Rwanda seemed both full of shadows and full of beauty to me. On our way to the health care clinic, we passed fruit fields, and I’d smell tea leaves and the sweetness of newly ripened bananas. Coffee bushes burst with ruby-red berries. Thin farmers swung hoes to claw at the brown earth of the terraced hillside.
Early in the morning, the place took on a mystical quality as fog clung to the hills. To the southeast, the forests supported thirteen species of primates and hundreds of species of birds that rose every morning with the sun.5 It seemed tragic that such a beautiful country had become synonymous with such ugly acts.
Yet the images of refugee camps and border crossings that flooded the media told only part of the story. The news sells tragedy, but often misses stories of strength. It left an impression of desperate, downtrodden, despairing people. But there, as a small part of things, I got to see so much more.
At the clinic, I saw dozens of women and children sitting in the grass talking under the high sun. Many of these women had walked for miles with their children, hoping to get bandages and antibiotics. They had carried children with earaches and blurred vision. There were other families, however, whose children seemed healthy and playful. When I asked one woman why she’d come to the clinic, she said, “So my son can play and also to talk to the doctor.”
Another women asked, “You have children?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t have any children.” That felt like a long way off to me, but I realized some of these mothers were my age or younger.
“Your children are beautiful,” I added. She translated this to her friends, and they all smiled.
I sat down in the grass with them. The day felt calm, wide open, and for a few moments as I sat there under the high sun and watched the children run and play, I felt like I was at a kid’s birthday party in a park. At any minute, someone might bring out a cake.
A middle-aged woman with her hair wound atop her head sat down next to me. A Rwandan aid worker, she had an air of gravity, and the other women turned their eyes toward her. I later found out that she had raised five children and was a former schoolteacher. She was a survivor of the genocide, but her husband had been killed.
She smiled encouragingly at the women, who began to speak. When she responded, she moved her hands in the air like she was conducting a symphony. The women told the stories of their survival, which the aid worker translated to me in snatches of detail and dialogue.
They talked about fleeing for their lives, running with their children into the forest to escape the thugs. A woman with a deep, ugly gash on her arm from a machete attack told the aid worker, “They mistook me for dead and threw me into a pile of corpses.” She’d waited all night until the Interahamwe—members of the death squads who’d brutally raped and hacked their fellow countrymen to death—fell into drunken sleep in the early morning. Only then did she run away.6
Other details rose from the group:
“A woman I played with as a child had a son who joined the Interahamwe and became a murderer.”
“She ran out of her house, but her sister was behind her, and they caught her and they raped and killed her that afternoon.”
I struggled with taking photographs that day. I wanted to capture their portraits, to share what I saw with others. These women had suffered more than I could imagine, and still they welcomed me, told me their stories.
And yet I hesitated to use my camera. If I tried to take photos, I’d be asking to take a piece of each person who had suffered and share their story with strangers. As I sat debating, one woman sitting before me propped up her young child on his two wobbly legs and encouraged me to take his photograph.
She smiled at me and laughed. When I raised my camera, I looked through the viewfinder and saw a whole group of women smiling back at me.
Driving back to Kigali, I thought about what I was trying to do. Some people had spent years serving in Rwanda. I was going to be here for six weeks. How was I supposed to contribute? I decided I could at least take photographs like the ones I had just snapped. I could give Americans a glimpse of Rwandan lives, with all of their facets: joy, loss, strength, hardship, compassion.