Sometimes in April

April marks two things for Rwandans: the start of the rainy season (totally skewed by climate change, as we have mentioned) and the month of mourning for all that was lost in Rwanda's genocide.

The genocide remains, by and large, a peripheral part of life here. Sixteen years after the worst of it, people are beginning to mention it in conversation; we get snippets of stories, a moment here or there, a girl we work with turning to point at a building and saying, "We hid there, after they killed my parents." There is a struggle between the need for privacy and the need to have the events that occurred here known and remembered.

We were aware that April was a totally different story, but were unsure what to expect. Last year was the 15th anniversary, and stories from ex-pats included people crying all through the month, in restaurants and on street corners. We were told that no music is played except mourning music, what little nightlife there is dies down considerably, and schools are closed for the first two weeks of the month. And we have found that this is all true, to some extent, but it doesn't really do justice to how Rwandans commemorate their loss.

April 7th, Wednesday, was the official Genocide Memorial Day, a national holiday for which all industry closes. We went to the stadium to hear the president speak (this marks the second time the RAs have been present when a sitting president gave a speech - we were both also there for President Obama's inaugural address). The stadium is a perfect example of Rwanda's struggle for both privacy and recognition. For the first two hours, a narrator droned on in Kinyarwandan, and throughout the stadium, you couldn't hear a pin drop, except for the people going into hysterics. There was pure silence from thousands of people, and then the screams of what could only be someone being ripped apart, in absolute agony, then more silence, then more screams, as Rwandans either experienced flashbacks or engaged in a socially acceptable form of grieving. According to our friend Amir, last year's 15th anniversary was worse; he said it was as though people in the stadium had lost their loved ones that very day. The stories that were triggering this grief were not repeated in English.

When President Kagame spoke, he alternated between Kinyarwandan and very pointed English intervals. He is an excellent speaker, and clearly beloved by his countrymen, some of whom were good-naturedly mimicking his mildly eccentric speech patterns next to us. Even though we only understood half of what he said, the half-hour went by quickly, and people around us would occasionally burst out laughin at something he said in Kinyarwandan. But when he switched to English, he had a point to make, and it was largely political. He chastised people who claimed there wasn't free press in Rwanda (there isn't, in some major ways) and those who say Rwandan's don't feel free to express themselves (they largely don't, politically). He made the extremely fair point that it is these same countries who call for greater freedom of expression that get angry when Rwandan's point out the role they played in the genocide (a great deal of the speech indicated that France's President Sarkozy irritated Kagame considerably during his recent visit). His speech, to our delight, also included the perfectly enunciated phrase, aimed at Western countries, "I. Don't. Give. A. Damn." But most of what he said about the genocide was said in Kinyarwandan, privately, to his fellow countrymen, in words the muzungus wouldn't understand.

By and large, aside from a slightly eerie day in which every single bar, store and restaurant in the city was closed, life moves on this month much as it always did. But occasionally, something reminds us that privately, Rwandans hold this time sacred. Assumpta, who manages our guest house, has worn something purple every day. When we were in Remera, a place known for it's drunks and giant $1 bottles of Primus (the two are probably not unrelated) as well as it's truly unspeakably appalling "bathrooms", almost every bar on the street (made up entirely of bars) was closed, and we were asked to leave around 10pm. We've seen more soldiers on the streets this month, and in places we don't usually see them, as genocide deniers sometimes do things like throw grenades at memorials during April. And today, RA2 realized that Rwanda Television, the only television station available to most of the population and renowned for it's extraordinary bad taste in programming, was showing nothing but genocide memorial themed music videos. This month, mourning is a private experience that a whole country shares.