Emerging From My Cave

This past week was the most random, intense and emotional week of my life. Never before have I been battered so relentlessly with such strong and conflicting feelings and actualities. I will try to recount the week within a reasonable-length post, which of course will leave a great deal out. If there is any point you, the reader, would like me to elaborate on, please let me know.


“Imagine him being dragged forcibly away from there up the rough, steep slope...without being released until he’s been pulled out into the sunlight. Wouldn’t this treatment cause him pain and distress?” - Socrates in Plato’s Republic

While rereading Plato’s parable of the Cave during the eight-hour car ride to Kigali, Rwanda, I recognized a wonderful parallel to what I am currently going through:

Day 1:
Watching “Sometimes in April,” I break down into a sobbing mess. I rarely cry, ever, but I am thankful when the DVD breaks two thirds of the way through and I can take the chance to excuse myself to my hotel room.
For some reason, the movie gave me the slightest feeling of what it might have been like to have lived in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994, and it scared me beyond belief. I was upset because I had caught the smallest glimpse of this tragedy and because I knew that feeling would soon become as distant and illusive as it always was.

Day 2:
We are taken straight from a successful development project at a rural school and dropped into a refugee settlement without a clue as to what we were getting into (a theme for the week, as it turned out). Separated into groups of seven, I followed the group headed to the Rwandan settlement, while others met with Somalians, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Sudanese, Burundians, and Congolese. The setup of the site visit was like a sick and twisted safari where we gawked at the refugees for about an hour and a half before leaving the park in our rented vans.
The “interviews” were horribly awkward. We hadn’t prepared any questions because we had no idea what was going to happen. It was horribly awkward. An english class for adults was kicked out of their one-room classroom to make way for us seven American students to sit around for an hour, grasping for questions that might in some way validate our presence there. But they knew better: the Rwandans, like the Somalians and Sudanese and others, had seen American students come by, sometimes for a day, sometimes a month, it didn’t really matter because nothing ever came out of it. The refugees demanded explanations for our visits, and rightfully so. Even we were questioning why we had any right to be granted access to these camps, to use these people as guinea pigs for practicing our art of “rapport building” and interviewing.
We asked a few questions and learned some interesting things about the current situation of Hutus in and outside of Rwanda, but the people with the real questions were our interviewees: “What are you going to do?”
Hell, what can we do? They knew full well that we couldn’t provide any help or improvement. And yet they still talked to us and told us how hard life is for them in the settlement and back in Rwanda. In under two hours, I learned just how insignificant and yet relatively powerful I am and had no idea what that meant.

I am emerging from my cave of ignorance into a light far brighter and more disorientating than the equatorial sun. The hour spent in the settlement camp was so overwhelming and frightening, it is enough to scare me back into my cave of encompassing darkness.

“And once he’s reached the sunlight, he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things which are currently taken to be real, would he, because his eyes would be overwhelmed by the sun’s beams?”

Day 3:
Rwanda Genocide Memorial
I feel blind and helpless, groping for any bit of something to make sense of this new knowledge and these new feelings. The memorial left me emotionally numb. I just could not understand the violence, the hate, and the ignorance.

1930 Prison (see next blog for more detailed description)
We are told that we will be taken to the Kigali prison to hear testimonies from actors in the 1994 genocide...this wasn’t quite the case. We are placed in front of prisoners, many of whom are perpetrators of the genocide but none of whom are designated, as honored guests. They show off their culture to us and ask for our participation in turn. We are taken from the stage and led to the floor to dance with and for hundreds of prisoners. The experience is humbling, moving, and horribly confusing. Here we were dancing with possibly murderers, but we had no way of knowing who they were and what they had done. We had just come from a memorial which cried out for the thousands lost, yet here we were dancing and laughing with those who have been convicted of the crime.

Clive Owen walks by us at the mall

Day 4:
Rwandan Genocide Memorials: churches where thousands were killed
Clive Owen

The victims and perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide are no longer superficial shadows projected on a television screen, I have met the Hutus in the settlement camps and danced with the convicts in prison, and I have listened to the Tutsis now left in charge. But what does it all mean?

“And if he were forced to look at the actual firelight, don’t you think it would hurt his eyes? Don’t you think he’d turn away and run back to the things he could make out?”

The temptation to run back to my happy cave of ignorance in the United States is so strong that I fear it will be too much to resist. Even now, not even a week later, the emotions are fading. Two years ago, I was set on studying rural health in IDP camps in northern Uganda. After Ghana, I knew I could not go into rural health. After the refugee camps, I know I can’t even spend the six weeks of my independent project there. There is too much suffering, too much hopelessness, and I am too paralyzed by my own insignificance and remoteness to be of any use. But at least I know that. So now I am in the adjustment period: still blinded, senses numbed, but I am beginning to see the slightest silhouettes of something tangible.


NOTE: just learned that a grenade attack occurred in Kigali the day after we left. (don’t tell my grandmothers)

Republic, translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford University Press 1993.