAMP and then another, Honorata began descending toward a nervous breakdown-and the state of her children wasn't helping matters. Her teenage children were suffering the trauma of loss, of war, and of the disappearance of normal boundaries. They had nothing to believe in and no sense of order or safety. The girls rebelled by donning miniskirts and blasting their radios, and they didn't want to talk to hertypical adolescent behavior that felt more confusing to Honorata, given her own state of mind.

"Why do we have to be wise and thoughtful?" her children would shoot back at her when she reached out to calm them. "Weren't you wise? Weren't you kind to everyone? And still they treated you like a dog. Still they killed our father."

The only people who listened to her were a small group of Canadian nuns who taught Honorata yoga and other exercises recommended to heal body and soul. They kept her close to them. For the first time in her life, Honorata allowed herself to be "accompanied."

"I always accompanied poor women and widows; suddenly, I needed others to accompany me," she recounted.

Love lies at the base of our common humanity. In parts of Africa, people say "I am because you are." Hindus in India greet one another with "Namaste," or "I bow to you," though spiritual leaders also interpret this as a way of saying that the God in me recognizes the God in you. War brings out the best and the worst in humanity, and genocide is no different. People killed one other by turning neighbors into "cockroaches" and nonhumans. But ordinary Rwandans also risked death to help one another. Sometimes-often-the same person did both.

Friends assisted Honorata financially. A Belgian priest offered to support her family, saying he wanted to be a "papa" of sorts. He recognized that her children refused to set foot in Rwanda again. He understood that she needed to go back to see if her mother was alive. And he helped raise the money to send her children to boarding schools overseas.

Honorata could barely discuss the day she said good-bye to her children. She'd been caught between knowing they would be safer and healthier in boarding schools outside the country and feeling that she herself had no choice but to return home to see if her mother was alive and to help the ones left behind.

She paused and took a deep breath. I looked at her, feeling exhausted and sad, yet seeing peace and calm in her eyes. If she could endure such suffering and still sit there with a beatific smile, what could I do from my own position of privilege? If I asked her where she got her strength, I knew she would attribute it only to God. But I also knew that much was due to the extraordinary woman sitting next to her-Collette.

WHEN THE GENOCIDE BEGAN, Collette was alone with10Tutsi girls in the boardinghouse for young women she'd set up in Honorata and Theodore's little pink house in Nyamirambo. Isolated, the girls and the older woman were easy prey. As angry young men with machetes encircled the house, Collette would lead the girls in long recitations of passages from the Bible, urging them not to look through the windows at the horror outside. Most upsetting to Collette was seeing the dogs that roamed the streets and ate the corpses of neighbors.

I remembered driving home one night when I was working with Duterimbere in 1988 and being attacked by a pack of wild dogs. It was around midnight when the pack began jumping on all sides of the car, trying to get in. One lunged onto the hood and I stared into his hideous face. I sped off and got away, but the viciousness of the animals still haunts me. Collette was driven almost entirely by her refusal to allow herself or the girls to face the indignity of being devoured.

"All people deserve a proper burial," she later told Honorata. "Death was a given. But I would not give up my dignity."

A blade of grass, in time, can push its way through stone: Collette and the girls remained in the house for 3 months. They grew food in the tiny garden, barely ate, and used parts of the wooden fence that circled the house as firewood. Daily, marauders came to the gate to taunt the young women with promises of salvation. The next day, the same boys would threaten to kill the girls, cut off their "fine" noses, or chop off their "long legs." Every day Collette sat in her chair and read the Bible, refusing to move. The soldiers began to believe that God was protecting Colletteand somehow, she and all 10 girls survived.

Like mother, like daughter. Immediately following the genocide, Collette began working with widows. When Honorata returned, she joined her mother in accompanying those who had lost what she had.

Now Collette, Honorata, and the orphaned children had been joined in the pink house by Honorata's stepmother, whom she'd once considered evil. Honorata confessed to making a deal with God during the genocide: She would care for this woman if God let her survive.

"Time heals," Honorata told me. "I've heard my stepmother tell people how well I look after her. She once confided to a friend that she would have been much kinder to Anunziata and me during our youth if she'd known that I would end up taking care of her. But we never know, do we?"

Fire strengthens iron. "Before the war," Honorata told me, "I was comfortable. I worked without really knowing why. Living in the service of other people, I finally felt fully alive. I found the true force of God in being available to others and in accepting one's fate without complaining. I began to understand that God was sending me a message: You must radiate and shine despite the difficulties you have on earth. In spite of your own problems, comfort those women who have lost their husbands.

"In the end, goodness triumphs over the bad. It is our challenge to do good and to serve others without waiting for the good to be returned. I'm convinced that those people who cultivate universal love will have good fortune on earth. In serving others, I found light in a place of utmost darkness"

Through Honorata, I understood that resurrection happens right here on earth. I see her spirit and her resilience in women across the globe who have nothing, yet suffer great loss with almost unimaginable grace and dignity. Honorata will forever be one of my greatest teachers. Her story reminds me of the extraordinary power of the human spirit to withstand almost anything. Her story also speaks to the power of service, to living a life of purpose, and to keeping the flame of hope alive.

Honorata asked me to accompany her to visit the group of widows she supported. "They need to give you their stories for their own healing," she said. This notion of "giving" stories was new, but I would soon learn the power of bearing witness and of transferring pain through storytelling. By listening and acknowledging the truths of those women, I had the honor of playing a miniscule part in their healing.

Together, we met four women in a small room. They were Hutu and Tutsi, their husbands dead or imprisoned. All were living alone. Like Honorata, each woman took nearly 3 hours to tell her story. Like Honorata, each woman was full of grace.