Murambi

This morning, we went to a memorial site called Murambi. It is, by far, the most powerful memorial site that I have been to, and I really don't think there could be any other memorial that eye-opening in the world. 50,000 people were killed at Murambi during the genocide, and most of them were buried in a mass grave there. But a few hundred bodies had been preserved in limestone, and they were put in some of the rooms as a memorial. There were about twenty or thirty rooms in long hallways, split up into a couple of buildings. You would walk along the building and look in each room, where dozens of bodies were displayed on tables. They were all white, because of the limestone, and most of them were just bones. But you could see the skin and stuff like that too, and some of them even had clothes on still. Some even still had some hair. There were babies too. You could hardly make out their forms, but you could tell they were babies because they were so tiny. The bodies are just laying there, mostly in mangled positions, in the positions they died in. Some of the positions looked like they were fighting to stay alive, and others looked like they had just laid down for an afternoon nap. I don't really know how to describe my feelings while I was there, but here is what I wrote in my journal:
"I cannot even begin to describe this feeling. It's like I can't breathe, I'm going to throw up, and I'm going to faint, all at the same time. The smell in the rooms is overwhelming, but I don't know whether it is the dead bodies themselves or the limestone that is preserving them. My mind is racing, yet it is completely blank at the same time. It's impossible not to wonder how something like this could happen, but it is also so hard TO think about it. Being here makes me feel indescribably horrible; but no matter how bad I feel, I still think I should feel worse."
There was a man walking near our bus on the way to the memorial. He smiled and waved at us, and we waved back. We didn't know that he was headed to the memorial too, because he was one of the seven people that survived the massacre there. He couldn't really communicate how he survived, but we know he had been shot in the head. I can't believe anyone was able to survive, because the militias chased people through the forests for weeks and weeks after looking for people that had gotten away. The man reminded me of my grandpa: tall, skinny, and hunched over, but still smiling.
Murambi was one of the areas that the French controlled through Operation Turquoise during the genocide. They said they were there to help, but really they were training, funding, and helping the Hutu extremist militia. So basically, they knew exactly what was going on during the genocide, and they even helped fuel it. After the 50,000 people had been killed and buried at Murambi, the French soldiers played volleyball on top of their mass grave. That is so awful.
After I had walked through the memorial, I sat on the top of the hill, wrote in my journal, and just tried to contemplate life. The wind was blowing the grass, it was a cool day, and I could hear birds chirping, cows moooing, and people talking. But all of the noises seemed muted and far away. It was almost like even the animals knew something horrible had happened there. It was so weird sitting on top of the hill, because the view was so beautiful. And while we were walking through the memorial, I could see hundreds of dead bodies on my left and little kids laughing, smiling, and waving to my right. I was talking to our Teaching Assistant, Tessa, and we both decided that it was like being in heaven and hell at the same time.
As we were leaving, we saw more people making a documentary at the memorial. Half of me just wants to yell and them and tell them to leave the dead people alone; I'm sure they don't want to be shown to the whole world like that. But the other half of me knows that documentaries are such a good way that people around the world can find out about what happened in Rwanda, so that maybe, just maybe, it will never happen again.